#provençal literature

[kellyvela]

The Romance of Flamenca is an anonymous novel of the 13th century written in old occitan.

The novel recounts the torments that Archambaut de Borbon inflicts on his wife, the young and beautiful Flamenca. The precautions taken by the jealous husband to isolate Flamenca from other men, lead to his punishment by provoking a love affair between the lady and the knight Guilhem de Nivers.

~~~

The Romance of Flamenca is the kind of story that Sansa Stark & GRRM would love.

The novel is hyper descriptive of all the heraldry and all the pageantry of the events that take place in the story: weddings, tournaments and feasts full of bards and troubadours, something that GRRM really loves.

The story is about courtly love with a radiant lady pursued by many suitors -a couple of kings included, a jealous malicious queen, a courtious lord husband that becomes a brute because of jealousy, then the radiant lady is locked in a tower, but there's a true knight on a quest to her rescue. Later, the lovers meet in hotsprings, and during the final tourney, that takes place in a meadow, the radiant lady wears the crown of beauty, but we don't know how the tourney ends . . . . (the only copy of the ancient manuscript is incomplete).

In addition to the similarities already mentioned, the two ladies that loyaly serve Flamenca are called Alis (Alys) and Margarida (Margaery), and there's also a Count of Brienne mentioned.

Rosalía's album 'El Mal Querer' was inspired by The Romance of Flamenca.

'El Mal Querer' can be traslated as 'Bad Love,' and that's precisely what Archambaut de Borbon gave Flamenca, a bad love, a toxic love, full of jealousy without motive, hence he was punished by Love itself that conspired to make Flamenca and Guilhem fall in love and consummate their passion.

One of my favorite lyrics from 'El Mal Querer' are from the song called 'A Ningún Hombre:'

Hasta que fuiste carcelero, you era tuya compañero, hasta que fuiste carcelero.

That can be trasnlated as:

Until you became my jailor, I was yours, partner; I was yours, until you became my jailor.

Finally, it's worth to mention that The Romance of Flamenca also has its own fanfiction called 'The story of Flamenca: the first modern novel, arranged from the Provençal original of the thirteenth century' by William Aspenwall Bradley, published in 1922, with the aim to give an end to the story of the fair Flamenca and her gallant Guilhem.

[heliza24]

Daniel, Armand, and Keats???

Ok so the incredibly grainy footage of the new teaser has me spiraling! Devils minion on screen! But even more exciting, is Armand describing himself as “easeful death”, presumably to Daniel. Ok Rolin Jones, listen up. I don’t know a ton of literature by heart by I WAS a depressed and then chronically ill teen and early twenties person, who identified maybe a little too hard with romantic poet John Keats. Some of his poems are permanently tattooed on my brain. So I see what the writers are doing here. “easeful death” is from Ode to a Nightingale. The full line is: “Darkling I listen; and, for many a time/I have been half in love with easeful Death”. I mean. Come on.

I reread the poem after watching the trailer last night, and it’s actually SUCH a clever reference. It could practically be written by Daniel about Armand. We already know the writers room is familiar with and willing to reference other classic poets (Emily Dickinson absolutely is a vampire) so I think this is 100% intentional.

The narrator of the poem is tired of the difficulties of life and is longing for death; he speaks to the nightingale as a kind of immortal figure who is free from all cares. He is able to momentarily accompany the nightingale, at least mentally, as it flies and forget all troubles, but must come back to earth by the end of the poem. It’s pretty easy to read this as Daniel talking about Armand.

In fact, the first thing the speaker longs for is not death or the nightingale, but wine to take his mental pain away.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

         Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country green,

         Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

O for a beaker full of the warm South,

         Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

                With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

                        And purple-stained mouth;

         That I might drink, and leave the world unseen

And we know that Daniel was numbing himself with drugs when he first met Louis and Armand. In fact the voiceover in the trailer almost feels like a pitch to Daniel; Armand is saying “I’m better than the best drug you’ve ever had”, effectively.

The speaker is determined to forget what the lucky nightingale (or Armand) “hast never known”:

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

         Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

         Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

                Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

The nightingale doesn’t know about the trials of living and aging, just like Armand. The speaker wants to forget about the inevitable “palsy shakes” that arrive with age. which could easily be a reference to what we now diagnose as Parkinson’s Disease.

At this point in the poem, the speaker tells the nightingale that he will join him in forgetting life not with the help of “Bacchus and his pards” (wine) but with “posey” (poetry). Which makes me think of Daniel using his writing to get closer to the vampires.

The fact that the speaker calls the nightingale “Darkling”! I mean what a perfect name for Armand. In fact I think this whole section is just perfectly about a vampire if you want it to be:

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

         I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

         To take into the air my quiet breath;

                Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

         To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

                While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

                        In such an ecstasy!

         Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

                   To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

         No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

         In ancient days by emperor and clown

Armand was not born for death; he’s seen many an emperor and clown and in fact been both (leader of the coven, pretending to be Rashid). There’s also an emphasis on the nightingale’s song. I don’t know if Armand will be a musician at all in the show, but he and the coven are definitely performers.

In the last stanza, the speaker comes back to himself. He knows that he does not get to escape the burden of life for the ease of death, or at least not yet. It makes me wonder if Daniel will eventually turn down the gift at some point in the devils minion timeline. We know that he rejects Louis' mocking offer to give him the gift in the Dubai timeline.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

         To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

         As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

         Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

                Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep

                        In the next valley-glades:

         Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

                Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

The last line and the confusion about whether the time spent with the nightingale is a dream or not makes me think of Daniel waking up from the dream of Polynesian Mary’s.

