French Language & Literature: Occitan Studies

The core collections for French language and literature represent at a fairly high level all genres and periods starting with the middle ages that serve the research interests of faculty and students in French graduate and undergraduate programs. They have historically emphasized literary production in the language’s homeland (i.e., France, as well as parts of Belgium and Switzerland), but Francophone literary production from Asia, Africa, and the Americas are also included in modern decades in addition to European authors. A small part of Penn’s collecting has been in languages related to French, sometimes viewed as dialects, more accurately as competitors for linguistic preeminence. The most significant example is Occitan, which has in recent years been collected at a more intensive level because of faculty interest.

Occitan is a Romance language closely related to Catalan, and has some hundreds of thousands speakers in southern France, as well as smaller numbers in parts of Spain (specifically Catalonia, where it is an official language) and Italy. Its presence in collections that value western European literature is explained by the historical importance of medieval European troubadour poetry, which was largely written in the Provençal variant of Occitan, which was the language of what is now southern France, the region of Languedoc, or Occitania. This was the literature of courtly love that influenced the growth of lyric poetry in other European languages. At that time the language was understood throughout most of educated Europe, the maternal language of the English queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, and her sons kings Richard (who wrote troubadour poetry) and John.

The core of this collection are troubadour texts and musical recordings (e.g., see Nuits occitanes : troubadours' songs, Nouvelle anthologie de la lyrique occitane du Moyen Age, initiation à la langue et à la poésie des troubadours, Chansons d'amour des troubadours : une anthologie texte et musique, orLa Tròba Vol. 2 / : anthologie chantée des troubadours : XIIème et XIIIème siècles. To see most of what the library holds of the troubadour literature, use a Find It search in the catalog of “(poetry provencal) OR (songs provencal) OR (literature provencal),” which produces a result of over 900 items, and can then be limited to English, French, or other languages. These will include, in addition to translated texts, music, and indexes, critical and historical work on the literature.  

Scholars stay current with Occitan Studies through the online Tenso: Journal of the Société Guilhem IX, which “publishes articles on any aspect of Occitan studies, including literature, language, linguistics, and music, and prints scholarly essays, critical editions, translations, original verse in Occitan, book reviews, announcements, and bibliographical information.” English is the primary language of the journal, but it also accepts contributions in French, Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, Italian, and German.

Among  famous old Occitan works are the Boecis,  a 258-line-long poem written entirely in the Limousin dialect of Occitan between the year 1000 and 1030 and inspired by Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy; the Waldensian (an Occitan dialect) La Noble leçon, the Romance of Flamenca (13th century), Blandin de Cornoalha, and the Song of the Albigensian Crusade (1213–1219?).

French government oppression of Occitan began with the medieval monarchy, was a piece of the crusade against the largely Occitan speaking Albigensians, and was intensified under the centralizing tendencies of the French Revolution. There was a literary revival of the language in the late 19^th century, and Frédéric Mistral, author and lexicographer of the Provençal language, won the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature. Other celebrated Occitan writers include Gabriel Azaïs (1805-1888) and the mid-20^th century poet Jeanne Barthès, who encouraged  Occitan literary works through her magazine Trencavel from 1937 to 1943. More recent writers, such as Jean Boudou (Joan Bodon, 1920-1975), found wider audiences with French translations of their work. While the Occitan revival continues today without the repression of the past, publishing in the language is still limited and it is not easily acquired through French book sources.