Lecturae Tropatorum (Dec 2009)
Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, “Domna, tant vos ai prejada” (BdT 392.7)
Abstract
This paper will attempt to read Raimbaut de Vaqueiras’ ‘contrasto’ from the viewpoint of its explicit addressees: the late twelfth-century imperial nobility of north-western Italy, as embodied by the Malaspina family. The text’s distinctive bilingualism thus assumes social and political significance since it pits the claims of the feudal aristocracy of the hinterland against the power of the Genoese bankers and merchants. The dialectical relationship of the two sides involved, played out by the voices of the jongleur and the Genoese lady, is nevertheless also literary: Raimbaut appears to match popular poetry, poetry which is «non regulata» as Dante would later call it, against a century of courtly Occitan poetry distinguished by an extremely formal tradition. A carnivalesque dimension is thus present in the reciprocal illumination of the two poetic voices: if popular poetry is unregulated despite its expressive qualities, troubadour poetry is confined, by means of the parody of the genre of the ‘salut’, to topics far-removed from reality. Raimbaut’s aim then is to restructure trobar by going back to the beginning: to the Count of Poitiers and his political and cultural act of inventing a secular poetry of aristocratic inspiration and in the vernacular. A ‘male’ poetry that will be formulated by the surprising gap at the end of the poem.
