 Well, hello everyone once again, I am not in class But I'm traveling the world wide. I'm attending a conference right now. I'm actually in Helsinki Guess we're Finland and I'm attending a conference. Well, not quite. I'm still in Tucson while we are filming So it's okay to do some changes and play with multimedia That's what the whole course is really all about We want to James and I want to introduce the text for today. These are the troubadour poetry We thought it might be a good way to start out with giving you some visuals and James has here Faximili tell me James. What do you have? Well, I just thought it was interesting since we've been talking about music as well as literature in the Middle Ages and here we have some illuminated pages of Songs with musical notes attached to them as well And we can see the notes and they look somewhat similar to what musical notes look like today But obviously a little bit different as well Did it strike you maybe that the combination of images texts and notation Form almost what we call in German a Gesamtkunstwerk Wagnerian yes Quite the charming how the musicians and the artist the scribes all of them collaborating and so what we really do is we look at medieval manuscripts Study medieval art that is an expression of the entire Artistic world and the world of the aristocracy. I have another wonderful example and maybe you just can decide on another image James showed you just a facsimile of a manuscript. So it's a page in a book and in many cases medieval art also was expressed in Sculptures and so I have you a fabulous book that gives us ideas of Wooden sculptures used in altars now. This is a late medieval But it gives you just an idea of what late gothic late 15th early 14th sense excuse me late early 15th century art looks like and I also have to say something But I think it's worth for for students to get an idea what they can see when we go to Medieval churches Gothic churches and have then this incredible experience of These wooden sculptures this now happens to be in Rotenburg up there Taoba one of the most beautiful medieval towns a little plug-in I'm going to Rotenburg next year with my students So once again those of you who are maybe considering joining me in my medieval tour Well, it's kind of a sales pitch, you know But at the same time I just want to show y'all why I am so excited about this art Why I always love to go back and why I love teaching this is every word There is this art. There is a beauty. There is the craftsmanship So the absolute brilliance of that time, of course, it's a different world, but we are really impressed There is something magical about it So maybe can close this book and I would like to share with you a third example and This example is called in our book I'm showing you something that is called in our book in late medieval times people Started to practice their religious devotion in private particularly noble ladies and They were very interested in having devotional books prayer books or books about all kinds of artistic Expressions and they're these tiny little sort of almost paperbacks We would call them today if they were not wonderfully volume bound Volumes this is now it happens to be a book about hunting and I'm turning the page just to give you an idea of the really incredible beauty the artistic beauty of these books Showing our scenes of hunting, but let me move just a little bit to the side So that you just have an idea how Calligraphic these texts were Remember, this is not printed. This is written by hand on parchment Okay, so we gave you a couple of examples visual examples medieval art and hopefully you have right away in understanding that Whenever we look at texts or listen to music, we have always to combine that with images the craftsmanship religion and the social structure of that time and so Cutty love that's what we really will talk about or are discussing throughout the course is Situated in the wider social context and for that purpose today We look at the very famous troubadours and then you'll look primarily in this video on Into the poetry by the first one basically the founder of Cordy love poetry a man called Guillaume Le Neuf William the ninth Did something strike you James as to about the Background or something that you found interesting maybe well, I thought it was interesting contrasting his the short biography Provided here at the beginning with some of his works It's mentioned in the the biographical section that he was fighting for a lot of his reign and Was constantly struggling with various things and you can sort of see that Reflected in this text. He's got a very down-to-earth style Yes, sometimes and then sometimes it's very elusive very esoteric even some as very religious Did you also notice that sometimes it's very ludic? Yes, it's very vulgar at some times we could say Are you familiar with the word ludic? I have to use that. I think a week ago Mm-hmm and ludic is an adjective which means playful comes from the Latin ludus So I think sometimes it's just our ludic It's playful. It's joyful and I actually see a number of parallels to the common or Burrana These are clerics and yet They compose all kinds of dirty poetry, right? Playful poetry. I think these are very brilliant highly educated people Mm-hmm and so our modern sensitivities as to what is norm standard ethics Morality might not quite apply to some of those things particularly if it's ludic It's playful trying to demonstrate a certain level of culture and civilization and another thing that struck me was the fact that we're moving out of the The clerical realm and into the aristocratic realm whereas before we had most of the art and everything produced yes by the clergy or clergy related Artists, but now we've got right, but of course keep in mind we have discussed Heart of an hours Poor Henry or Lord Henry. We already had a different text reflecting noble