The "Impossible Love" of the Troubadours

The story of the love affair between Abelard and Heloise is one of the most famous of the Middle Ages, serving as the real-life model for later romances (e.g., The Romance of the Rose; Lancelot and Guinevere). It is told in the pages of Peter Abelard’s autobiography, The History of My Calamities, and in the letters which passed between the two lovers. Abelard (c.1079–1142) was one of the most brilliant scholars of the renaissance of learning that flourished in Paris in the early twelfth century. He was the first to want to reconcile faith with reason (i.e., to use logic --dialectica-- based upon the works of Aristotle in order to explain religious text and doctrine): "In doubting, we come to seek, and in seeking, we perceive the truth." For this he was tried twice tried for "heresy," resulting in some of his work burned.

However, Abelard's scholarly powers of analysis and prowess in agrumentation, which gained him many enemies, was not the limit of his gifts. He also excelled in music; in writing love songs! (As if he was made for the prime example for Re-Vision Radio's program of dialectics mixed with music--and for an ancient model of the musical/orphic scholar!)

Why should I say more? We were united first in the dwelling that sheltered our love, and then in the hearts that burned with it. Under the pretext of study we spent our hours in the happiness of love, and learning held out to us the secret opportunities that our passion craved. Our speech was more of love than of the books which lay open before us; our kisses far outnumbered our reasoned words. Our hands sought less the book than each other's bosoms -- love drew our eyes together far more than the lesson drew them to the pages of our text. In order that there might be no suspicion, there were, indeed, sometimes blows, but love gave them, not anger; they were the marks, not of wrath, but of a tenderness surpassing the most fragrant balm in sweetness. What followed? No degree in love's progress was left untried by our passion, and if love itself could imagine any wonder as yet unknown, we discovered it. And our inexperience of such delights made us all the more ardent in our pursuit of them, so that our thirst for one another was still unquenched.

In measure as this passionate rapture absorbed me more and more, I devoted ever less time to philosophy and to the work of the school. Indeed it became loathsome to me to go to the school or to linger there; the labour, moreover, was very burdensome, since my nights were vigils of love and my days of study. My lecturing became utterly careless and lukewarm; I did nothing because of inspiration, but everything merely as a matter of habit. I had become nothing more than a reciter of my former discoveries, and though I still wrote poems, they dealt with love, not with the secrets of philosophy. Of these songs you yourself well know how some have become widely known and have been sung in many lands, chiefly, methinks, by those who delighted in the things of this world. As for the sorrow, the groans, the lamentations of my students when they perceived the preoccupation, nay, rather the chaos, of my mind, it is hard even to imagine them. (Abelard, Historia Calamitatum)

In fact, it was precisely this--writing love songs--that Heloise claims made her fall in love with him. Heloise refers to these letters as great in number at the end of the letter she wrote to Abelard after reading his Historia Calamitatum:

When you sought me ou{ for shameless pleasures, you showered me with incessant letters, you placed your Heloise on the lips of everyone through frequent song: I resounded through every market-place, each house. But how much more rightly might you now arouse me in God, as then you aroused me in lust! Consider, I beg you, what you owe me; listen to what I demand; and so I finish a long letter with a brief conclusion: Farewell, my only one. (Heloise)

(These love songs did not survive, but we have some of the later liturgical hymns he wrote for Heloise's Paraclete.) Heloise (c.1090–c.1164) was his young student, and the niece of Fulbert, canon of Notre Dame in Paris. She became known as one of the most learned women of her time, studied not only in bliblical sources (like 'The Song of Songs') but in the classics (e.g., Greek and Roman literature, including rhetoric and Ovidian treatises on love). She was also a skilled writer. They were married (an act that Heloise herself was at first against, thinking it would hurt Abelard's religious career), but that didn't prevent her uncle his revenge. Incensed by Abelard’s seduction of Heloise, Fulbert ordered an attack on Abelard and had him castrated in punishment for the scandal and insult he had caused. Abelard fled Paris, entered a monastery and forced Heloise to become a nun. Their relationship continued through their letters (and perhaps through later meetings, when Abelard took over the responsibilties of becoming the spiritual director of the nunnery, the La Paraclet, which he himself had earlier founded as a monastery). By the time of Abelard's death, Heloise (who lived for over twenty more years) had become known as the wise abbess of The Paraclete--but only out of her sense of duty to Abelard. She never, in all her long years as a nun, forgot her true love.

