Abstract
The monograph is focused on the troubadour manuscript R (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, français 22543), written somewhere around Toulouse in the first decades of the 14th century, and attempts at reading it as a "book in progress". The manuscript, the second most extensive witness to the troubadour tradition, contains more than one thousand items - not only refined loves songs (cansos), but also sirventeis dealing with social ills, various didactic pieces in verse and prose, or narratives about particular troubadours (vidas and razos).
The main thesis of the monograph states that the R nevertheless offers a uniting line strong enough to connect the mutually incompatible poetic utterances in a coherent whole thanks to the readable structure of its introductory part in which the tradition gradually crystallizes in the dialogue of poets that follows appearance of Marcabru, portrayed as the first troubadour ever, and leads to the undisputable master of trobar, Giraut de Borneill. The main topic of this dialogue (initiated by Marcabru's famous Lavador) is safety of poets that use unreliable and at times objectionable words in a courtly environment saturated with worldly power.
From the start of Marcabru's corpus in R, especially in his poems Dirai vos en mon lati and L'autrier jost una sebissa, it gradually becomes evident that the safe way of delivering poetic speech has to be conceived as a peculiar type of play. In the first chapter, the monograph explores various concepts of game that stem from Johan Huizinga's description of play as an activity whose space-time is inscribed into a "magic circle" allowing for potentially infinite repetition of the act of playing.
In addition to a close reading of Huizinga's Homo ludens the most focus is devoted to Eugen Fink's vision of play as one of the five of basic phenomena of human being-in-the-world (Grundphänomene) that in a unique way allows players to temporally forget the time that runs towards death, and the notion of game as a phenomenon that is naturally split in the core and allows the players to immerse themselves and to reflect upon this activity at the same time, as presented by Jacques Henriot. As a result, the empty border area that encircles the space-time of Huizingian play is moved inside and made into the very life-giving core of every ludic activity.
Then, various kinds of danger that the courtly poets strive to limit and avoid when they pose as players (as is the case with Marcabru, the so called "Count of Poitiers" and many others) are explored. It is shown that not only behind their poetic utterances but also deep in the modern theoretical and historical discourse (exemplified by Gaston Paris, D.
W. Robertson and Jacques Lacan) lies an image of all-powerful female figure able to confer a sense on a male voice or withdraw it.
This discussion sets the stage for inquiry into the manuscript proper that starts with a biography of Giraut de Borneill. This narrative sets an etalon of poetic mastery, whose protagonist is able to live in the courtly milieu without being exposed to the pain that usually goes hand in hand with courtly refined and unfulfilled love, and ends with the first series of Giraut's poetry, in which a reader witnesses the invention of canso as a ultimate courtly genre (connected explicitly with Giraut in the vida of Peire d'Alvergne).
In contrast with earlier versions of courtly poetic games proposed and condemned in R by Marcabru and Bertran de Born, the canso constructed as a self-confessed fiction in which the man's successful understanding of the world depends on the lady's wish and his own will to submit to it. This internal split resembles Henriot's notion of game and as such it enables the reader to see, how the paradoxical nature of "courtly love" determines not only the content of poems but also their contextual placement in the heterogeneous manuscript.