culture secular world But it was a different genre of an hour that he writes narratives and I always like to for your own sake I like to switch from narratives or prose more or less to Poetry so now we're moving from Not quite pros. Let me make this really clear right in the middle ages. We hardly have prose It's all at least in the literary world. Everything is in verse Even if the poets tell us stories That's in verse because it has to be performed by music for that reason you showed us the Manuscript with the notations But these are no poems these are very specifically Intended to convey ideas, but not necessarily to tell a complete story. Well, this is musical So these are a little How shall we say kaleidoscopic impressions? That don't really tell us a long story with one exception. There's one poem where this night Does not speak of a tent. Okay, what comes to that it tends to be me. There's a kind of a story Let me have a first give you a little bit exciting and curious background We just don't know so many things we just don't know where this poetry suddenly came from it is really fully developed in the vocabulary imagery in Style notation music everything it is almost perfect already. It is not primitive simplistic poetry and Yet we don't quite know the inferences where that might have come from Interestingly enough Guillaume lived in southern France. We call that area today the Provence and We know that he was quite a bit involved in wars against the Arabs at that time Arabs to a large extent still controlled The Iberian Peninsula. So you have Muslim Arabic cultures and We know that Arabic culture much earlier before European culture had developed these kind of ideas of courtly love of erotic poetry So also we are in the midst of the Crusades So the first crusade took place in started in 1096 that's good hundred years before Guillaume writes his poetry and I don't want to go much into the crusades. You know a little bit about the crusades Well, I found it interesting throughout the whole section, you know The the biographies show that most of them had something to do with the crusades and a lot of the poems speak about Peripherally about the crusades, but it's in a contradiction because isn't it odd If I during the day they slaughter people they cut off limbs and heads and blood and guts everywhere at night They sit in front of the fire and to sing these beautiful poems And odd contradiction these crude nights who barely survive in the heat of the Mediterranean Starving almost and fighting for their lives and at night suddenly It's beautiful love poetry and particularly once they had come back Obviously, they were somehow Influenced by Arabic poetry. We cannot quite prove it, but it's a very intriguing concept how Culture is transferred from one to the other We're not quite sure how this might have worked Language-wise because these crusaders didn't know Arabic for sure not But they lived sometimes for years sometimes for decades in the Holy Land And certainly they picked up a lot of things or heard the songs performed by Arabic Composers or take one more component Guillaume lived southern France whether he heard songs in the Holy Land or whether he heard those songs from Jean-leurus, that's the word Jean-leurus who had traveled through the Iberian Peninsula and Then arrived at his court and presented. Woof Arabic stuff. Well, it's right next door You just have to cross the Pyrenees that exactly right and we know that he actually Ventured into the Iberian area and fought and so there were lots of contacts another possibility is that these courtly poets at that time might have been influenced very strongly by the new Adoration of the Virgin Mary So we see that also in art. I don't have a good example right now But maybe on Thursday, I will be able to show a couple of images But the new adoration Idealization you could almost say Glorification of the Virgin Mary that becomes a very strong cult in the religious sphere in the church But it seemed also to have carried over influence the secular world So it's a very interesting situation We have a very early a troubadour poet and you should also talk about the word I mean, what does that mean troubadour? Do you have any idea show true bar? We it's an it's an Provincial word. So they didn't speak really French. They spoke Occitan Occitan double C is the language to some extent still spoken in southern France Interesting if you travel for example today to northeastern Spain, let's say Barcelona or you are somewhere here Saragossa or any of those places Then you will notice these people speak not Spanish. They speak Catalan, right? And Catalan is just a variant language and much more closely related to Occitan than to Spanish actually So you have a variety of different groups in that whole region and I think the more cultural contacts you have The more culture flourishes, you know borderland issues Just to digress. Look at Tucson. Yeah, there's a border city and how many cultures do we have? Mexican, Anglo, Finnish, Swedish, Greek, Russian, you name it, right? Well, we see the the Mexican influence in Tucson just like we would see the the Muslim influence in Spain That's right. And all the mariachi music that we love all the great food they serve This is just part of our culture. We like this mix the rainbow And I think the Guillaume and a poetry Guillaume's poetry and the troubadour poetry is just an expression of that too And in this regard, I think medieval culture is an incredibly interesting model for our own culture because we observe how much these various cultures influence each other We'll observe later how for example the French poets influence the Germans and return to the German love poetry Strongly influenced by the troubadour and to avail poetry We know that later the English poets were influenced by the French the Spaniards were influenced the Italians learn to some extent from