Gauthier, Nancy, and Jean-Charles Picard, eds. Topographie chrétienne des cités de la Gaule: des
origines au milieu du VIIIe siècle. 8 vols. Paris: Boccard, 1986–90.
Geary, Patrick J. Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages. 2nd ed. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990.
Sivry, Louis de, and Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Champagnac. Dictionnaire géographique, historique,
descriptif, archéologique des pèlerinages anciens et modernes et des lieux de dévotion les plus
célèbres de l’univers. 2 vols. Paris: Migne, 1850–51.
Sumption, Jonathan. Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion. Totowa: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1975.
Turner, Edith and Victor. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological
Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.
PLAGUE
. See BLACK DEATH
PLANH/COMPLAINTE
. Dating from 1137 to 1343, over forty planhs, or Occitan funeral laments in lyric form,
have survived. Most of them are on the death of a powerful man, a few on the death of a
relative or friend of the poet, and a few on the death of his lady. The topoi of the genre
are ritualized in a tradition descending from the Latin planctus, but the grief that the
songs express need not be considered insincere. In some planhs, the poet grieves for the
loss of his patron, but he almost never praises the expected successor, as he might do if
his motivation were thoroughly materialistic. In other planhs, the poet’s grief is
disinterested, as when the nobleman Guilhem de Berguedà grieves generously for his
enemy Pons de Mataplana, or when Bertran de Born grieves for Henry, the Young King.
The practice of metrical imitation, by which one song was set to the tune and metrical
form of another (most often a canso, or love song), originated in the sirventes, or satire,
and spread to the planh but was never considered obligatory. The generic status of the
planh is ensured by its codification in the Doctrina de compondre dictatz (ca. 1290–
1300) and in the Leys d’Amors (1341).
The French complainte, unlike the planh, is not a lyric genre but a thematic one in
didactic or narrative form, written in nonlyric stanzas or in octosyllabic couplets and
often influenced by the Vers de la Mort of Hélinant de Froidmont (ca. 1193–97). The
complainte is attested from 1226 (Robert de Saincériaux on the death of Louis VIII)
through the anonymous Regrés de la mort saint Loys (1270), several poems by Rutebeuf,
and Alain Chartier’s lament for the death of his lady, among other texts; it continued to
be cultivated as late as the Grands Rhétoriqueurs.
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1400