Consistori de Barcelona


The Consistori de Barcelona was a literary academy founded in Barcelona by John the Hunter, King of Aragon and Count of Barcelona, in 1393 in imitation of the Consistori del Gay Saber founded in Toulouse in 1323. The poetry produced by and for the Consistori was heavily influenced by the troubadours. The Consistori's chief purpose was to promote "correct" styles and themes and discourage vices by awarding prizes in competition to poets who adhered to the "rules" of poetic composition. The names of few poets laureate have come down to us and despite some excellent descriptions of the Consistori's activities, associated persons and poems are obscure.

Prehistory and origins

At Pentecost, 31 May 1338, a contest was held at Lleida before Peter the Ceremonious, John's predecessor, at which those poems adjudged the best were given awards. A panel of judges was designated in advance by the king. It was to pass judgement super arte dictandi et faciendi pulcra carmina sive cantars: "on the art of speaking and composing beautiful songs, that is, cantars". The winning poets received a rosa d'or and piece of expensive golden satin called diasprell. With its floral prize, the 1338 contest emulated the jocs florals already being held in Toulouse and to be held eventually in Barcelona as well.
Much about this event, however, remains unknown: the language of composition was vernacular, but which vernacular is uncertain, and the names of the poets or any portions of their work have not survived. Nonetheless, Martí de Riquer presumes that similar festivals occurred in years prior and recurred in subsequent years, though there are no records. It need not be assumed that such contests took place in the royal presence; they may have been held by the great lords.
At Valencia on 20 February 1393, John the Hunter founded an annual festival to be celebrated in honour of the Virgin Mary on the day of Annunciation or the following Sunday at Barcelona. The festival included a vernacular poetry contest, modelled after those held in Toulouse, Paris, and other illustrious cities, and the poems submitted were judged by Jaume March II and Luys d'Averçó, entitled magistros et defensores of poetry.
The document of the king's foundation, which was written up by the scribe Bartomeu Sirvent, also mentions that the initiative for the festival had been March and Averçó's and that they had requested it of the king. The expertise of judges for the festival was also set out by the king, in Latin: gaya vel gaudiosa, et alio nomine inveniendi sciencie, that is, "gay and joyful, and by another name inventive science". The Latin terms gaya... sciencie and inveniendi sciencie were direct translations of the vernacular terms gay sauber and ciència de trobar.

Competitions

The first recorded contest held by the Consistori de Barcelona was held probably on 28 March 1395 with the king in attendance. He had only been in Barcelona since 25 March. This festival is known from a letter the king wrote, which he sent on 19 February 1396 recording the bella festa... a honor de la dita gaya ciència, the prizes for which were provided by the municipal government. There is no record of the names of the winners, the prizes, or their poems. The letter of 1396 was written in Catalan by Bernat Metge on behalf of the king and sent from Perpignan to Barcelona, foretelling the king's arrival for the festival and asking the city to commit some funds to it. Jaume March brought the letter before the Consell dels Cents Jurats sometime in the middle of march, but the timing was horrible. The Consell was intriguing against the king and the city had largely rejected his control. Then the Consell dels Trenta sent an embassy to John to report on el fet de la gaya sciència, but the city's response was que les dites joies no sien donades per la Ciutat and that was the end of the year's floral games.
John died two months later, having only held two of his planned annual festivals. The festival disappeared for two more years until 1 May 1398, when John's successor, Martin the Humane, agreed, from Zaragoza, to subsidise the Consistori's annual festival, to be held again on Pentecost, with forty Aragonese gold florins to cover the cost of the golden and silver prizes for the winners, to be chosen by mantenidors named by the king. On 12 August 1399 at Zaragoza, Martin renominated Jaume March and Luys d'Averçó as rectors, maintainers, and defenders of the Gaya Sciència de Barcelona. Martin's two acts do not refer to the previous efforts of King John and rather seem to treat the Consistori as a new royal foundation distinct from the municipally-run foundation of his predecessor. Martin's 1398 act also made mention of Toulouse and Paris in a lengthy preamble outlining the merits of the various sciences: arithmetic, astrology, dialectic, geometry, law, medicine, music, politics, strategy, composing, theology, etc. Under Martin a great festa was held in 1408 beneath the walls where the Mirador del rei Martí—a recent addition the royal palace complex—and the Palau del Lloctinent meet in Barcelona.
The Consistori lapsed with Martin's death and the political confusion leading up to the Compromise of Caspe prevented its activity, but on 17 March 1413 Ferdinand of Antequera, who succeeded Martin in accord with the Compromise, confirmed to the Consistori all that Martin had decreed in 1398, conceded to it the right to elect the four maintainers, and permitted it to meet at any time of the year other than the annual festival. The annual contest was confirmed to occur on 1 May, and Ferdinand became its greatest patron. His ties to Castile helped increase the accessibility of Catalan culture and was a catalyst for the first Castilian poetic treatise, the Arte de trovar.

