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LITERATURE OF THE MIDDLE AGES
D
uring the Middle Ages, Catalan witnessed a considerable written output, both
literary and merely utilitarian. In this latter category, we can find all types of
documents from as early as the 12th
century, just as in other European languages
at the time. These include:
• Private: Agreements, donations, wills, complaints, personal letters, letters of
challenge, diaries;
• Public: Royal documents, books containing divisions of estates at the
expense of the autochthonous Muslims, speeches from the Courts, or parliaments
(general ones from the Crown or particular ones from Catalonia,
Valencia and Sardinia);
• Commercial: Inventories, contracts, tariffs, loan and maritime insurance policies,
bills of exchange;
• Legal: Usatges de Barcelona (c. 1300; The Usatges of Barcelona: The Fundamental
Law of Catalonia, 1994), Costums de Tortosa (1272; another collection
of legal regulations), Furs de València (laws and privileges of the
kingdom; 13th
century), Llibre del Consolat de Mar (1385; Consulate of the
Sea, 1975), a variety of ordinances;
• Judicial: Accusations, interrogations, summaries and rulings from the courts;
• Diplomatic: International treaties, capitulations;
• Linguistic: Glossaries and vocabularies, treatises on correct language use;
• Scientific: Medical books, veterinary books, books on the Natural Sciences, etc.;
• Translations: Literary, religious, philosophical, scientific, humanistic, etc.
However, apart from the religious oratory of the Homilies d’Organyà (Homilies of
Organyà, from around 1200), which is the first text in Catalan of a certain length after
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the two brief excerpts conserved from the Liber iudiciorum (c. 1150, c. 1140/80), during
the 13th
and 14th
centuries some of the greatest works of history were written in
Catalan (the “Four Great Chronicles”, namely: Llibre dels feits [The Chronicle of James I,
1883; Book of the Deeds of James I of Aragon, 2003], the Crònica de Bernat Desclot
[Chronicle of the Reign of King Pedro III of Aragon, 1928], the Crònica de Ramon
Muntaner [Muntaner’s Chronicle, 1980], and the Crònica de Pere el Cerimoniós
[Chronicle of Peter IV of Aragon, 1980]). However, it is primarily with Ramon Llull
(1232-1316; traditionally known in English as Raymond Lully or Lull) when the first
great landmarks in Catalan literature appear. A first-generation Majorcan (the son of
colonists hailing from Barcelona), this great yet controversial scholar, bold missionary
and indefatigable traveller wrote a monumental number of works (approximately 300)
in Catalan, Latin and Arabic which encompass a wide range of subjects in an array
of literary genres. In Catalan, his most noteworthy writings include his novels Llibre
Ramon Llull, left, also known in English as Raymond Lully or Lull (1232-1316), according to an
illustration from the 1505 Barcelona edition of his Arbor Scientiae. This restless and indefatigable
Majorcan monk was author of a huge oeuvre in Catalan, Latin and Arabic and is regarded as the
father of literary prose in Catalan.
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d’Evast e Blaquerna (Blanquerna, 1925, passim), and Fèlix o Llibre de meravelles
(Felix or Book of Wonders). These two works also include, respectively, the celebrated
Llibre d’amic e amat (The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, 1923, c. 1995),
a treatise in a mystical tone divided into as many versicles as there are days in the
year and bearing influences from many sources, including the Bible’s Song of Songs;
and the political-social fable Llibre de les bèsties (The Book of the Beasts, 1927,
1978). Also noteworthy is his Arbre de ciència (Arbor Scientiae), a type of encyclopaedia
of the contemporary knowledge from his vantage point. The Doctor Illuminatus,
as Llull was also known, introduced into Catalan not only a noteworthy corpus
of educated terms with Latin roots, but also, starting from him, the language and
those who cultivated it as a literary language had a flexible, rich model of prose
appropriate for narrative, science and philosophy. Llull, in short, along with a few
other authors from his day, such as Dante and Eckhart, was one of the first writers in
Europe that as early as the 13th
century spoke about these realms of knowledge,
which until then had been the preserve of Latin, in a common language.
