ABSTRACT
In Chapter One above dealing with the language and function of the Hispano-Arabic zajal, I found it necessary to make the remark that the printed word has always been an object of reverence. If Gaston Paris, writing in 1883, had called the poetry of the troubadours la poésie de joie instead of popularizing the term la poésie d’amour courtois (Boase, 1977: 1 and 4, n. 1), the whole history of scholarship on the poetry of the troubadours in recent times might have taken a completely different course. No effort would be made here to offer a new theory on the origin or on the meaning of courtly love. All that I am saying is that the designation poésie de joie would have been just as legitimate a description of the poetry of the early troubadours as the term poésie d’amour courtois. The early troubadours, and I am thinking of Jaufre Rudel, Marcabru and even Guillaume of Poitiers, were primarily intent, it would seem, on ordering the world within them. Love is valued by them as a measure of the constancy they seek, or as a quotient of an assured joy which is not always in pledge to external contingency. Love is valued, one is tempted to add, in as much as it can give the individual a feeling of centrality which could not be easily “displaced or overset”. 1 I make bold to claim that there is in the poetry of the early troubadours an affirmation of the importance of the individual, or at least the importance of the light which emanates from his own heart. In this respect early troubadour poetry could well be described as the romantic movement before the modern Romantic Movement, or, better still, as the renaissance before the Renaissance. 2