the Arabs south and from the Germans to the north and they in turn gave to the rest of Europe So it is really an incredible hodgepodge and a give and take and so for that reason our study of troubadour poetry Is a good sample Really interesting. I think intellectual enterprise. So troubadour tromba. That's a Catalan word coming back to tromba means to find Finding first of all a melody and then Finding a theme so something you want to talk about. I Thought we maybe start with one or two poems and maybe a very Standard one. I would like to begin with a very specific one A poem you all should be familiar now with remember coming up around him That's a week ago and I introduced the various types of songs genres. So we talked about the pastoral the week ago and I explained how the setup Allows us to categorize this poem. We also had a poem about the coming of spring and I had used also the word Locus Amernus Now beautiful nature setting and if we take a look on page 117 poem number six So please would you all although I'm not here? Please open your book. We need to work together All right, that's the whole point whether I'm standing on the stage or I'm talking to you via video I hope that doesn't make a huge difference And of course James and Lee and Tina will later jump in and also will talk more in person about Some of these poems. I think poem number six. It's quite interesting Now when we see the meadows once again in flower and the orchards Turning green streams and fountains running clear the breezes and the winds It is right that each man celebrate the joy that makes him rejoice No, what is your impression? Would you like to be in that setting? Oh for sure. I thinking of Sabino Kenyon somewhere the same April Waterster running it's fresh. It's wonderful. Lovely some music a party going on or maybe even Provence Provence with lavender and thyme everywhere. Good wine. Oops. No, I shouldn't say that So but very clear right there you get the sense This is a stanza that beautiful illustrates the beginning of spring So a nature poem The poet sets us all up. He situates us right away there. We everyone would like to be right It's a beautiful setting and nature and human culture come together in everything in terms of love We all know this, you know, what is love all the bees and that's butterflies and stuff like that It comes in here just as well. These are archetypal images. Remember we talked about it Two or three weeks ago archetypal. This is how the experiences all people enjoy Love is what love isn't here, right? You can start seeing this It's always I better don't start singing overrun screeching out of the room But he begins and to explore About what the meaning of love is and also his pain Why do I get not one bit of it? So he observes that he sees that everywhere around him there is love and he expresses his disappointment his sadness and How disappointed he is I third stanza I never had the joy of what I love and I never will as I never did for I am aware I do many things and my heart says it is all It is the melancholy. It is suddenly sort of as we would say in German Veilschmerz You might want to explain later a little bit more Veilschmerz familiar with that word, right? So The global sense of sorrow. Oh poor me. Oh, everyone is in love. Not me It's quite entertaining, of course. Remember this is entertainment This is poetry that is performed in the evening When the court assembles they might have done the tournament and they have nothing to do There is no DVD. They cannot get to online Cannot fax for nothing. So they just have to talk to each other And I think that might also be why they combine so many of the arts together Exactly. So the artists come together and they They are being paid by these nobles to create all this wonderful entertainment. And so What else is more interesting and exciting than love particularly when they say? Oh, I'm not in love I'm alone. So that's what he says, right? So and so I know less that anyone would pleasure is The pleasure principle sequin Freud would have a heyday. He he could analyze is really very well I would come up with all kinds of wild analyses. Oh my goodness. So but simply right Yeah, and I think it's important that you know We see that word right off the bat here with these songs because we're not necessarily talking about The love that exists between man and God, but we're talking about a physical love. That's right But it could also be translated very easily. He doesn't say what kind of love He's just talking about emotions and he's talking about Possibly even between him and the Virgin Mary. I mean if you want you could simply interpret it in that way Don't you I mean, of course in this context, it is for a secular audience But in the back of their mind it all is evoking that imagery it could also be my goodness The Virgin Mary is not really in favor of me, but in this context there concretely it is Erotic love so we do have here a public discourse. That's for me very very important that this poetry that Indicates reveals how much in public Everyone talked about love. I mean we are at parties today When the politicians get together they don't talk about love. Oh, no, no, no, that's a private matter, right? But in the Middle Ages and particularly among their nobles Love that is the only topic worthy for public discourse It is the highest art. You're only a true noble if you're lover. Yeah, so that's really extremely important so he goes on and Talks very much about his interest in finding love to explore the emotions and Then on the next page in the second stanza I find particularly interesting Let me read it to you or would you maybe just read it just a second stanza. Yeah a man a Man who wants to be a lover must meet many people with obedience and must know how to do the things that fit in court And must keep in court from speaking like a vulgar man Very interesting perspective. I