This Occitan romance, sometimes also referred to as Las Novas de Guilhem de Nevers, was probably composed after 1263. Just over 8, 000 lines of it survive in a single manuscript whose beginning and end are lost. A dedicatory passage suggests the author's name was Bernardet, writing in the service of a lord of Alga in the Rouergue. Although composed in the extreme south of Occitania, the romance is set in northern France. The Flemish heroine, Flamenca, is married to a count of Bourbon who jealously locks her up, allowing her out only to church and to the spa baths. She is eventually seduced by another northerner, Guilhem de Nevers, who ingeniously poses as cleric. He whispers two syllables to her each time she comes to church, and arranges to meet her at the baths, where she ‘heals’ his lovesickness and vice versa. At the end of the surviving text Flamenca has persuaded her husband to trust her, and she and Guilhem carry on their affair under his nose without his realizing it. Guilhem's two-syllable messages combine with Flamenca's two-syllable replies to construct five lines of octosyllables strongly reminiscent of those lyrics of Peire Rogier that represent an inner dialogue. Indeed, at every turn the behaviour of the lovers recalls the poetry of 12th-c. troubadours. Multiply ironic, a work of extraordinary wit and poise, the romance seems to be offering a wry look at Occitan culture from the perspective of those who felt cut off from its heyday by the victory of the northern French in the Albigensian Crusade [see Cathars].
[Sarah Kay]
