Orchards of Power: The Importance of Words Well Spoken in Twelfth-Century Occitania
Cover Image of 'Interfaces,' Issue #6: Merete Barker, 'From Another World,' 2014, acrylic on canvas, 195 x 300 cm – By kind permission of the Artist – www.meretebarker.com
PDF

Keywords

Occitan
Latin
diglossia
triglossia
courtly culture

How to Cite

Rüdiger, J. (2019). Orchards of Power: The Importance of Words Well Spoken in Twelfth-Century Occitania. Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures, (6), 65–95. https://doi.org/10.13130/interfaces-06-04
Received 2018-03-10
Accepted 2020-01-02
Published 2019-12-07

Abstract

Occitan, now a regional language of France, has long been recognized as one of the most important vernaculars of the Medieval West – both for being the language of the troubadours and for being the first Romance (or Neo-Latin) language to develop a fully-fledged scripta. This article argues that unlike other regions, twelfth-century Occitania had not diglossia (learned Latin/vernacular) but triglossia. A courtly sociolect, written and spoken, vied with and even outdid Latin in large sectors of cultural production. Under particular circumstances, courtly culture, including courtly love, developed into a political and economic code whose relevance went far beyond the stylization of elite sociability with which French or German courtliness is often associated. The political culture which developed in Languedoc was one of the factors why the Albigensian Crusade (1209–29) was an
unusually violent and consequential period of warfare.

https://doi.org/10.13130/interfaces-06-04
PDF

Except where otherwise noted, the content of this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Authors retain copyright of their work. The CC BY-SA 4.0 licence allows readers to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, as long as the original author is credited and as long as any works that are derived from the original are distributed under the same terms.

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...