Na Maria: Courtliness and Marian Devotion in Old Occitan Lyric

Summary

When I undertook a doctoral dissertation under the direction of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, a work that would become my first book, I had observed that the mere mention of the Virgin Mary or of Marian song elicited flat responses from critics, both alive and long gone. According to them, it was a foregone conclusion and therefore the end of analysis to say that Marian song in Old French was merely the product of substituting the Virgin Mary for the Lady of secular courtly song. Bruckner herself took on a similar problem of “flattening out” in her 1986 article, “Jaufré Rudel and Lyric Reception: The Problem of Abusive Generalization”:

Lured by the enigma of Jaufré's amor de lonh, many scholars have sought to explain or identify that elusive love and decipher (or invent) some satisfactory narrative that will account for, order, and classify the six poems of his corpus into a unified structure. The trouble is, such unity usually comes at the price of flattening out our appreciation of Jaufré's poetic variety, since most of these critical efforts, from the vida on, focus on the two poems of far-off love and consider the other songs as either buildup to or distraction from the poetic heights of amor de lonh.