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  • Amour sacré, fin’amor: Bernard de Clairvaux et les troubadours by Brigitte Saouma, and: La liturgia del “trobar”: Assimilazione e riuso di elementi del rito cristiano nelle canzoni occitane medievali by Gianluca Valenti
  • Mary Franklin-Brown
Saouma, Brigitte. Amour sacré, fin’amor: Bernard de Clairvaux et les troubadours. Philosophes médiévaux 60. Leuven: Éditions de l’Institut supérieur de philosophie, Louvain-La-Neuve/Peeters, 2016. vii + 373 pp. 978-90-429-3132-9. €94
Valenti, Gianluca. La liturgia del “trobar”: Assimilazione e riuso di elementi del rito cristiano nelle canzoni occitane medievali. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 385. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. xiii + 295 pp. 978-3-11-034021-1. €119.95

These two thought-provoking books examine the relation between troubadour lyric and medieval religious teaching and practice. They are published at a time when scholars of courtly literature are paying more and more attention to religious texts while those in other fields are reassessing the religious/secular divide. Brigitte Saouma and Gianluca Valenti open new paths to understanding the crossover between church and court in the Middle Ages and inspire the hope that Occitanists will more fully theorize this relation while scholars conducting broader inquiries will give more attention to the troubadours.

In Amour sacré, fin’amor: Bernard de Clairvaux et les troubadours, Saouma systematically compares Bernard of Clairvaux’s explication of divine love in the sermons on the Song of Songs and the De diligendo Deo to the fin’amor of the troubadours. Noting that these notions of love were elaborated at roughly the same time, in overlapping cultural milieux, she argues that both encouraged a less violent society where love is accorded as a gift, regardless of social rank, and where individuals are motivated to abandon their own will, accepting instead the will of a beloved who is (unlike earthly lords) not a strongman. In such a way, both Bernard and the troubadours “develop discourses that are opposed to feudal [social] organization, which is founded on a real inequality” (11). Acknowledging published sociological and historical interpretations of troubadour love lyric, Saouma nonetheless insists that fin’amor contains a metaphysics that [End Page 65] exceeds whatever determinism the immediate social context may exert and makes it directly comparable to the Christian metaphysics propounded by Bernard. An analogous metaphysics produces an analogous ethics, which is what allows this lyric to circumvent contemporary structures of lay power.

The author develops the comparison over the course of three substantial chapters (120, 135, and 160 pages), which she has divided into numerous sections and subsections. Chapter 1 deals with Bernard, setting out his exegetical method and then the doctrine that he develops concerning Christ, the human person, the process of love, the characteristics of human love, and the characteristics of reciprocal love. Chapter 2 applies a similar structure to an exposition of the roles set out by troubadour love song (the lady and the lover), and then the metaphysical and ethical aspects of fin’amor. Here Saouma’s approach is quite different from that of classic books on love and the troubadours. For example, unlike Leslie Topsfield, she is not interested in variations between troubadours or in individual troubadours’ contributions to a theory of love. Instead, she organizes her exposition according to an abstract schema that parallels the one she used in her discussion of Bernard. Despite the diversity of the poems, a certain number of principles “traversent les textes, de manière cohérente. Même s’ils ne sont pas érigés en système, ils forment l’architecture de la fin’amor” (151). Paradoxically, the organizational uniformity between the first two chapters of the book creates a methodological dissymmetry, where one individual represents the Christian tradition, but the troubadour tradition is represented as a whole, without individual variation. This choice could be justified by the different author functions that underpin Bernard’s sermons and troubadour lyric or by differences in textual transmission, but such distinctions are made briefly if at all and not mobilized to justify the book’s structure. Saouma also sets herself apart from Moshé Lazar by not weaving together direct quotations of the lyric; in fact, she never quotes...

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