In summary, Rolin Jones what the fuckkkkk. I’m so so excited about this season and all the Armand/Daniel content we’re about to get.

Oh also, as a bonus, if you want to hear Ben Whishaw recite the entire poem, and you definitely do, here you go:

[smokygluvs]

Georges Charles Brassens - sale petit bonhomme

I don't always post pictures of men I would like (or have liked) to sleep with. That might surprise you.

There are very few images of the man where I find a certain sexual attraction (although this one...maybe). For those of you who don't know, Georges Brassens (1921-1981) was a French singer-songwriter who became a French national treasure.

Self-taught in music and classical literature, his songs are masterworks of melodic complexity and literary gymnastics. Am I getting carried away here? Yes, probably. He was a genius and a hero of mine and one of my two favourite artists (Brel being the other, and I cannot decide which of them I love most).

He could also be obscene (listen to Le Gorille or Le Temps ne fait rien à l'affaire) for which he was criticised, so he produced Le Pornographe du phonographe. He also wrote La Mauvaise réputation, currently my favourite, about being frowned upon by les braves gens.

Famous as a pipe-smoker (though he occasionally smoked cigars), politically engaged and with a wonderful deep voice and Provençal accent. Listen to Mourir pour des idées, one of the angriest songs I've ever heard.

He died aged 60 (looking at the image above it's hard to believe he was that young), but he packed in at least two lifetimes of wonderful songs that live on. Oh, and the moustache. Mustn't overlook the moustache.

[anagrammatist]

Historical figures who used Anagrams: Thomas Billon.

Anagrams flourished in 17th-century European literature. In France, Louis XIII, the Bourbon monarch, named Provençal native Billon as Royal Anagrammatist. Billon's court duties involved crafting prophetic, entertaining, and mystical anagrams, often based on individuals' names.

[menstits]

Like... I enjoy linguistics and I don't mind medieval literature in general/troubadour songs as a genre or whatever like they're literally fine but specifically the fact that romance philology is a dying discipline that nobody gives a fuck about other than my prof and like 4 other technologically incompetent guys who made a completely unusable online dictionary of ancient provençal dialect is literally making me sick like your discipline is dying because it's literally extremely inaccessible even to poor cunts like me who only have to take one exam about it and then never have to see it again let alone anyone who's actually thinking of studying this in a serious manner... 🧍‍♂️ Please hire someone to make your online dictionaries less dogshit

I whole heartedly hope everyone involved in the birth of romance philology as a discipline is roasting in hell rn. 🫶

[mali-umkin]

"[En Provence] La littérature en français ne s’y développe vraiment qu’à partir du XIXe siècle, en contact étroit avec langue et littérature provençales. Ces effets sont surtout perceptibles, d’une part, dans l’usage d’un français mêlé de provençal dans son lexique, et, d’autre part, dans des styles sous influence des façons de dire provençales. Au point qu’on peut parler d’une littérature francophone de Provence, à la fois pour la distinguer de l’expression littéraire en provençal et pour indiquer sa situation de littérature de contact entre deux langues et deux cultures, comme l’ont proposé des spécialistes de la littérature francophone de Bretagne."

[fatehbaz]

Writing a total social history of 18th Century New Orleans, Cécile Vidal offers to reframe it as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than [primarily] as a North American frontier town. [...] [Vidal] proposes [...] [the French] colonial period as one primarily affected by the relations with the main French colony of Saint-Domingue [Haiti] that “exhorted a profound influence on New Orleans society” (p. 9). More largely, this vantage point on the city aims at [...] situating “early North America history on the periphery of Caribbean history”, and, more broadly, “all American colonial and slave societies as parts of a continuum” (p .2). [...]

---

[S]tructural developments in the city’s history under French rule were often found at “the intersection between the North American and West Indian worlds” (p.23). [...] While exploring the contours of the city’s founding era until the 1731 Crown takeover, [Vidal’s first chapter] puts great care in replacing the city’s emergence within the specific imperial, Atlantic, and regional conditions, that ultimately led to the “Caribbeanization of New Orleans and Louisiana society” (p. 29).

Then, the colony came to a turning point in November 1729 after a deadly Natchez Indians’ attack on Fort Rosalie that “could have led to a complete inversion of the colonial order” (p. 106). The revolt [...] truly forms a turning point in this relation between race and empire analyzed throughout the book. It prompted a sharp migratory trend from the plantations back to the capital that eventually concentrated both the white and slave populations within the same area. For white colonists, this pitted the lower ranks of the urban population against the top urban dwellers formed by administrative officials and clergymen who sought to distinguish themselves by acquiring nearby plantations. For slaves, the general direction adopted was similar but the strategies different. 

A “rival geography”, as Vidal puts it, was developed by slaves many of whom resorted to a petit marronage made of short-term escapes from their plantations or households in and around New Orleans, but also by a desire to find temporary employment, sometimes a one-day task, in the city, in order to “enjoy a more autonomous life” (p. 130) and attain a “measure of anonymity” (p. 131). Nevertheless, “disappearing was not easy” (p. 131) in a locale where patrolling militias and networks of control had been patiently built in the aftermath of the Natchez revolt. [...] [T]he apex of the Louisianan colonial project became centered on New Orleans after 1731 after another plot among the Bambara slaves was discovered and suppressed. 

The administrative capital progressively became the ville above all other cities where “a sense of community among white urbanites” (p. 141) developed against the sources of disorder represented by Indians and Africans. [...]

