Every court boasted its poets, hospitably
received and loaded with presents; the great ones of the earth were
beginning to exercise that patronage of art and letters which in the
Renascence reached such extravagant proportions. Every distinguished
poet employed salaried musicians, the joglars (jongleurs), who wandered
from court to court, singing their masters' new songs. Others again, the
comtaires, related romances of love and adventure, gathering round them
a rapt throng of lords and ladies. Courtly manners and lofty principles
quickly became the recognised ideal; the man who was satisfied with the
pleasures of the senses was held in contempt; the greatest reproach was
"vilania"; in the "Yvain" of the French epic poet Chrestien de Troyes,
this universal feeling is thus expressed:
A courtier counts though he be dead,
More than a rustic stout and red.
Dante and his circle, as well as the best of the troubadours,
substituted for the "cortois" of the superficial Chrestien the "cor
gentil," the noble heart, which they accounted more precious than rank
and wealth and power.
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