bbey of Love
This story took place a couple of years ago, during late summer. Some of us were preparing our summer workshop students to give a recital of old Provençal and French love songs, including some of those you will shortly be hearing during this performance. The proposed venue was a little medieval church, lost in the hills behind Nice, just a few miles from the Italian border. The parish priest, a young, intelligent, and scrupulous man, had asked to see the song texts beforehand, and I drove a few winding kilometers down the valley, towards the sea, to meet him and comply with his request.
Our conversation then, poetry books in hand, led to an interesting encounter of conflicting medieval world-views. For the village priest regarded the ethos of courtly love as something like a counter-theology, a secular religion of sorts, in conflict with the tenets of the Christianity it was his role to defend. “This is dangerous material, Monsieur Cohen,“ he warned, examining the Provençal texts with care and evident familiarity with the language, ancient but still current in the villages of his parish. My argument that certain of the lovesongs had been written by medieval men of the cloth carried little weight. “Satan appears in many forms,” he replied, signing nonetheless the necessary permission to give the concert within hallowed church walls.
The young priest, of course, was right to warn us about the songs of the troubadours and trouvères. For him (and for us too, I hope), they were not dusty archaelogical artifacts, but passionate calls to a whole way of life. The debate about the values of courtly love, and how they related to the teachings of the Church, was a strong one in the Middle Ages, and clearly important to this modern man of the church as well.
To those who followed its rule, medieval love was a vocation. In the ethos of Provençal fin amor, the lover was expected to dedicate his or her whole being to the beloved, and to the values of the love-ethos. The relationships thus engendered were (at least in their ideal state) supposed to be all-consuming, even unto death, as in the Tristan and Iseult legend. Moreover, they took place without benefit of clergy, in contradiction to the vows of marriage and to the sacraments of the Church. No wonder the village priest was concerned! The Abbey of Love, described in the final strophes of Bele Doette, is of course an imaginary place. But the fact that it could even be imagined shows how the ideals of courtly love pretended to set up a counter- culture within medieval society. There is something dangerous, and subversive in the whole medieval love ethic, as there is, at a more basic level, in sexuality itself.
But let’s move back a bit from the danger zone! Our intention now, as we sing and recite some of these medieval works to you is not to create a social revolution, or to impel you to go into orders of whatever kind, but more simply to entertain and console. Yet, if these songs have a special beauty, and a certain enduring magic, it is because they do relate to some of the deepest and most powerful forces in our being. We all want to love and be loved, as did the men and women who composed these pieces eight centuries ago. These songs from ancient manuscripts are about real feelings, real passions, and real life issues, and as such they are probably more authentic and more contemporary” than much of what passes for entertaiment in the mass media all around us. We invite you to be touched by them, and to let their beauty, at once fragile and powerful, inform your own heart.
Joel Cohen