Also around that time, the language of the government swiftly crystallised into a
homogeneous and common model of Catalan for the entire linguistic domain. Those
who wielded the pen in Barcelona, Valencia or Majorca, for either practical or literary
purposes, spoke and wrote in the language of their region, yet they made an effort to
avoid excessively prominent local expressions that could make it difficult for their
texts to the understood in other Catalan-speaking regions. To accomplish this, they
imitated – while at the same time they helped to create – the language of prestigious
institutions and personalities, first of all that of the King’s Court, that is, the language
of the Crown, its entourage and its governing bodies.
Among the latter two, the Royal Chancellery, the body charged with drafting and
issuing royal decisions in written form, was of key importance. Its documents presented
a Catalan without dialect fissures, elegant and especially prestigious as they
had the King as their signatory. This model of language, which has been called the
King’s Catalan, inspired by the name of the traditional English linguistic model,
reached the most far-flung corners of the Crown where Catalan was spoken. What is
more, a multiplying effect developed, which in turn served as a reputable model for
other minor civil servants and scribes scattered throughout the entire Catalan-speaking
area, including courts of justice, local institutions and notaries. Precisely one of
the causes that contributed to the disappearance of this prestigious, vital model
of unified or “standard” language came from the gradual absorption of the Chancellery
into other bodies situated in Castile starting at the end of the 15th
century.
In the midst of the growing splendour of the Catalan language and prose literature,
only the language of poetry rose as an exception: during the Middle Ages the
Catalan, Valencian and Majorcan poets who composed did so in Provençal, or later
in a conventional language that was a hybrid of Provençal and Catalan, in propor-
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tions that varied according to each author and even according to different manuscripts
that have reached us from the same author. Prominent among these authors
are the brothers Pere (1336/37-1413) and Jaume (1334/35-1410) March, and Jordi
de Sant Jordi (c. 1395-1424). The massive use of Provençal, or Old Occitan, in poetry
was mainly due to the enormous literary prestige that the troubadours from southern
France (but also those from Northern Catalonia and Italy who wrote in Occitan)
had conferred on this language, and it was further fostered by its clear similarity with
Catalan as well as by the close ties and feudal alliances between the County of
Barcelona, starting in the 11th
century, and later the Crown of Aragon, and Languedoc
and Provence until the battle of Muret (1213). (The convention of composing in Old
Occitan could be compared today to the numerous pop music bands from all over the
world that, though English may not be their native language, nonetheless use it in
their songs.) This state of affairs was maintained until the first third of the 15th
century,
when the first body of poetry entirely in Catalan appeared, thanks to the formidable
literary figure of the Valencian Ausias March, son and nephew, respectively, of
the aforementioned Pere and Jaume March – both of them, as the vast majority of NeoValencians,
the sons of migrated Catalan colonists.
With the 14th
century works by Francesc Eiximenis, a Franciscan from Gerona who
lived in Valencia; by Saint Vincent Ferrer, a Valencian Dominican; and by the royal civil
servant from Barcelona, Bernat Metge, we enter into the golden age of Catalan literature,
which would last until the end of the 15th
century. The works by Eiximenis (1327/32-
1409), who studied in Oxford and Toulouse, were widely disseminated during his time
and were translated not only to Latin but also to Spanish, French and Dutch. His memory
and works are claimed both by Catalans and Valencians. Apart from the literary value
of his works, his oeuvre is enormously important for learning about and documenting
mediaeval daily life. With Lo crestià (The Christian), an unfinished work, he planned an
enormous encyclopaedic compendium of all the knowledge of his time. He also wrote
didactic and religious works, including the Llibre dels àngles (Book of Angels), an amusing
Llibre de les dones (Book of Women) and a Vita Christi (Life of Christ). For his part,
Vicent Ferrer (1350-1419), canonised by the Roman Catholic Church in 1458, was a
highly educated religious preacher who employed an apocalyptic tone, in addition to
being a key figure in both ending the Great Western Schism (1378-1417) and resolving
the crisis of succession in the Crown of Aragon that arose as a result of the 1410 death
of Martin I the Human of Aragon, the last king from the dynasty of the Counts of
Barcelona (Compromise of Caspe, Aragon, 1412). His almost three hundred sermons
in Catalan (although he also preached in Latin and is widely remembered even today
for his talent with languages) were compiled in situ by stenographers from his own retinue
and reflect, albeit palely, the spectacle his sermons must have been, which spread
throughout the Crown of Aragon, the rest of the Iberian peninsula, the Netherlands,
Switzerland, Italy and France, where he died and is buried (in Vannes, Bretagne).