---

Against generalizations on the “Creole” character of Louisiana, Chapter IX finally examines how the use of particular labels was contingent to racial and political understandings of what constituted a pays, and, then, later on, during the 1768 revolt against the new Spanish governor Ulloa, a nation. For the white population, “ethno-labels” (p. 468) were varied and referred to the origins of French speaking migrants whether these were Canadiens or Provençal or from another pays in continental France. [...] These attempts at differentiation found echoes later with the larger debates on racial degeneracy initiated by Cornelius De Pauw and Buffon in the metropole. [...] This tendency to define and exclude through different ethno-labels thus achieved its apex with “Creole” from the 1740s onward when both authors with a colonial background and enlightened metropolitan critics attached a “Creole” identity with “a person’s purity with blood”, and guarded against “the suspicion of métissage” (p. 455) [...]

Furthermore, this study goes beyond the encyclopedic exercise on secondary literature as it also presents detailed archival references in both local (American) and colonial (French) archival centers, the whole constituting the most erudite and synthetic study of a colonial city since Anne Pérotin-Dumon’s book on Pointe-à-Pitre and Basse-Terre, published in 2000. Carribean New Orleans remarkably concludes decades of research conducted by the author [...]. [T]his total social history of the city will help scholars to move away from the “creole singularity” paradigm and finally “draw comparisons between New Orleans and other places within the greater Caribbean, the French empire, and the Atlantic world.”

---

All text above by: Andy Cabot. “Was New Orleans Caribbean?” Books and Ideas (College de France). Published online 20 April 2020. At: booksnadideas.net/Was-New-Orleans-Caribbean. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Article refers to Cecile Vidal’s book Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society (2019).]

[nanshe-of-nina]

Favorite History Books || Four Queens: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe by Nancy Goldstone ★★★☆☆

Marguerite, Eleanor, Sanchia, and Beatrice, as daughters of the count and countess of Provence, were steeped in the culture of the troubadours. It played as important a role in their upbringing as their lineage—indeed, it was their lineage. Their father, Raymond Berenger V, came from a long line of poets. His grandfather, Alfonso II, king of Aragon, was a highly respected troubadour whose verses were praised by Peire Vidal, the greatest poet of his day. Raymond Berenger V inherited his grandfather’s talent and passion for literature, and embraced the troubadour culture. He wrote verses and his castle was always open to visiting poets and minstrels. His was a very literary court.

... Despite the troubadours’ influence, by all accounts, the sisters’ mother, Beatrice of Savoy, countess of Provence, was very happy with her husband. Beatrice had married Raymond Berenger V in 1219, when he was fourteen and she twelve. Raymond Berenger V was the first count of Provence to actually live in Provence in more than a century—all his predecessors had preferred to stay in Aragon. During the summer months, when the weather was fine, he and Beatrice traveled around the county, meeting the barons and accepting their homage. The count was young and strong and athletic: he climbed the long eastern side of the Alps and visited villages unknown to his ancestors. In the winter months, he and Beatrice held court at their castle in Aix-en-Provence, or sometimes went south to Brignoles, which he had given to Beatrice as a wedding present.

Beatrice gave birth to twin sons in 1220, but they did not survive. Marguerite was born in 1221, when Beatrice was just fifteen years old. Eleanor came in 1223, followed by Sanchia in 1228, and finally the baby, Beatrice—four girls in ten years. The children inherited their mother’s loveliness. The renowned thirteenth century English chronicler Matthew Paris, an eyewitness with no great love of foreigners, called Beatrice of Savoy “a woman of remarkable beauty.” But she was also intelligent and capable. One of ten children, eight of whom were boys, Beatrice had learned at an early age to value strength and power. From her father, Thomas, a bellicose, domineering man who was happiest when making war on his neighbors, she had inherited a family ethos of solidarity at all cost. Thomas had ruled his large, unwieldy brood unconditionally and with an iron will. From their first breaths, Beatrice and all of her siblings had been taught to think first of the family’s ambitions, and these were many.

… During this period, Marguerite and Eleanor, only two years apart, were each other’s constant companion (Sanchia and Beatrice were too young to be interesting as playmates). Marguerite’s temperament resembled her mother’s. She was patient, capable, intelligent, and responsible, with a rigid and highly developed sense of fairness. Eleanor was more mercurial. As is often the case with second children, she both admired and competed with her accomplished older sister. The differences in their personalities were complementary, and the bonds these two established while growing up in Provence would survive into adulthood. Marguerite and Eleanor were always much closer to each other than they were to either Sanchia or Beatrice.

... Raymond Berenger V and his family were very much a part of this culture of studied affluence. They entertained often and lavishly. “Count Raymond was a lord of gentle lineage…a wise and courteous lord was he, and of noble state and virtuous, and in his time did honorable deeds, and to this court came all gentle persons of Provence and of France and of Catalonia, by reason of his courtesy and noble estate,” wrote the medieval chronicler Giovanni Villani. Among his many visitors were his wife’s brothers. The count kept a large retinue and rewarded his entourage with gifts of money and clothes. His daughters were dressed in gowns of rich red cloth, the sleeves long and tightly laced to their arms. Over this they might wear a jacket of green silk. White gloves protected their hands from the sun. Even as children, they had their hair, which they wore down around their shoulders (only married women put up their hair), dressed in jeweled combs.

[grandhotelabyss]

The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature; and, more recently, not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgat and Caxton, from Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius, Ovid, and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Provençal poets, and his benefactors: the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and John of Meung: Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino: The Cock and the Fox, from the Lais of Marie: The House of Fame, from the French or Italian: and poor Gower he uses as if he were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry, out of which to build his house. He steals by this apology,—that what he takes has no worth where he finds it, and the greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.

