Family Matters

The scene is at the court of James I of Aragon in the mid-13th c., the place is the royal palace of Barcelona or any of the crown's other possessions, and the dramatis personae include the heir to the throne, prince Peire (future king Peire the Great), and the court's most famous troubadour, Cerverí de Girona (fl. 1259-85). Author of the largest corpus of any Occitan troubadour (114 poems), Cerverì distinguishes himself by the surprises and challenges he presents to his audience: an alba (the most openly erotic genre) to the Virgin Mary, the Cobla in sis lengatges (Cobla in Six Languages), the apparently nonsensical Vers estrayn. Cerverì borrows equally from the folk-inspired Galician-Portuguese poetry and from the French tradition, including the chanson de malmariée, where a young woman bemoans being sold off by her family to an old man (gilos, "Jealous") and separated from her youthful doulz amis, some even praying for the death of their husband. Both within that tradition and among Cerverì's three chansons de malmariée, the Gelosesca stands out as "especially determined" to lose her husband, using every "solution" (prayer, black magic, potion or experimenta).