Initial "M" from a poem of Guiraut de BornelhArcher Huntington, leader in placing the chansonnier in the library for preservation and public availabilityCerverí de Girona, "Si voletz que.m laix d'amar", a balada, folio 34v
The Cançoner Gil (Catalan:[kənsuˈneˈʒil], Occitan:[kansuˈneˈdʒil]) is an Occitanchansonnier produced in Catalonia in the middle of the 14th century. In the systematic nomenclature of Occitanists, it is typically named MSSg, but as Z in the reassignment of letter names by François Zufferey. It is numbered MS 146 in the Biblioteca de Catalunya in Barcelona, where it now resides.
The name of the chansonnier is not medieval. It is so-called after its last possessor before it was donated to the Biblioteca, Pablo Gil y Gil, Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Zaragoza (c. 1910), owner of a valuable collection of ancient manuscripts.[1] It was donated at the request of a group of ten of the library's patrons: Isidre Bonsoms, Pere Grau Maristany, Eduard Sevilla, the Marquès de Maury, Josep Mansana, Jacinte Serra, Manuel Girona, Hug Herberg, Teresa Ametller, and Archer Milton Huntington. Part of the motive for donating the chansonnier was to have it rebound. It was given new red leather binding decorated with the arms of the provincial government (diputació) and the Cross of Saint James. Ramon Miquel i Planes, with the advice of Ernest Molinés i Brasés of the Escola de les Arts del Llibre, and the technical skill of J. Figuerola, restored the chansonnier with the new binding at the behest of the provincial government.
The chansonnier is well preserved, made of high-quality parchment with clear, well-formed letters. The first third of it is decorated with initials and marginalia, but the latter folios are unfinished; the spaces left for ornamentation are unfilled. Also, no space is left for musical notation, and since some of the poems are known to have melodies, the chansonnier must have been produced to be read, not used (for musical performance).
The Gil is the only source for a number of Cerverí de Girona's poems. It offers a large number of variants of the well-known classical poems, perhaps because it is based on oral traditions and not on other texts. It is for this that it was lettered Sg and Z, towards the end of the alphabet and among the (traditionally) less reliable chansonniers, though this system of classification is no longer considered a good guide to accuracy or reliability.
Sources
Riquer, Martín de. Historia de la literatura catalana, Vol. 1. Barcelona: Ariel, 1964.
Miriam Cabré et Sadurní Martí, "Le Chansonnier Sg au carrefour Occitano-Catalan", Romania, vol. 128 (2010), pp.92–134.
A troubadour was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages (1100–1350). Since the word troubadour is etymologically masculine, a female equivalent is usually called a trobairitz.
A chansonnier is a manuscript or printed book which contains a collection of chansons, or polyphonic and monophonic settings of songs, hence literally "song-books"; however, some manuscripts are called chansonniers even though they preserve the text but not the music, for example, the Cancioneiro da Vaticana and Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional, which contain the bulk of Galician-Portuguese lyrics.
The trobairitz were Occitan female troubadours of the 12th and 13th centuries, active from around 1170 to approximately 1260. Trobairitz is both singular and plural.
Guillem is a Catalan first name, equivalent to William in the English language, which occasionally can appear as a surname. Its origin and pronunciation are the same as its Occitan variant Guilhèm, with a different spelling.
Cerverí de Girona was a Catalan troubadour born Guillem de Cervera in Girona. He was the most prolific troubadour, leaving behind some 114 lyric poems among other works, including an ensenhamen of proverbs for his son, totaling about 130. He was a court poet to James the Conqueror and Peter the Great. He wrote pastorelas and sirventes and his overriding concern was the complexities of court life. None of his music survives.
Guillem Ramon de Gironella was a late thirteenth-century Catalan troubadour. His poetry, while difficult, is highly original and praised for its beauty.
An ensenhamen was an Old Occitan didactic poem associated with the troubadours. As a genre of Occitan literature, its limits have been open to debate since it was first defined in the 19th century. The word ensenhamen has many variations in old Occitan: essenhamen, ensegnamen, enseinhamen, and enseignmen.
Raimon de Cornet was a fourteenth-century Toulousain priest, friar, grammarian, poet, and troubadour. He was a prolific author of verse; more than forty of his poems survive, most in Occitan but two in Latin. He also wrote letters, a didactic poem, a grammar, and some treatises on computation. He was the "last of the troubadours" and represented l'esprit le plus brillant of the "Toulousain School". He appears in contemporary documents with the titles En and Frare.