—Emerson, “Shakespeare; or, The Poet” (my emphasis)

[latristereina]

The significance of Lucena’s Arte de axedrez goes far beyond its recreational value, however. The work is not only the first printed book on chess playing; it is also the earliest documentation of a radical alteration in the rules of the game. The change took place quite suddenly in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, transforming the way chess had been played for five hundred years. It is central to my argument that this revolutionary change centers dramatically on the only female piece on the chessboard, the Queen.

Chess historians differ in their determination of the date or country of origin of the “new chess.” The erudite H. J. R. Murray believed that the new moves were invented in Italy, and he cites as evidence Lucena’s prefatory statement that he acquired knowledge of the game on travels to Rome and France. More recent authorities believe the moves originated in either Spain or southern France. Richard Eales, for example, states that “it is hard to ignore the fact that almost all the reliable early evidence is linked with Spain or Portugal” (76). There was, in fact, in a general acknowledgment in the late Middle Ages of Spaniards’ expertise at chess, their skill at the game considered an indication of a high level of civility. In book 2 of Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (The book of the courtier), the nobleman Federico Fregoso touts the benefits of chess as a pastime, calling it “a refined and ingenious recreation” (1140). Interestingly, especially in light of Pulgar’s comment on Fernando’s excessive dedication to the game, Don Federico also advises against devoting too much time to the pastime, lest it detract from more serious pursuits. Gaspar Pallavicino responds by praising the Spaniards for their seemingly effortless skill at the game: “there are to be found many Spaniards who excel at chess and at a number of other games, and yet do not study them too exhaustively or neglect other things,” to which Federico replies, “You may take it for granted . . . that they put in a great deal of study, but they conceal it” (140).

Chess scholars also disagree as to when exactly the new rules came into being. There is, however, unanimity in that they replaced the old game with remarkable swiftness. By 1510, the medieval game was obsolete in Spain, Italy, and probably France. By 1550, there is no evidence for its existence anywhere in Europe besides parts of Germany, Scandinavia, and Iceland (Eales, 76). Eales expresses the prevailing scholarly puzzlement over the rapidity with which modern chess replaced the Islamic form that had prevailed throughout the preceding millennium as follows: “The transition from medieval to modern was a complex and gradual process, in almost every area of life. Few historians or readers of history now expect to find specific events which tipped the scales from one age to the next. . . . So it is ironic that the game of chess experienced the only major change in its internal structure in over a thousand years of documented history through a single and dramatic shift in its rules of play at just about this time, the late fifteenth century” (71).

The drastic shift in rules centers dramatically on the Queen. In the old game, identified by Lucena as “old-style chess” [axedrez al viejo], the Queen was far weaker than the Rook or Knight and only slightly stronger than the Bishop (Murray, 776). In the new game, the Queen combines the moves of Rook and Bishop, to become by far the strongest piece on the board. This shift caused a radical alteration in the method and tempo of play. As Murray explains,

the initial stage in the Muslim or mediaeval game, which lasted until the superior forces came into contact, practically ceased to exist; the new Queen and Bishop could exert pressure upon the opponent’s forces in the first half-dozen moves, and could even, under certain circumstances, effect mate in the same period. The player no longer could reckon upon time to develop his forces in his own way; he was compelled to have regard to his opponent’s play from the very first. . . . Moreover, the possibility of converting the comparatively weak Pawn into a Queen of immense strength . . . [meant] it was no longer possible to regard the Pawns as useful only to clear a road by their sacrifice for the superior pieces. Thus the whole course of the game was quickened by the introduction of more powerful forces. (777)

It is important to note that whereas medieval players had been experimenting with extended moves for the Pawn and the Bishop since the thirteenth century, no known medieval precedent for the new Queen exists. The impression that the change in the Queen’s power made on European chess players and theorists is best seen in the names they gave the new game in France and Italy: “chess of the mad lady” [eschés de la dame enragée] and “mad chess” [scacchi alla rabiosa] (Eales, 72). Lucena calls it simply “chess of the lady” [axedrez de la dama].43 Chess authorities have proposed a variety of reasons for the sudden and drastic shift in the power of the Queen. These range from the “impact of the Renaissance” and the “urge toward individual independence,” to the invention of the printing press and the geographical discoveries of Columbus, to the creation of the idealized courtly lady by the Provençal troubadours (Cereceda, 24), to strong female role models such as Joan of Arc or Catherine Sforza (Eales, 76–77; Murray, 778–79).

It is perhaps a measure of the marginalization of Iberia in modern cultural history that no one has related the transformation of the Queen’s power in chess sometime between 1475 and 1496 with the unprecedented strengthening of royal authority simultaneously being effected by a historical queen who was decidedly a queen regnant and not a queen consort. Richard Eales, for example, states confidently that “It is certainly striking that the dominant piece in the new chess should be the queen, the only one with a female name, but no conceivable change in fifteenth-century history can explain it” (77).

It seems likely that the tastes and patronage of a queen who significantly shaped literature, art, and architecture in the final quarter of the fifteenth century also affected the recreational arts. Certainly, Isabel is a far more likely candidate for this distinction than the historically remote Joan of Arc (1412?–31) or the geographically displaced Catherine Sforza (1463–1509) proposed by Eales. Although there is no proof that Isabel’s real and symbolic power caused the transformation in the game itself, we can say that at the very least the recording of that dramatic change was a result of the impression that the absolutist power of this “new kind of queen” made on one aspiring letrado.

