LOS MOTZ EL SO - Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Library ...

assesses Folquet’s works as follows: “I cannot deny that there are, here and there, some refined
thoughts, some graceful and agreeable verses. But these graceful little flowers rarely flourish in
the arid lands where only the scholastic thistles survive.” 34
34 “Je ne nie pas qu’il y ait, çà et là, quelques pensées, quelques vers faciles et agréables.
Mais ces gracieuses fleurettes s’épanouissent rarement dans ces terres arides où ne prospèrent
que les chardons de la scolastique.” Jeanroy, La Poésie lyrique des troubadours, 2: 151.
poet.”
Much recent scholarship on Folquet focuses on Dante’s citation of him and his works.
Even here the undercurrent often seems to be “how could Dante esteem such a mediocre poet?”
Teodolinda Barolini devotes much of her book on the poets cited by Dante to how Dante
evaluated the better poets in his critical works–Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia–then
replaced them with weaker poets like Folquet in the Commedia. 35 The trend continues with later
scholars like Albert Rossi, who locates Ovidian quotations in some of Folquet’s songs and
connects these quotations to Dante’s depiction of Folquet in Paradiso. Thus, Rossi takes
Folquet’s work seriously; yet the undercurrent is visible in such pronouncements as “the stock
sententiae which permeate Folquet’s idiom.” 36
Similarly, Nicole Schulman recently examined Folquet’s life as a way to understand the
dynamics of the Albigensian Crusade. She observes that, although both as a poet and a preacher
he was considered very persuasive by his contemporaries, none of his sermons survives and the
reasoning abilities he displays in his poems leave much to be desired. 37
35 Barolini, Dante’s Poets. On page 179 she specifically describes Folquet as a “weak
36 Rossi, “Ovidian Exemplarity,” 52.
37 Schulman, “Folco,” 129-30.
9