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Bernat Metge (1340/46-1413), raised in the educated milieu of the Royal Chancellery, is
best known as the author of Lo somni (The Dream, 2002). This dialogue in apologia
mode, in a tone somewhere between irony and sarcasm in the classical style of Cicero,
which features the author himself as the main character, grapples with a variety of issues
ranging from personal to political and theological. His prose, undoubtedly some of the
most elegant in Catalan literature from any age, also shows solid knowledge of authors
such as Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Also from this period are the
Majorcan author Anselm Turmeda and Arnau de Vilanova, the latter most likely from
Valencia. Turmeda (c. 1350-c. 1430) was also a moralistic writer. Originally a Franciscan,
he abjured his faith and converted to Islam – to this day his tomb is still venerated
in the city of Tunis. A satirical author of both verse and prose, his most important work
in the latter genre is the Disputa de l’ase (The Ass’s Dispute), which has come down to
us only in its French translation (Paris, 1544). Arnau de Vilanova (1230/40-1331), a
physician to popes and kings, wrote almost seventy books in Catalan and Latin, and is
known not only for his works of medicine and alchemy but also, as a religious reformer,
for his apocalyptic prophecies, which were not always entirely orthodox. His most important
work of this in Catalan is the Raonament d’Avinyó (Reasoning of Avignon).
Given the sizeable number of Valencian authors writing in Catalan which emerged
in the 15th
century, it should be said that there have been not unjustified proposals
to label this the “Valencian century” of Catalan literature. Also during the middle
of this century was when the chivalric novel Curial e Güelfa (Curial and Guelfa, 1982)
was written by an anonymous author. Nevertheless, it is mainly known for being the
century which ushered in the poetic works of Ausias March and the novel Tirant lo
Blanc by his brother-in-law, Joanot Martorell, both members of the small Valencian
nobility.
Ausias March (1400-1459), son and nephew of two renowned Valencian poets
who wrote in Provençal, as mentioned above, is perhaps the finest poet in Europe
from the time of Geoffrey Chaucer to François Villon. Just as Llull can be regarded
as the father of Catalan literary prose, March was the first writer to choose to use
Catalan for poetry. As a classical author of Catalan literature, his almost 10,000 verses,
which are introspective, not always easy and full of striking images, have never
ceased to be read and to influence Catalan poets from all subsequent ages. An educated
layman, not only was he familiar with the literary tradition of the Provençal troubadours,
one can also discern in his works echoes of Aristotle, Saint Thomas
Aquinas, Dante and Petrarch. His 127 poems, probably composed as of 1427, have
traditionally been grouped into four subject-based divisions, currently under revision:
the Cants d’amor (Songs of Love), the Cants de mort (Death Songs), the Cants
morals (Moral Songs) and, finally, his great Cant espiritual (Spiritual Song). [Selected
Poems, 1986; A Key Anthology, 1992; Ausiàs March: Verse Translations of Thirty
Poems, 2006.]
