FIG. 4-1 Medieval lutenist, from an illumination in a thirteenth-century manuscript now at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence,
Italy. The instrument he is playing entered Europe as war booty from the Crusades.
But secrecy and illegitimacy should not be confused with licentiousness. The conventions of fin’
amors heightened the unavailability of the lady as actual lover and made her an object not of lust but of
veneration. The canso was thus essentially a devotional song, a song of worship—another link with the
sacred sphere, especially with the burgeoning liturgy of the Blessed Virgin. Veneration of the lady, like
veneration of Mary, promoted not license or sensuality but rather the sublimation of amorous desire in
charity, self-mortification, and acts of virtue. It was another bond of honor, hence a quintessentially feudal
attitude.
MINSTRELS
In Bernart’s case it was easy enough to feel outranked by the lady: like many of the later troubadours, he
was a commoner—according to various traditions the son of the baker or the furnace stoker in the castle
of Ventadorn, near Poitiers—who rose to prominence, and received noble patronage, strictly on his merits
as a poet. (Bernart’s patron was Eleanor of Aquitaine herself, with whom he traveled to France after her
first marriage, and to England after her second, thus spreading his art abroad.) While the art of the
troubadours was a quintessentially aristocratic art, an art of the castle, it was not an art practiced only by
aristocrats. Rather, whoever the actual practitioner may have been, it was an art cultivated and patronized
by aristocrats and expressive of their outlook.