This year, the Old Occitan Literature Workshop offered a space for beginners and returning readers of Old Occitan to get together and read poetry in Old Occitan.
For those interested on the history of medieval vernacular poetry, Old Occitan proves essential. The language which I am calling Occitan is sometimes known as Southern Gallo-Romance, or referred to by names of regional varieties, such as Provençal. This language continues to be spoken in communities across Catalonia, Southern France and certain parts of Northern Italy.
In medieval Europe, poetry produced in this language proved foundational. Occitan became so well known as a language of poetry that poets working in Catalonia and Italy adopted it as their language of song. Occitan was so widely read and used that it came to inform poetry in numerous other languages, including German, French, and Italian.
Given the range of Old Occitan’s cultural influence, for students of medieval poetry, learning more about this language and its literary tradition proves vital, but it is often difficult to find spaces in which to read these texts with others. That’s where the Old Occitan Literature Workshop comes in.
The Workshop ran for two terms. In the first term, we investigated lyric poetry from well-known medieval troubadours, and read the semi-fictional prose biographies of their lives, known as vidas. These prose texts offer a useful training ground for beginners, as their syntax is unaffected by meter or rhyme, and often give details of the poets’ entertaining antics. The vidas also provide a sense of the geography of the tradition, detailing the poet’s travels and the patrons they worked for. When possible, we workshopped translations that members were developing for their research.
In the second term, we investigated the text known variously as the Chanson de Sainte Foy, or the Canço di Santa Fe. Although not as widely read as troubadour poetry, this early vernacular poem derives from earlier Latin sources about the life of Saint Faith, a young martyr whose remains were interred in southern France, first at Agen, and then at Conques. Linguistically, the text proves challenging, as it records a moment when Old Catalan and Old Occitan were extremely similar, or arguably indistinguishable, on a literary level. The poem offers a glimpse into how vernacular literature in the 1000s conceptualized late Antiquity and represented the figure of the young woman saint.
Next year, the Workshop will not be running, but the Old Occitan community in Oxford continues to go from strength to strength. Colleagues in linguistics have also organized their own reading group and organized an Old Occitan Study Day. The future looks bright for Old Occitan Studies at Oxford.
