#thibaut le chansonnier

[histoireettralala]

Thibaut le Chansonnier.

The present count of Champagne, Thibaut IV, is a poet. Guarded through his minority by his capable mother, Blanche of Navarre, Thibaut grew up to marry, one after the other, a Hapsburg, a Beaujeu, and a Bourbon princess, by whom he had eight children. To these children he added four more, products of his numerous love affairs. But the enduring passion of his life was a chaste one, owing to the inaccessibility of its object, the queen of France. This lady, Blanche of Castile, wife and widow of Louis VIII and mother of Louis IX (St.-Louis), was a dozen years Thibaut’s senior. Nevertheless Thibaut’s penchant for Blanche was such that he was suspected of poisoning her husband when the king died suddenly. The injustice of the accusation provoked Thibaut to join a couple of baronial troublemakers, Hugo of La Marche and Peter of Brittany, in a sort of antiroyal civil war. When on sober second thought Thibaut changed his mind, Hugo and Peter turned their spite against him and invaded Champagne, setting haystacks and hovels ablaze. Stopped by the walls of Troyes, they were forced to turn around and go home when a relieving force arrived, sent by Queen Blanche.

Partly as a result of the war, Thibaut was constrained to sell three of his cities—Blois, Chartres and Sancerre—to the king of France. At the last moment he felt a reluctance to hand over Blois, cradle of his dynasty, and carried stubbornness to the point of courting a royal invasion. But forty-six-year-old Blanche of Castile dissuaded thirty-three-year-old Thibaut in an interview of which the dialogue was recorded, or at least reported, by a chronicler:

Blanche: Pardieu, Count Thibaut, you ought to have remembered the kindness shown you by the king my son, who came to your aid, to save your land from the barons of France when they would have set fire to it all and laid it in ashes.

Thibaut (overcome by the queen’s beauty and virtue): By my faith, madame, my heart and my body and all my land is at your command, and there is nothing which to please you I would not readily do; and against you or yours, please God, I will never go.

Thibaut’s fancy for Blanche needed sublimation. Sage counselors recommended a study of canzonets for the viol, as a result of which Thibaut soon began turning out “the most beautiful canzonets anyone had ever heard” (a judgment in which a later day concurs). The verses of Thibaut the Songwriter were sung by trouvères and jongleurs throughout Europe. A favorite:

Las! Si j’avois pouvoir d’oublier

Sa beauté, a beauté, son bien dire,

Et son très-doux, très-doux regarder,

Finirois mon martyre.

Mais las! mon coeur je n’en puis ôter,

Et grand affolage

M’est d’espérer:

Mais tel servage

Donne courage

A tout endurer.

Et puis, comment, comment oublier

Sa beauté, sa beauté, son bien dire,

Et son très-doux, très-doux regarder?

Mieux aime mon martyre.

[Could I forget her gentle grace,

Her glance, her beauty’s sum,

Her voice from memory efface,

I’d end my martyrdom.

Her image from my heart I cannot tear;

To hope is vain;

I would despair,

But such a strain

Gives strength the pain

Of servitude to bear.

Then how forget her gentle grace,

Her glance, her beauty's sum,

Her voice from memory efface ?

I'll love my martyrdom.]

Frances & Joseph Gies- Life in a Medieval City

[nanshe-of-nina]

Favorite History Books || Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love by R. Howard Bloch ★★★★☆

Until now the advent of Western romantic love has been seen as a liberation from—or antidote to—ten centuries of misogyny. In this major contribution to gender studies, R. Howard Bloch demonstrates how similar the ubiquitous antifeminism of medieval times and the romantic idealization of woman actually are.

Through analyses of a broad range of patristic and medieval texts, Bloch explores the Christian construction of gender in which the flesh is feminized, the feminine is aestheticized, and aesthetics are condemned in theological terms. Tracing the underlying theme of virginity from the Church Fathers to the courtly poets, Bloch establishes the continuity between early Christian antifeminism and the idealization of woman that emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In conclusion he explains the likely social, economic, and legal causes for the seeming inversion of the terms of misogyny into those of an idealizing tradition of love that exists alongside its earlier avatar until the current era.

“This means that Guillaume IX [of Aquitaine]’s famous conversion, from which courtly love was supposedly born, is, due to the lack of textual evidence, no conversion at all. On the contrary, what emerges from the inconclusive documentation is that the relation of the first troubadour’s two faces is more logical than chronological or biographical and that the copresence of misogynistic and courtly songs is better explained by the fact that the two medieval discourses on woman are not contraries but intermingling zones of a common conceptualization of gender. Antifeminism and the idealization of the feminine are mirror images of each other—coevally overdetermined visions of woman as overdetermined.

Nor is the example of Guillaume IX, sometimes considered sui generis or idiosyncratic because it is the first, really that different from those of Marcabru, Bernart de Ventadorn, or Thibaut de Champagne, all poets in whose works, as we saw, conflicting attitudes are maintained in such close proximity—that is, within individual poems, and even within a single strophe— that the contrasting elements of contradiction cannot be biographically detached. On the contrary, the fundamental bivalence of courtliness where the question of woman is concerned is there from the beginning, and the “two faces” of the first troubadour are the founding implicit articulation of a defining opposition that will simply appear to be more explicit in, say, the two portions of Le Roman de la rose with which we began, or in the two unusual motets of the Chansonnier de Montpellier, which alternate misogynistic and courtly strophes within a single lyric.”

[francepittoresque]

16 août 1284 : rattachement de la Champagne et de la Brie à la couronne de France ➽ https://j.mp/2VkI8WR Enjeux de batailles sous le célèbre Thibaut IV « le Chansonnier » au début du XIIIe siècle, la Champagne et la Brie, transmises par voie d’héritage depuis la fin du Xe siècle, échoient entre les mains du futur roi de France par son mariage avec l’unique héritière

[francepittoresque]

16 août 1284 : rattachement de la Champagne et de la Brie à la couronne de France ► http://bit.ly/Rattachement-Champagne-Brie Enjeux de batailles sous le célèbre Thibaut IV « le Chansonnier » au début du XIIIe siècle, la Champagne et la Brie, transmises par voie d’héritage depuis la fin du Xe siècle, échoient entre les mains du futur roi de France par son mariage avec l’unique héritière