Speeches of Felip de Malla

In February 1413, one month before Ferdinand's privilege, the Consistori held one of its best-recorded competitions at the Palau Reial Major. The opening speech of one of the maintainers and the declaration of the winner have both been preserved. Both of these speeches were transcribed in a Catalan liberally seasoned with classical and ecclesiastical Latin. Felip displays knowledge of classics, of Pindar, Alcaeus, Horace, Catullus, and Serenus Sammonicus. Not surprisingly from a master of theology, it is intensely religious:
Felip's speeches are interesting and very erudite, but he shows a penchant for Scholastic digressions and tolerated only religious poetry dedicated to God or the Virgin. Felip praises Ferdinand, who was apparently present, for lending prestige to the Consistori. He then presents the theme. In light of the fact that Ferdinand is involved in a war with the James II, Count of Urgell, Felip asks for short, sharp pieces about war, namely, for a sirventes. Felip's closing speech is similar in style to his opening, being filled with Latin references and lengthy commentary, but absent is the mention of the winner's name or poem. Probably the speech was written in advance of the final judgement before a winner was known.

Description of Enrique de Villena

One of the best descriptions of the Consistori de Barcelona is found in the Arte de trovar of the Castilian writer Enrique de Villena, who was at Barcelona in 1408. Though written in 1423, it probably describes the Consistori during the era of Martin the Humane as well. Enrique's account of the foundation of the Consistori, however, is a jumble of historical events that took places decades and almost centuries apart:
Enrique is the sole authority for the statement that John the Hunter sent an embassy to the King of France, Charles VI, evidently before 1393, to request that he send two men from his Consistori at Toulouse to found one at Barcelona. According to Jerónimo Zurita in his Indices rerum ab Aragoniae regibus gestarum, in 1388 an embassy was sent to France ut vernaculae linguae celebres poëtae in Hispaniam ex Narbonensis provinciae scholis traducerentur: & studia poëtices, quam gaiam scientiam vocabant, instituerentur. His vero, quorum ingenium in eo artificio elucere videbatur, magna praemia, industriae, & honoris insignia, monumentaque laudis esse constituta. The story is not implausible, however, and may explain the obscure references to Paris in the acts of John and Martin. It is also plausible that two scholars left Toulouse with the purpose of founding a second academy at Barcelona, considering the history of Occitan literature in Catalonia.
According to Enrique, who is the only source for the organisational structure of the Consistori, it was run by four mantenidors: a knight, a master of theology, a master of laws, and an honourable citizen. Since all other existing documentation shows John and Martin naming two mantenidors, it follows that Ferdinand of Antequera, under whom Enrique was writing, raised it to four. At one point Enrique seems also to say that prizes were given out each month, but this may represent a corruption in the manuscript and should perhaps refer to each year. According to Enrique, the "collegio de Barcelona" lapsed after the death of Martin in 1410. The sixteenth-century Toledan Álvar Gómez de Castro glossed the Arte de trobar manuscript with the fact that Enrique came into the service of Ferdinand after his election to succeed Martin in 1412 that he procuró la reformación del consistorio y señaláronle por el principal d'ellos. Enrique held a post in the Consistori similar to that of a president, but it is possible that he exaggerated his own importance.
Enrique described the festas of the Gay Science as occurring in two sessions, perhaps on two separate days. At the first session, one of the mantenidors gives a lecture, then the poets recited their work de la materia a ellos asignada. The themes were algunas vezes loores de Santa María, otras de armas, otras de amores e de buenas costumbres: sometimes the praises of the Virgin Mary, other times of arms, other times of love and good customs. These three themes were understand by the Romantics as those of faith, patriotism, and love.
After the first session, the poems were put into writing and taken by the mantenidors for secret deliberations, where the poems were examined for fidelity to the rules and their faults were carefully enumerated. Stress was laid upon the identification of vicis in the esteemed llibres de l'art, the treatises carried by the mantenidors. The second session was held after the judgement was passed and there the winner was declared and the prizes awarded.