think what he says and this will become the motto almost for all of courtly love Poetry will ever hear throughout the entire semester. Love has something to do with service Because you want to win a heart and remember the Kamina Burana the guitar There was no service The man grabbed her by the hand. He forced her to the meadow, right? He exposed her He raped her. I think horrible Here is a totally different perspective true love can only exist if there's a sense of service of pleading of Trying the best you can do He refers of course Many people and you have to obey them. You must know how to speak I think it's a very important thing How can you convince a woman or a man if you're a woman to love him or her if you don't know how to speak? You must be extremely eloquent. You must be able to express your emotions That is I think for guys often very difficult But that's the reason why we practice these or study these poems They provide us with an example how to learn that vocabulary Right, and I think it's interesting. I think it's it's a really intriguing contrast between the the previous poems and yes by Guillaume we see that He knows how to master his courtly speech But we also know that he can speak like a vulgar man at times. That's right. So we have here the conflict still trying to To determine how much on what courtly life is really all about So many scholars that I actually argued that the notion of courtly love really served as an educational tool Because it is not easy to perform in the service of a king. It's just like for us It's not easy. Let's say to become a diplomat It's not easy to move up to a higher social level Let's say later when when you all want to become something lawyer a doctor or whatever You need to know the language you need to know how to talk behave dress Remember, that's the dress code or the pledge. We have that even there This is now professional. This is no longer kindergarten We are now in the in the training for real life and this is real life He shows how all the those who listen to this poetry Will get therefore most important material that they can integrate into their own language and their own thinking and Then he shows this is a test. This is a learning experience. We have an instancer, excuse me in poem 7 We clearly explicitly is talking about the test But I think you're still right. I think absolutely and maybe we can turn to that other poem, which is really Very entertaining. I would almost call that poem poem number four This is a page 113 Now, can you please all turn to that poem? I shall make a verse since I am sleeping Okay page 113 I think here. Well, what kind of poem is it? Is it a pure love poem? No, not at all It it seems it seems like the author wants to have fun with the idea of love Well, not so much love, but the the sexual act Okay, so are we transgressing here? Are we now maybe do we saying something bad? There's something talking about sex The public will not like that Your parents will not like that, right? Of course, you're all adults. All right, so I don't think we should Fool around don't beat around the bush and address it Of course all love poetry in one way or the other of course also talks about the sexual act But that's not our concern. Our concern is everything around it. Maybe the culture Again Freud would have his feast. Yeah, right? You would analyze my language and would say, oh my god, this man has this and this and anyone It's kind of interesting, isn't it how this poetry it's love poetry We can have a lot of fun talking about it because the analysis allows us suddenly to look into the mental mindset, right? So I would almost say this is like a ballot Or actually in our modern context, we would call it the corrido This is a genre that is very very popular here in Tucson. It's a corrido really It's someone who composes a song in Spanish about his love affair and a problem and Then he performs it in public. It's the whole genre the poetry center I mentioned the poetry center before. No, it's very very well. It's extremely famous the corrido here Sort of like a chanson. Yes. It's a chanson story an account some kind of an adventure story Shall we go into the details a little bit and about you can read for yourself, but let's let's reveal Let's allow the cat out of the bag anyway. Well, this is a panel. Most of you have a cat here in a way Yeah, so this man Is riding somewhere around? well, we're in Overnia, so he just provides us with a geographic reference and He encounters home Encounters two ladies. I believe where this is three. Oh three. I'm not quite sure. I think it was three Let's see The wives of N. Garin and N. Bernard. Oh, you're right That just two but that's enough two ladies for one man. That's enough. We don't need to go much further So I'm sorry for that. You're right and This guy of course tonight Let's be careful. Yeah, when he ever he says I or me. This is not him. It is a poetic I all right Let's always be very very clear when we have literature and someone who says I and I experiences This is a poetic I that means it's the text. I can easily say I Traveled to the Mars and I experienced there's water and I discovered the aliens. This is literature, right? But he's he is talking about a member a male member of his caste exactly So he really dramatizes this very very strongly. So I think we just can finish Our session today. I notice the time is fleeting So he wants of obviously one thing What does he want? Anyone knows I Think he wants sex. Oops. That's what you said But it's very clear in this poem what he wants because you're right away. He pretends that he cannot speak except Babar, y'all Babar, y'all Babarian Again, remember this is onomatopoetic Right, so as if he were mute or his tongue were cut out or something at least then these two ladies Well, it's a projection. Of course, it's a male projection women also want something very interesting So