ABSTRACT
Eminently among Romance philologists, Paul Zumthor analyzes the object of love in the trouvere lyric of northern France as the song or “chant” itself. This has been demonstrated in the critical scholarship, even if not all scholars are convinced that the Christian influence is specific and deliberates rather than more a matter of general cultural background of the Latin liturgy and Marian cult. Mystical theology opens a dimension of transcendence to the abyss of the Godhead, and this, too, is crucial to the structure of lyric as newly rediscovered by the Troubadours and as developed further by Dante in the Paradiso. In any case, an existential condition underlying whatever cultural ideology and genealogy is at stake. But it is played out on a vast scale by Dante, most deliberately and consequentially in the theological apotheosis of lyric poetry in the Paradiso.