Poetic content and style

The isolation and their classicism of the Consistoris cut them off from the literary movements giving life to other vernaculars, such as the dolce stil novo and the Renaissance in Italian and the work of Ausias March associated with the zenith of medieval Catalan. Martín de Riquer is highly critical of the negative influence of the Toulousain academy on Catalan poetry through the exportation occitanisms and support of an outmoded literary language. For its thematically limited, narrow conception of art and imposing rules for form and content, he compares it to French neoclassicism and its "tyranny of the monotonous alexandrine". All these bad influences continued their negative effect from Barcelona, where the rhetorical style of Toulouse was copied. The picture of judges marking of "vices" in the margins of the poems submitted for competition is emblematic of the "tyranny" the rules held over creativity. In these respects the Consistori was much like a medieval university. It was also more bourgeois, being essentially created by citizens for citizens, with their tastes and their concerns in mind. The essential difference between the activities and the poetry of the Consistori and that of the earlier troubadorus is that the latter composed in a courtly environment and share courtly tastes and concerns. In this respect the movement mirrored that of the dolce stil novo in Italy, but it was less successful. The failure of the city of Barcelona to support the Consistori and its falling back on royal patronage in 1396 best exemplifies the problems of consciously continuing the troubadour tradition in an atmosphere that was not made for it.
Few poems have survived from the Consistori's contests, preserved in chansonniers with other troubadour songs. The Cançoner dels Masdovelles is one of the most important songbooks, yet only three songs can be connected to the Consistori de Barcelona with any certainty. Gilabert de Próxita wrote Le souvenirs qu'amors fina me porta, a secular song on love, in the manner of the troubadours. According to its forty-second line, it was presented al novell consistori, probably the re-creation of Martin the Humane. Andreu Febrer composed Sobre.l pus naut element de tots quatre, an astrological and mythological panegyric for an unnamed queen of Sicily. It alludes to the cossistori, but this may be a reference to some competition held in Sicily. Another troubadour with surviving work presented at Barcelona is Guillem de Masdovelles, who also competed at Toulouse. His canso of love Pus li prat son de verdura guarnit was "coronada" the winner at a contest in Barcelona. Guillem's work is written in an Occitan sprinkled with catalanisms and Andreu's in Catalan with occitanisms. Apparently, the language of the poetry presented at the Catalan consistori was not constant. Guillem's nephew, Joan Berenguer de Masdovelles, did translate his uncle's winning poem from llemoví into Catalan. Joan Berenguer's translations of his uncle's Occitan works demonstrates the conscious use of a literary idiom as opposed to the language of conversation and the consciously archaic nature of occitanisms in Catalan writing.

Legacy and influence

The Consistori of Barcelona is generally considered a transitional period in Catalan literature, away from the prestigious treatment of Occitan and the pervasiveness of occitanisms and towards an independent Catalan poetry. In many respects it is the last phase of medieval literature and of the troubadours, opening the way to what can be considered Renaissance literature in Catalan. The Consistori, or more specifically the Gay Science that it fostered in the Iberian peninsula, extended its influence slowly over Castile and Portugal to the west. Enrique de Villena's Castilian Arte de trovar was probably written with the intention of exhorting its dedicatee, the Marqués de Santillana, to found and patronise a Consistori in Castile modelled after the Barcelonan example:
Somehow anyway the Marqués did absorb the concept of the Gay Science, for he wrote to Duke Pedro of Coimbra a famous letter, Prohemio e carta, which extols the divinely inspired, charismatic yet frenetic nature of the gaya sçiençia. This conception of the troubadours' art was fundamentally altered by the infusion of neoplatonism that came with the Renaissance and Italian influence. Nonetheless, Spanish poetry of the fifteenth century, more so than anywhere else, sought to emulate classic Occitan poetry. Alfonso the Magnanimous in particular, despite his classicism, brought a distinctly medieval, Occitan, and troubadour-esque poetry to Naples with his 1443 conquest. This Spanish literary tradition at Naples remained outside Renaissance currents. In Spain, troubadour scholarship got off to a quick start in the sixteenth century, but the influence of the Consistori can hardly be spoken of past the mid-fifteenth century.

List of known works