- Barbara F. Weissberger, Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship, Wielding Power

[silverloreley]

Is Italian a similar language to French?

Anon, know you made a far more difficult question than you think it is. Lucky you this relates quite closely to the subject of my next exam, so I can consider it an exercise, lol.

The short answer is: they’re similar but not so much. The most notable differences one can notice are that Italian very seldom has words that not end in vowel, while French doesn’t utter vowel sounds even when they are written. Another difference is the pronunciation of sounds, but to show it I’d need to use IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) or to make audios (which is a big no for me), so I suggest, if you’re curious, to listen to the same song in the two languages (Disney songs are easy to confront, to say) to hear how different they sound.

The mid-long, slightly more technical answer is: both are neo-Latin languages, meaning they both descend from Latin so they’re bound to share similarities on a morphological and lexical point of view that are evident in themselves in written form. They also influenced each other in the centuries, so the relationship is thick enough.

But! The territory now known as France that was once conquered by Romans (in fact, the area that Romans held for the longest time) had its own population, the Gauls, with their own language which, in a certain measure, influenced the Latin spoken there. Then, during the barbaric invasions, the zone was invaded by the Frankish, a germanic population that brought there their own language, from the fusion of those influences, there emerged the Franco-Provençal and other forms, the d’oc and d’oil forms, the latter is the one from which currently spoken French evolved from.

And I promised myself I wasn’t going to write a long answer about the Italian language to add on it, but I did anyway, so here it is, under the cut.

Before that, I’d like to sum up what there’s down here, with a little more:

Italian was created from one of the many dialects Italy had, all of which derived from Latin, by Dante Alighieri (yes, the one I make fun of, but I’ve been studying him as part of my study course for 10+ years so I am allowed to do that from time to time) and then cultivated by people for centuries as a language made only for literature and not quite spoken until the Unity of Italy. During those centuries more influxes entered, but none prevalent to the base Dante made.

Now, to the long one:

Unlike French, Italian, although it is an evolution from Latin, had numerous influences from other languages, but none as strong as French had from Frankish. In fact, Italian is the evolution of the dialect of a singular area of Italy, the volgare fiorentino, aka the tongue spoken in Florence. Now, the discussion is incredibly complicated, so I’ll try to reduce it to the essential lines.

The volgari were the tongues spoken by everyone, at every level, that derived from Latin’s spoken tongue, which was different from the written for a number of phenomena that it’d be too long to explain here. Every zone of Italy, every city even, had its own, and many of them started to evolve a written tradition separated from the Latin one, which was still prevalent. The Sicilian court of Frederich II is known to be the first Italian volgare that produced high-level literature (although there are recent finds that show how this may not be entirely correct, but that calls for more research...).

Enter the Florentines Stilnovisti, a group of poets that started to use their own dialects instead of the Sicilian one, to write their love poetries. Dante Alighieri was one of them.

But Dante was above them. He was a genius (for how much I love to make fun of him, it’s undeniable how great he was at what he did) who first theorized the creation of a tongue that could be the same for all of Italy, the way Latin once was, a tongue which had the same dignity and expressive abilities of Latin, and then HE MADE IT.

The Comedìa (worldwide known as the Divine Comedy) is the result of his work, 80% of the Italian vocabulary can be already found in it, most of the syntax and morphological structures are already in there and he built the tongue from his mother dialect, the tongue spoken in Florence, but not only! He made up words, he used Latin and Franco-Provençal and other Italian dialects and much much more to create a new tongue that became what we now speak!

And yes, then there came Petrarca that set a higher standard for poetry by “cleaning up” the mixed language of the Comedìa, and then Boccaccio became a baseline for prose (the three of them are known as the Three Crowns of Italian language) but the groundwork was made by Dante Alighieri.

And then, centuries later, there was Alessandro Manzoni (as a matter of fact, there would be a few passages in the middle, but this is already long as it is, so I’ll skip to here). By that time, Italian language was, just like the country, not a reality but more of a solid idea (I made some time ago a series of posts about Italian History, in case you want to see what the situation was). It was a language for literature only, with all the heaviness of being old and not quite up to date as it a spoken language was supposed to be. Manzoni had the bright idea to take this novel he was writing and modify the tongue according to how real people in his time’s Florence actually spoke. And it worked marvels! The tongue made by Dante was renewed with the influx of the practical evolutions the people did without even noticing they made!

When the Unity of Italy came shortly after, the tongue Manzoni used was basically adopted by the whole country, the novel I Promessi Sposi became a school book that was functional to teach the language to all the people who spoke only their own dialects and it’s still an essential part of Italian kids’ education today.

[emoyuuta]

okay i want to point out something about ninth house that probably doesn't make any sense but i need to say it anyway.

so alex is dante and darlington is virgil, right? we all know those characters are from the divine comedy.

but you know what also dante wrote? "dolce stil novo" sonnets. it's a literature movement (that has similarities with provençal/french poetry) where the poets are usually knights (intended as second-born sons) express their impossible love to their loved ladies, but since their love is well...impossible (for class reasons and often because those ladies are already married but this doesn't matter here) they express their devotion through servitude to the lady.

i'm probably reaching at straws but darlington seeing himself as a knight and wanting to serve alex at all costs remembered me this.

[no-passaran]

"In my grandmother's school, in Marseille, in the early 20th century, the girls who were caught speaking Provençal language had to clean the toilets. And the repeat offenders were forced to lick them "because they had shit in their mouth"!