"The name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word mistress, or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore." (Heloise)

The post-love affair letters (including newly discovered letters), in which Heloise challenges her former scholar-lover (who is now in holy denial about their love) to live up to both what he taught her about real ethics and his promisies to her, are testiments to Heloise's real faith in the face of Abelard's reconsituted faith and the Church's condemnation of profane love. It is, therefore, the Gypsy Scholar's opinion that, in the final analysis, it is not Abelard who emerges the greater figure, secure in his moral higher ground, but Heloise, who, while bravely holding her social role as abbotess, remained forever faithful to her independent principles about the essential purity of romantic love; i.e., faithful to the "Religion of Love. "

This is what Ibn 'Arabi, roughly contemporary in Arabic Andalusia, called it. Ibn 'Arabi was born in Murcia, Andalusia in 1155. When this Sufi mystic and later writer of profane love poetry, "undertook his journey to Mecca in the thirteenth century, he was forced to reflect on the nature of love, that extraordinary feeling that gives human beings a chance to reach toward divine perfection. It is well known that the Sufi mystics, starting with Ibn 'Arabi, have always had trouble drawing the line between love inspired by the divine and love inspired by a woman." [Fatema Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West.] And thinking of the Gypsy Scholar's essays, "The Origins of the Troubadours: 'Andalusia, I Want To See You Again and Again,'" the great Thousand And One Nights, or Arabian Nights, which stories were translated first into Arabic and then into Latin by the mid-13th century and, thus, made popular to Latin Europe, featured the storyteller-heroine Scheherazade. Thus, it could be said, with some reservations, that Heloise, in her challenging post-love affair questions to Abelard, in order to get him into a renewed dialogue, and perhaps to bring him back around to the feminine point of view, is a real-life Scheherazade: "Scheherazade had read the books of literature, philosophy, medicine. She knew poetry by heart, and had studied historical reports, and was acquainted with the sayings of men and the maxims of sages and kings. She was intelligent, wise, and refined. She had read and learned." (For the Gypsy Scholar's refusal to draw the line between sacred and profane love, see p. 5: "Quest-Romance.")

The story of Abelard and Heloise is one of passion, pride, devotion, grief over lost love, faith, heresy, brutality, exile, and intellectual brilliance. Through it we can question medieval attitudes to sex and marriage, faith and learning, sacred profane love. They lived at a time of great intellectual and social change, not to mention the political flux and anxiety about the crusade. It was a time, then, of intense creative energy that made Paris one of the centres of the “Twelfth-century Renaissance.”

Therefore, the story of Heloise and Abelard serves as the best example of what the Tower of Song program is all about: Argument & Song; Philosophy & Love.

THE CARMINA BURANA

Carmina Burana (Latin for "Songs, or Chants, of Beuern") is the name given to a manuscript of 254 poems, songs, and dramatic texts from the 11th or 12th century, although some are from the 13th century (circa 1230). The collection was found in 1803 in the Benedictine monastery of Benediktbeuern, Bavaria. Along with the Carmina Cantabrigiensia, the Carmina Burana is the most important collection of Goliard and vagabond songs. Most of the poems and songs appear to be the work of the Goliard poets in the thirteenth century, by students and clergy when the Latin idiom was the lingua franca across Italy and western Europe for traveling scholars, universities and theologians.

The Goliards were an assortment of clergy (mostly students), defrocked or renegade monks, wandering poets and minstrels, who satirized the Church and who venerated Peter Abelard.  They called themselves "goliards," possibly after the name "Golias." (Abelard, once a "wandering scholar," was not the mysterious and infamous Arch-Poet of the Metamorphosis of Golias, published in the year Abelard died, 1142, but he may have been the original lord of misrule, the mythical "Bishop Golias," whose name became associated with the secular poetry of the Carmina Burana. "Bishop Golias" was the medieval Latin form of the name "Goliath," given to Abelard by his arch-enemy Bernard of Clairvaux, and is suggestive of the goliards posing as heavy drinking yet learned students who lampooned the ecclesiastical and political establishment.) Traditionally, the Goliards have been identified as "vagantes" ("wandering scholars," or vagrant students, vagabond monks and minor clerics), said to have been "better known for their rioting, gambling, and intemperance than for their scholarship." The poems and songs of the Goliards  captured the adventurous world of dropouts and rebels from the medieval clergy, who were lovers and drinkers on the road, "celebrating existence rather than living the meditative, celibate life  of the monastery." (Note: Not all "clergy" were monks, nor were they necessarily part of a religious order, since they could also be, like free-lance scholar Abelard, clerics or "clerks;" i.e., scholars.) The Goliards expressed themselves through poetry, song, and performance, much like the jongleurs (minstrels) of the period.