The Consistori del Gay Saber was a poetic academy founded at Toulouse in 1323 to revive and perpetuate the lyric poetry of the troubadours.
The Consistoride Barcelona was a literary academy founded in Barcelona by John the Hunter, King of Aragon and Count of Barcelona, in 1393 in imitation of the Consistori del Gay Saber founded in Toulouse in 1323. The poetry produced by and for the Consistori was heavily influenced by the troubadours. The Consistori's chief purpose was to promote "correct" styles and themes and discourage vices (vicis) by awarding prizes in competition to poets who adhered to the "rules" of poetic composition. The names of few poets laureate have come down to us and despite some excellent descriptions of the Consistori's activities, associated persons and poems are obscure.
The Cançoneret de Ripoll, now manuscript 129 of Ripoll in the Arxiu de la Corona d'Aragó, is a short Catalan-Occitan chansonnier produced in the mid-fourteenth century but after 1346, when Peter IV of Aragon held a poetry competition which is mentioned in the chansonnier. Influenced by Cerverí de Girona, the chansonnier and its ideology serve as transition in the history of Catalan literature between the dominance of the troubadours and the new developments of Ausiàs March.
The viadera was a lyric genre of Catalan and Occitan literature invented by the troubadours. It was a dance song devised to lighten the burden of a long voyage or to enliven the trip. It was a popular as opposed to "high" form and only infrequently used by cultivated poets. According to the Catalan Cançoneret de Ripoll, it was la pus jusana spècies qui és en los cantàs and elsewhere it is called la més baixa espècie de cançons.
Johan Blanch was an Occitan troubadour who composed a canso for a joc floral at the Consistori del Gay Saber. According to the rubric of the fourteenth-century chansonnier that preserves it, he was a Catalan whose poem "won the violet", top prize. His canso is elegant and pleading.
Melchior de Gualbes was a Catalan knight, politician, and author of three short poems. His poetry is preserved in the Cançoner Vega-Aguiló, in a section badly damaged by humidity. Only the use of ultraviolet radiation has made possible full readings of all his pieces.
A salut d'amor or (e)pistola ("epistle") was an Occitan lyric poem of the troubadours, written as a letter from one lover to another in the tradition of courtly love. Some songs preserved in the Italian Quattrocento and Cinquecento chansonniers are labelled in the rubrics as saluts, but the salut is not treated as a genre by medieval Occitan grammarians. The trouvères copied the Occitan song style into Old French as the salut d'amour. There are a total of nineteen surviving Occitan saluts and twelve French ones, with a Catalan examples also.
The Cançoner Vega-Aguiló is a chansonnier predominantly carrying Catalan and Occitan pieces, but also some Castilian and Middle French verse.
The devinalh, was a genre of Old Occitan lyric poetry practiced by some troubadours. It takes the form of a riddle, or series of riddles or cryptograms and is, if read literally, mostly nonsensical. Known practitioners include Guilhen de Peiteu, Raimbaut of Orange, Giraut de Bornelh, Guilhem Ademar, Guilhem de Berguedan and Raimbaut de Vaqueiras.
Guilhem Molinier or Moulinier was a medieval Occitan poet from Toulouse. His most notable work is Leys d'amors, a treatise on rhetoric and grammar that achieved great notoriety and, beyond the Occitan, influenced poets writing in Catalan as well as in Galician or Italian, for which they served as a reference. The occasion for its composition was the founding in 1323 of the Consistori de la Sobregaya Companhia del Gay Saber at Toulouse. The consistory consisted of seven members who organized poetic contests and rewarded lyric poems that best imitated the style of the 12th- and 13th-century troubadours. Molinier was not an original member of the consistory, but he was its chancellor in 1348, when he was tasked with codifying the principles of Occitan lyric poetry. In this work he had a collaborator, Marc Bartholomieu. A final version was approved by the consistory in 1356.
Raimon de Castelnou was an Occitan writer and troubadour of the second half of the 13th century. He wrote five cansos and one treatise on Catholic doctrine and ethics. There is a sirventes attributed to him in some manuscripts, but its attribution is disputed.
Andreu Febrer i Callís was a Catalan soldier, courtier and poet.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