My grandmother did not pass Provençal on to her children."

Philippe Blanchet, linguist. L'Express, 5th April 2016.

And this is how languages are killed.

France's policies known as the Great Linguistic Genocide are referred to as "la Vergonha" ("the Shame" in Occitan) because of the feeling they forced onto its speakers. The people whose mother tongue was the local language (Occitan, Breton, Basque, Catalan, Alsatian, Arpitan, Corsican, etc) were forced to feel so ashamed that they hid their language even from their children. Many, even nowadays, think that their "patois" (a word that means "badly spoken mix of languages") doesn't have a written form and doesn't allow complex thoughts. Not aware that some of these languages, such as the case of Occitan (of which Provençal is a variant) have one of the oldest and richest literature heritages in all of Europe. Cultures that the State of France murders a bit more everyday.

[isadomna]

Alfonso VI of León & Urraca of Zamora

The two siblings were children of Fernando I "El Magno" and Sancha of León.  After the death of their father, Alfonso inherited the Kingdom of León and Urraca the city of Zamora, and the Infantazgo, that is, "the patronage and income of all the monasteries belonging to the royal patrimony" on the condition that she remained unmarried. The figure of doña Urraca is one of the most powerful of medieval Iberia. She is the pious and devout daughter, sister, and co-ruler recorded in the Latin historical chronicles, as well as the passionate and cruel temptress in vernacular chronicles and in the ballad tradition. Undoubtedly the wildest rumor surrounding Urraca is that of an incestuous relationship and even marriage with her own brother. Urraca and Alfonso's mutual admiration was well known in their day and alluded to in contemporary documents. Alfonso governed jointly with Urraca: "Adefonsus Serenissimus rex, una cum consensu sororis mee Urraka". Alfonso refers to her with the conventional but certainly true formulation "dilectissima adque amantissima sóror mea".

The earliest known written allegation of Urraca and Alfonso's incest appears in a work by the mid twelfth century Granadine historiographer Abu Bakr ibn al-Sayrafi. The second known early reference to Urraca's incest with Alfonso appears in Fray Juan Gil de Zamora's historical tract De praeconibus Hispaniae (c. 1278-1282). As in the Arabic version, Fray Juan alleges that the incestuous acts took place following the siege of Zamora and their brother Sancho's murder. Whatever motives Ibn al-Sayrafi and Fray Juan had in reporting the allegation, their testimony affirms the existence of early peninsula-wide epic poems containing narratives of an incestuous marriage between Urraca and her brother Alfonso VI. The original source of this report is impossible to ascertain. Lévi Provençal and Menéndez Pidal considered the incest accusation plausible. Catalán agrees, noting that incest was part of eleventh century reality. Alfonso VI's biographer, Bernard F. Reilly, doubts the incest charge. He sees "nothing innately surprising or sinister" in Urraca's sisterly preference for Alfonso and finds neither the Muslim source nor Gil de Zamora to be "convincing".

Urraca was a woman of status and power in a world of ruthless dynastic imperatives. Alfonso was what we would now call a warlord, constantly on the offensive, leading his nomadic court, intent on securing borders, keeping rebellious nobles under control, and fighting to reconquer al-Andalus. During their brother's long reign (1065-1109), both Urraca and Elvira exercised power equivalent to or greater than all of Alfonso's queens. Like their mother Sancha, Urraca and Elvira, had they married, would have been transmitters of lineage. From this point of view, the brother-sister marriage would have been a possible strategy to consolidate inheritance. With all other heirs defeated, the brother-sister liaison would have unified the previously dispersed paternal territories. Urraca did not need a royal marriage to exert influence: her privileged position as a member of the royal family and daughter of Fernando and Sancha and her own ability to use that position guaranteed her more prestige and authority than any matrimonial alliance. The Chronica Seminensis enthusiastically describes Urraca's fervent love for Alfonso, her maternal care for him, and her rejection of husbands and carnal relationships: 

Indeed, from childhood on, Urraca loved Allonso with a heartfelt fraternal love, more than the others. Since she was older, she raised him as a mother, and dressed him. She was distinguished by her wise counsel and probity. We affirm this not from rumors, but from our own experience, in that she disdained carnal relationships and the fleeting adornments of matrimony.

Subsequent Latin chronicles follow the Seminensis in characterizing the nature of Urraca's and Alfonso's relationship as that of mother and son.   

Because Urraca was very noble in her ways, Alfonso was commended to her by their mother and father, for she loved him more than the other children. At the time that King Alfonso conquered the Kingdom of León, he obeyed his sister Urraca as he would a mother.

The evolution of the scandalous Urraca persona was part of the jongleuresque anti-Alfonso discourse. Hostility to Alfonso, explicit in Islamic historiography and exemplified in Ibn al-Sayrafi's accusation, is summarized in the famous verse referring to him in the Poema del Mio Cid: " iDios qué buen vasallo / si oviesse buen señor!". In the epics of the Castilian juglares, in the chronicles which rephrased them, and in popular balladry, Urraca was the narrative scapegoat and sexual libel was the weapon of choice. The open and intense personal-political complicity between the two was translated into intense sexual complicity. The specific incest charge was certainly a serious attack, breaching, as it does, a nearly universal taboo, but in the end its narrative buttress was fragile. It never became as widely disseminated as the accusations of Urraca's fratricide/regicide, prostitution, and promiscuity. The exact nature of the relationship between Urraca and Alfonso, whether maternal, fraternal, carnal or platonic, can never be definitively reconstructed. Historical reality, as always, slips through our fingers.

