Introduction: The Multilingualism of the Occitan-Catalan Cultural Space, Courtney Joseph Wells

This special issue of Tenso dedicated to "The Multilingualism of the Occitan-Catalan Cultural Space" began as a session sponsored by the Société Guilhem IX at the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo in May 2016. While the conference session was dedicated to intercomprehension and multilingualism in areas where Occitan was used as a literary language, the present issue has the somewhat more concentrated focus of the multilingualism of the medieval Occitan-Catalan space. Since Occitan had the status of literary language in Northern France, Northern Italy, and Catalonia, in addition to the southern third of France, we have narrowed the scope of that study to the vibrant linguistic, cultural, and literary zone that connected Occitania with Catalonia across the Pyrenees from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. As Martí de Riquer has pointed out, Occitan's role as poetic language in Catalonia is "un fenomen que no té parió en altres literatures" [a phenomenon without equivalent in other literatures] (Història 13). While Catalan became the literary language of Catalan historiography over the course of the thirteenth century in the so-called grans cròniques of Catalano-Aragonese monarch Jaume el Conqueridor, Bernat Desclot, Ramon Muntaner, Pere el Cerimoniós, and in the works of Ramon Llull (Badia, Història 20), Occitan remained the lyric language of Catalan poets into the fifteenth century (Riquer, Història 22). And though the troubadours are often studied under rubrics of "literary influence" in France and Italy, where poetic traditions in langue d'oïl (the trouvères) and in Sicilian (and later Tuscan) vied early on with Occitan in the lyric poetry of the trouvères and the poets of the scuola siciliana, it is far more difficult to draw up literary genealogies of influence in the Occitan literature of Catalonia since troubadour lyric was Catalan literature, in all senses of the term.¹ As Miriam Cabré has said in her magisterial study of troubadour culture in the medieval Crown of Aragon, "els catalans són part integrant de la cultura trobadoresca" [Catalans are an integral part of troubadour culture] ("La lírica" 227).

Put succinctly, then, Occitan is a language of Catalan literature in the Middle Ages.² It is the language of the high poetic culture that was promulgated in the courts of Catalan monarchs such as Alfons el Cast (also known as el Trobador), Pere el Gran, and Jaume el Just, who, in addition to being patrons of troubadour culture, composed lyrics themselves in Occitan; and it is the language used by Catalan lyric poets of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such as Guillem de Berguedà and Cerverí de Girona. As the Catalan troubadour Ramon Vidal puts it in his Razos de trobar, songs composed in Occitan (which he calls lemosi) have the greatest authority "per totas las terras de nostre lengage" [throughout the lands of our language] (ms. B; Marshall, Razos 6). But this is not to say that the multilingualism of the medieval Crown of Aragon is limited only to Catalan and Occitan. Thanks in no small part to the expansionist politics of Catalan monarchs, Romance vernaculars such as Occitan, Catalan, Aragonese, Sicilian, Sardinian, Neapolitan, and Tuscan could be heard in various lands controlled by the Crown of Aragon (Badia, Història 19). However, as the Catalan scholar Lola Badia has argued, of all of these Romance languages "la que té més presència en la literatura catalana medieval és l'occità" [the one that has the most presence in medieval Catalan literature is Occitan] (Història 19). While it is true that Catalan prose found eloquent advocates in the works of Ramon Llull, Jaume el Conqueridor, Desclot, and Muntaner, Occitan maintains a position of privilege on the Catalan literary scene throughout the Middle Ages.

The three articles of this special issue consider the use of Occitan as a literary language in the cultural area that Catalan scholars call l'espai occitanocatalà, the Occitan-Catalan space. As the term implies, in the Middle Ages there existed a linguistic, historical, political, and cultural unity between the...