The collection preserves the works of a number of poets, including Peter of Blois (a student of Peter Abelard), Walter of Châtillon, and the anonymous one, referred to as the goliardic "Arch-Poet." The pieces were written almost entirely in Medieval Latin; a few in Middle High German, and some with traces of Old French or Provençal. Many are macaronic, a mixture of Latin and German or French vernacular. The manuscripts reflect an international European movement, with songs originating from Occitania (southern France, home of the troubadours), France, England, Scotland, Aragon, Castille and the Holy Roman Empire. Some scholars have suspected that the author of some of the songs in the Carmina is actually Peter Abelard (in the role of jongleur), who is known to have written love songs to Heloise, which are now lost. Thus attributed to Abelard are two songs (part of the grouping referred to as "Love Songs"): CB 62, "Dum Dianae vitrea" ("When Diana's silver light") and CB 57, "Hebet sidus" ("Dull Star").

The theme of Carmina Burana is spring, wine, love, all symbolic of ecstasy and divine creativity as well as pagan joy in the basic realities of life, the first principles of existence. Its writings were not what you would have expected to find in a monastery. The poems include the freshness of medieval love lyrics, exuberance of the drinking song, the zest of the sinner's "confessions," the wild humor of the hymns to gambling and gluttony, the stoic litany to Lady Luck ("Fortuna Imperatrix"). Sex is also a dominant theme in many of the songs, along with bawdy drinking songs on par with what you might hear at your local pub. We can imagine the members of the monastery not being too thrilled with this particular discovery. One might wonder why the supposedly pious and reserved monks would keep such a collection on hand. In the equally reserved climate of the 1800s, various translations were attempted. Translations were usually restricted to a very small portion of the collection, and most didn't attempt to copy the rhyme and rhythm of the original text (but did manage to minimize any bawdy references).

The Carmina Burana contains the main collection of "secular" (or "profane") poetry and song from the Middle Ages (if, of course, the poetry/song of the troubadours of the south of France is excluded). However, some of its material falls in between the genre of sacred and secular. It contains Latin plays on Biblical themes, pastoral and religious poems, recruiting songs for the Crusades, satires, and a large group of lively, sometimes licentious, love songs and drinking songs. It has become one of the best-known sources for medieval European literature.

Generally, the works contained in the Carmina Burana can be arranged into four groups according to theme: 55 songs of morals and mockery (CB 1–55), 131 love songs (CB 56–186), 40 drinking and gaming songs (CB 187–226), and two longer spiritual theater pieces (CB 227 and 228).

(This outline, however, has many exceptions. CB 122-134, which are categorized as love songs, actually are not: they contain a song for mourning the dead, a satire, and two educational stories about the names of animals. There also likely was another group of spiritual poems included in the Carmina Burana, but they have since been lost. The attached folio contains a mix of 21 generally spiritual songs: a prose-prayer to Saint Erasmus and four more spiritual plays, some of which have only survived as fragments. These larger thematic groups can also be further subdivided, for example, the end of the world [CB 24-31], songs about the crusades [CB 46-52] or reworkings of writings from antiquity [CB 97-102].)