Source:

Doña Urraca and her Brother Alfonso VI: Incest as Politics by Teresa Catarella. Published by La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Volume 35, Number 2, Spring 2007, pp. 39-67 (Article)  

[gascon-en-exil]

From what I've heard (never been there myself), different regions in France tend to have their own regional cultures and specialties. What are some attributes the Gascogne region is known for?

...You know I don’t live in Gascogne, right? Hence the “en-exil” part - my patrilinearity and therefore my family name are Gascon but I’ve spent my life in New Orleans.

I know from literature and fragments of the culture we’ve preserved that Gascogne is one of the more remote and less populated regions of France - which adds a bit of context as to why my great x7 grandfather on that side chose to leave it for this godforsaken swamp where in the early 19th century there was at least a fashionably large city and easy money to be made - and that there’s a lot of crossover there with Spanish culture (Spain being on the other side of the Pyrénées) as well as with the adjacent but wholly distinct Basque culture. In fiction Gascons are stereotyped as hot-headed and impulsive, most famously in literary depictions of Cyrano de Bergerac...so more or less the same as how northern Europeans imagine those from the south which tracks geographically if nothing else. I don’t know any of the Occitan languages that were historically spoken in southern France, although it stands to reason that the Gascon variant is somewhere on a continuum between French and Spanish just as the more well-known Provençal dialect is between French and Italian.

[thelonguepuree]

Dickinson’s “items” have been successively and carefully framed to give the impression that something, or someone, is missing. While the recovery of Dickinson’s manuscripts may be supposed to have depended on the death of the subject, on the person who had, by accident or design, composed the scene, the repeated belated “discovery” that her work is yet in need of sorting (and of reading) may also depend upon the absence of the objects that composed it. These objects themselves mark not only the absence of the person who touched them but the presence of what touched that person: of the stationer that made the paper, of the manufacturer and printer and corporation that issued guarantees and advertisements and of the money that changed hands, of the butcher who wrapped the parcel, of the manuals and primers and copybooks that composed individual literacy, of the expanding postal service, of the modern railroad, of modern journalism, of the nineteenth-century taste for continental literary imports. All of these things are the sorts of things left out of a book, since the stories to be told about them open out away from [a] narrative of individual creation or individual reception … This is to say that what is so often said of the grammatical and rhetorical structure of Dickinson’s poems—that, as critics have variously put it, the poetry is “sceneless,” is “a set of riddles” revolving around an “omitted center,” is a poetry of “revoked . . . referentiality”—can more aptly be said of the representation of the poems as such. Once gathered as the previously ungathered, reclaimed as the abandoned, given the recognition they so long awaited, the poems in bound volumes appear both redeemed and revoked from their scenes or referents, from the history that the book, as book, omits. … The argument of Dickinson’s Misery is that the century and a half that spans the circulation of Dickinson’s work as poetry chronicles rather exactly the emergence of the lyric genre as a modern mode of literary interpretation. To put briefly what I will unfold at length in the pages that follow: from the mid-nineteenth through the beginning of the twenty-first century, to be lyric is to be read as lyric—and to be read as a lyric is to be printed and framed as a lyric. While it is beyond the scope of this book to trace the lyricization of poetry that began in the eighteenth century, the exemplary story of the composition, recovery, and publication of Dickinson’s writing begins one chapter, at least, in what is so far a largely unwritten history. As we have already begun to see, Dickinson’s enduring role in that history depends on the ephemeral quality of the texts she left behind. By a modern lyric logic that will become familiar in the pages that follow, the (only) apparently contextless or sceneless, even evanescent nature of Dickinson’s writing attracted an increasingly professionalized attempt to secure and contextualize it as a certain kind (or genre) of literature—as what we might call, after Charles Taylor, a lyric social imaginary. Think of the modern imaginary construction of the lyric as what allows the term to move from adjectival to nominal status and back again. Whereas other poetic genres (epic, poems on affairs of state, georgic, pastoral, verse epistle, epitaph, elegy, satire) may remain embedded in specific historical occasions or narratives, and thus depend upon some description of those occasions and narratives for their interpretation (it is hard to understand “The Dunciad,” for example, if one does not know the characters involved or have access to lots of handy footnotes), the poetry that comes to be understood as lyric after the eighteenth century is thought to require as its context only the occasion of its reading. This is not to say that there were not ancient Greek and Roman, Anglo-Saxon, medieval, Provençal, Renaissance, metaphysical, Colonial, Republican, Augustan—even romantic and modern!—lyrics. It is simply to propose that the riddles, papyrae, epigrams, songs, sonnets, blasons, Lieder, elegies, dialogues, conceits, ballads, hymns and odes considered lyrical in the Western tradition before the early nineteenth century were lyric in a very different sense than was or will be the poetry that the mediating hands of editors, reviewers, critics, teachers, and poets have rendered as lyric in the last century and a half. As my syntax indicates, that shift in genre definition is primarily a shift in temporality; as variously mimetic poetic subgenres collapsed into the expressive romantic lyric of the nineteenth century, the various modes of poetic circulation—scrolls, manuscript books, song cycles, miscellanies, broadsides, hornbooks, libretti, quartos, chapbooks, recitation manuals, annuals, gift books, newspapers, anthologies—tended to disappear behind an idealized scene of reading progressively identified with an idealized moment of expression. While other modes—dramatic genres, the essay, the novel—may have been seen to be historically contingent, the lyric emerged as the one genre indisputably literary and independent of social contingency, perhaps not intended for public reading at all. By the early nineteenth century, poetry had never before been so dependent on the mediating hands of the editors and reviewers who managed the print public sphere, yet in this period an idea of the lyric as ideally unmediated by those hands or those readers began to emerge and is still very much with us. Susan Stewart has dubbed the late eighteenth century’s highly