he's playing with expectations desires dreams and so these two ladies obviously think Great opportunity here. We have our Sex slave And he can't he can't ever reveal anything about it after that's right. I hope no one heard what I said So anyway, they're both interact all three interact in an intriguing way It's a wonderful game actually after all as much as we are laughing about this whole setup I'm sure the audience at that time laughed about that as well. Oh, I'm sure really beautiful. So Big enough, we know what they want. They want him they want his body They don't care about it. They just want about want him as a sexual object, but they're still very worried What are they worried about? Well, they're worried about being revealed as adulterous women Exactly. So this is an extremely important point after all We will talk a lot throughout the entire semester and I will repeat this over and over again and explore this further further We are talking about courtly love, which is not necessarily marriage This depends very much on the genre. So in narratives such as romances or I remember a heart of an hour's Lord Henry it ends in beautiful marriage one of everything is fine But in love poetry, we have a different world there that they explore emotions and these emotions Outside of marriage marriage is arranged. So you cannot really have the the Exuberance of the erotic passion within marriage. It would be just kind of Boring well, it's not boring, but for the audience just like today. I mean you watch TV Are you ever watching a TV series with a married couple? Happily married. They have two or three children. No problems Any show? No, no shows. They're always right. They're just about adultery or something Transgressive and so that's happens. That's exactly what happens here as well And it shows interesting enough how on the one hand they are the active ones. They now they test him What do they test? well, they they think that he might be tricking them and so they They get a red cat out and they have it scratches back down. That's right And of course he's getting bloody so that hurts a lot, but he is strong enough because it's x-tribe. Oops He knows what he's fighting for. Yes, exactly And he demonstrates thereby how strong he is how self-controlled he is and Then of course it gets really crude and a pardon us and well actually we don't need to quote You can read on page one fifteen yourself After he had proven that he is indeed a fool or a mute They know exactly they can use him and what do they use him as a sex object? absolutely a sex slave or whatever and Well, and you can read exactly what he's saying. So he doesn't hold anything back He's I mean Guillaume Guillaume clearly says what they did they enjoy that the greatest time of all the whole week and Let's leave it with that. Okay. We don't need to go much further And I think that should be enough. I except for one thing I would like us to point out another poem which shows us how Wonderful he really is and how poets prove to be really good poems. You can all of course certainly disagree with that poem I mean, there might be a lot of people who say oh, this is really too crude. I don't like that But I could see their points. So but he's just playing around but I think we all can agree that a great poet singer artist architect whatever Shows his or her skills and abilities by their wide range in his or her repertoire and For that reason, I would like this very briefly point out poem three on page 112 Yeah, I can you to quickly turn to poem one three on page 112. I Don't need to discuss it very much just a few highlights Which show you something very very remarkable and highly unusual We even don't know until today what to make out of this. I will make a verse of exactly nothing We don't know what he means indeed. He says nothing. He says so much about nothing It's a nothing poem Actually, we'll call it today nonsense poem And I would just simply like to idea that's for you to think about it in the future That to some extent medieval love poetry This is not quite love poem. I know but love poets Have a lot in common with postmodern poetry where we also explore the meaning of nothingness Existential questions and in a way it comes through here as well Well, it makes you question. What is a poem if you can have a poem that's about nothing very interesting I mean, it's a existential question because he is only exploring with language. He doesn't need meaning and Frankly, that's the same thing with music. You can enjoy the greatest music. You don't need words You don't need to get a message from the composer. That's what I want to say. You just enjoy the music Or colors paintings look at postmodern art. There is no concrete message But rather they are images or floating shapes and forms that is postmodern We really could say some of the medieval poets are Postmodern That's the latest trend actually in research that we begin to realize how much many of these medieval poets particularly when they talk about love and The dialectics of love and the difficulties of expressing ineffable things remember I use that word a week ago ineffable or apophatic That's exactly where we are today in in light of Relativity theory sorry for making these wild jumps, but there are interesting connections See when he says I don't know when I slept awake if someone doesn't tell me My heart is almost broken from the grief in it and I swear by saying Marshall to me the whole thing isn't worth a mouse But he doesn't know it is the basic human question Who am I? as if he were well Avada letter or in Descartes with cocky to Ergo zoom. I think therefore I am Means nothing anymore It brings up so many philosophical questions. I leave it up to that and I think we can say goodbye It's our time is up and appreciate it. Thank you very much for your attention and Stay tuned I should say right. Thank you very much. See you next week