Other frequently recurring themes in the Carmina Burana include: critiques on simony and greed in the church, that, with the advent of the monetary economy in the 12th cenutry, rapidly became an important issue (CB 1-11, 39, 41-45); lamentations in the form of the planctus, for example about the ebb and flow of human fate (CB 14-18) or about death (CB 122-131); the hymnic celebration of the return of spring (CB 132, 135, 137, 138, 161 and others); pastourelles about the seduction of shepherdesses by knights, students/clergymen (CB 79, 90, 157-158); and the description of love as military service (CB 60, 62, and 166), a topos known from Ovid's elegiac love poems. Ovid and especially his erotic elegies were reproduced, imitated and exaggerated in the Carmina Burana. In other words, for those unfamiliar with Ovid's work, depictions of sexual intercourse in the manuscript are frank and even sometimes aggressive. CB 76, for example, makes use of the lyrical I to describe a ten hour love act with the goddess of love herself, Venus. The Carmina Burana also contains numerous poetic descriptions of a raucous medieval paradise (CB 195-207, 211, 217, 219), for which the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, known for his advocation of the blissful life, is even taken as an authority on the subject (CB 211). CB 219 describes, for example, a vagrant order or "bawdy paradise" to which people from every land and clerics of all rankings were invited—even "priests and their wives" (humorous because Catholic priests must swear an oath of celibacy). In this parody world, the rules of priesthood include sleeping in, eating heavy food and drinking rich wine, and regularly playing dice games. In fact, this outspoken revelry of living delights and freedom from moral obligations shows "an attitude towards life and the world that stands in stark contrast to the firmly established expectations of life in the Middle Ages."

The manuscript of the Carmina Burana (abbreviated CB) was scribed in 1230 by two different writers in an early gothic minuscule on 119 sheets of parchment. In the 14th century, a folio of free pages, cut of a slightly different size, was attached at the end of the text. The handwritten pages were bound into a small folder, called the Codex Buranus, in the Late Middle Ages. However, in the process of binding, the text was placed partially out of order, and some pages were most likely lost as well. The manuscript contains eight miniatures (a term for drawings in illuminated manuscripts): the wheel of fortune (which actually is an illustration from the songs CB 14-18, but was placed by the book binder as the cover), an imaginative forest, a pair of lovers, scenes from the story of Dido and Aeneas, a scene of drinking beer, and three scenes of playing games – dice, ludus duodecim scriptorum, and chess.

Composer Carl Orff selected portions (24) of Carmina Burana for what became his most popular work, a "scenic oratorio" designed for the stage as well as for concert performance. It was first performed in 1936. Orff adapted some of the original medieval music, but most of the score was of his own design. Orff's Carmina is divided into three parts framed by a prologue and an epilogue. The last chorus, Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi, is a counterpart of the first, suggesting the turn of Fortune's wheel, indifferent to good and bad alike. The first main section, Primo vere, evokes budding, blossoming spring with a sequence of fresh-sounding quasi-folk dances. Part Two is an inebriated scherzo in which the tenor impersonates a roasted cygnet, the Abbot of Cockaigne encourages intemperance, and a final chorus sets the world reeling with merry-making. Part Three contains sublimely beautiful love songs, leading to Blanzifor et Helena, a high-summer celebration of love's consummation. At this dramatic climax, Fate again intervenes, spinning us back to the starting point.

Most people today only know it through the sudden popularity of one of its movements, Fortuna, Imperatrix Mundi, or simply O Fortuna (Fortuna meaning Fortune in Latin, as well as a Roman goddess). The composition appears in numerous movies, TV programs, and even commercials. For instance, it was first used as a soundtrack for the 1981 film Excalibur and the 1991 film The Doors. So it has become a staple in popular culture, setting the mood for dramatic or cataclysmic situations.

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THE CARMINA GALLICA

The songs of the Carmina Gallica ("Songs of the French;" from Gallic or Gaul, the Roman province) don’t quite fit into the historical progress that took music from Latin church compositions to vernacular courtly love songs; they fall into genres—the dance-like rondellus, the conductus, the motet, the sequence, and some just designated as chansons. The songs are primarily from the 12th century. They were written by highly educated clerics for their own amusement or for that of a lord. Some of the texts lie right in between sacred and secular, as they seem to condense the sacred-secular mixes of the polytextual motet into a single unified form of expression. They are all over the map when it comes to subject matter. Some are long, involved, ambitious religious poems. Some point clearly to the tradition of courtly love; some meditate gloomily on death.

The chansons "Vitam duxi," "Sevit aure spiritus," and "Spoliatum flore partum" were by Pierre de Blois. The chanson "Sic mea fata" was by Hilaire d'Orléans. Both of these composers were students of Peter Abélard.