mediated manufacture of the illusion of unmediated genres a case of “distressed genres,” or “new antiques.” Her terms allude to modern print culture’s attempts “to author a context as well as an artifact,” and thus to imitate older forms—such as the epic, the fable, the proverb, the ballad—while creating the impression that our access to those forms is as immediate as it was in the imaginary modern versions of oral and collective culture to which those forms originally belonged. Stewart does not include the lyric as a “distressed genre,” but her suggestion that old genres were made in new ways could be extended to include the idea that the lyric is— or was—a genre in the first place. As Gérard Genette has argued, “the relatively recent theory of the ‘three major genres’ not only lays claim to ancientness, and thus to an appearance or presumption of being eternal and therefore self-evident,” but is itself the effect of “projecting onto the founding text of classical poetics a fundamental tenet of ‘modern’ poetics (which actually . . . means romantic poetics).” Yet even if the lyric (especially in its broadly defined difference from narrative and drama) is a larger version of the new antique, a retroprojection of modernity, a new concept artificially treated to appear old, the fact that it is a figment of modern poetics does not prevent it from becoming a creature of modern poetry. The interesting part of the story lies in the twists and turns of the plot through which the lyric imaginary takes historical form. But what plot is that? My argument here is that the lyric takes form through the development of reading practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that become the practice of literary criticism. As Mark Jeffreys eloquently describes the process I am calling lyricization, “lyric did not conquer poetry: poetry was reduced to lyric. Lyric became the dominant form of poetry only as poetry’s authority was reduced to the cramped margins of culture.” This is to say that the notion of lyric enlarged in direct proportion to the diminution of the varieties of poetry—or at least that became the ratio as the idea of the lyric was itself produced by a critical culture that imagined itself on the definitive margins of culture. Thus by the early twenty-first century it became possible for Mary Poovey to describe “the lyricization of literary criticism” as the dependence of all postromantic professional literary reading on “the genre of the romantic lyric.” The conceptual problem is that if the lyric is the creation of print and critical mediation, and if that creation then produces the very versions of interpretive mediation that in turn produce it, any attempt to trace the historical situation of the lyric will end in tautology. Or that might be the critical predicament if the retrospective definition and inflation of the lyric were either as historically linear or as hermeneutically circular as much recent criticism, whether historicist or formalist, would lead us to believe. What has been left out of most thinking about the process of lyricization is that it is an uneven series of negotiations of many different forms of circulation and address. To take one prominent example, the preface to Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) describes the “ancient foliums in the Editor’s possession,” claims to have subjected the excerpts from these manuscripts to the judgment of “several learned and ingenious friends” as well as to the approval of “the author of The Rambler and the late Mr. Shenstone,” and concludes that “the names of so many men of learning and character the Editor hopes will serve as amulet, to guard him from every unfavourable censure for having bestowed any attention on a parcel of Old Ballads.” Not only does Percy not claim that historical genres of verse are directly addressed to contemporary readers (and each of his “relics” is prefaced by a historical sketch and description of its manuscript context in order to emphasize the excerpt’s distance from the reader), but he also acknowledges the role of the critical climate to which the poems in his edition were addressed. Yet by 1833, John Stuart Mill, in what has become the most influentially misread essay in the history of Anglo-American poetics, could write that “the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude.” As Anne Janowitz has written, “in Mill’s theory . . . the social setting is benignly severed from poetic intentions.” What happened between 1765 and 1833 was not that editors and printers and critics lost influence over how poetry was presented to the public; on the contrary, as Matthew Rowlinson has remarked, in the nineteenth century “lyric appears as a genre newly totalized in print.” And it is also not true that the social setting of the lyric is less important in the nineteenth than it was in the eighteenth century. On the contrary, because of the explosion of popular print, by the early nineteenth century in England, as Stuart Curran has put it, “the most eccentric feature of [the] entire culture [was] that it was simply mad for poetry”—and as Janowitz has trenchantly argued, such madness extended from the public poetry of the eighteenth century through an enormously popular range of individualist, socialist, and variously political and personal poems. In nineteenth-century U.S. culture, the circulation of many poetic genres in newspapers and the popular press and the crucial significance of political and public poetry to the culture as a whole is yet to be appreciated in later criticism (or, if it is, it is likely to be given as the reason that so little enduring poetry was produced in the United States in the nineteenth century, with the routine exception of Whitman and Dickinson, who are also routinely mischaracterized as unrecognized by their own century). At the risk of making a long story short, it is fair to say that the progressive idealization of what was a much livelier, more explicitly mediated, historically contingent and public context for many varieties of poetry had culminated by the middle of the twentieth century (around the time Dickinson began to be published in “complete” editions) in an idea of the lyric as temporally self-present or unmediated. This is the idea aptly expressed in the first edition of Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry in 1938: “classifications such as ‘lyrics of meditation,’ and ‘religious lyrics,’ and ‘poems of patriotism,’ or ‘the sonnet,’ ‘the Ode,’ ‘the song,’ etc.” are, according to the editors, “arbitrary and irrational classifications” that should give way to a present-tense presentation of “poetry as a thing in itself worthy of study.” Not accidentally, as we shall see, the shift in definition accompanied the migration of lyric from the popular press to the classroom—but for now we should note that by the time that Emily Dickinson’s poetry became available in scholarly editions and university anthologies, the history of various genres of poetry was read as simply lyric, and lyrics were read as poems one could understand without reference to that history or those genres.

Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005)