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Joanot Martorell (1410/11-1465) is the author of Tirant lo Blanc. Originally published
in 1490; it was published in English as Tirant lo Blanc in 1984, and Tirant lo
Blanc Complete in 1993 [1974]. This work has been regarded by some critics as the
first great modern novel in European literature. It is an extraordinary narration that
resolves around the trials and tribulations of its main character, the errant knight
Tirant lo Blanc, through England, Sicily, Rhodes, North Africa and primarily the
Byzantine Empire, where he will meet and fall in love with Carmesina, the very young
daughter of the emperor. Tirant lo Blanc has been described by the Peruvian author
Mario Vargas Llosa as a “total” novel, which he views as a novel that is at once chivalrous,
realistic, fantastical, humorous, historical, military, social, erotic and psychological
– yet none of these things exclusively. The merits of the novel were acknowledged
and extolled by Cervantes, who in Don Quixote (chapter 6 of part I), held
Spanish translation (1560) of a selection of poems by Ausias March (1400-1459), “a Valencian
knight from the Catalan nation”, as declared on this cover page, a work by the Portuguese writer
Jorge de Montemayor (or Montemor). March is the greatest poet of classical Catalan literature.
Within European mediaeval literature, his oeuvre is regarded as the greatest from the time of
Chaucer and Villon.
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nothing back when he described it as “the best book in the world”. Evidence of its
success and literary qualities can be found in the early translations into and printing
runs in Spanish (1511), Italian (1513) and French (1737?), which thus introduced the
book, as well as Cervantes, to eminences as wide-ranging as Ariosto, Rousseau and
Catherine the Great of Russia. Also, one episode of the novel inspired, indirectly via
Ariosto, the plot of Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1598) by Shakespeare. Likewise,
chapters 85-97 of Tirant are the oldest testimony to the legendary creation of the
Order of the Garter, the most distinguished of the knights’ orders in England, as well
as of the oldest version of its famous motto: Honi soit qui mal y pense (‘Shame to him
who thinks ill of it’). Currently, Tirant has been translated into more than a dozen languages,
including the most widely-spoken western languages as well as others such
as Chinese, Finnish, Swedish, Dutch and Romanian.
A stamp issued by the Spanish Post Office commemorating the fifth centenary of the publication
of Tirant lo Blanc (1490). This novel by the Valencian nobleman Joanot Martorell (1410/11-1465),
brother-in-law of the poet Ausias March, was warmly praised by Cervantes as the “best book in the
world” (Don Quixote, part I, chapter 6). Widely regarded as one of the first novels in modern western
literature, it has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
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Other natives of Valencia include the physician Jaume Roig (1434-1478), author
of L’Espill o Llibre de les dones (The Mirror or the Book of Women), a jocose and antifemale
autobiography of an old man, made up of 16,000 very brief four-syllable lines
in a colloquial tone; the abbess Isabel de Villena (1430-1490), author of a popular
and emotional Vita Christi (Life of Christ); and the nobleman Joan Roís de Corella
(1435-1497), who wrote on religious and profane topics and bears the reputation as
the best poet in Catalan from the second half of the 15th
century, as well as also being
a prolific prose writer in an early baroque style. The works of this latter author are
regarded by many scholars as the swan’s song of classical Catalan literature. Likewise,
in 1474 the first known book in Catalan was printed in the city of Valencia: Les
trobes en llaors de la Verge Maria (Songs in Praise of the Virgin Mary). However, this
book, which compiles compositions by some forty authors who had submitted their
works to a poetry contest, is more esteemed for its historical and cultural interest (it
is probably the first printed book in the Iberian peninsula) than for its literary value.
Finally, the Valencians were also responsible for the now-lost translation and printing
of the entire Bible (in 1478) into Catalan by Bonifaci Ferrer (brother of Saint Vincent),
but most copies of which were burnt by order of the Inquisition (we recall that biblical
translation into “vulgar” languages was forbidden by the Roman Catholic Church).