Literary History of the Troubadours

shared. In the month of February 1740, the Literary News of Florence original: Nouvelles littéraires de Florence (Novelle Letterarie di Firenze), a prominent 18th-century scholarly journal. celebrated his project and his work. Four years later, the learned Doctor Lami Giovanni Lami (1697–1770), an influential Italian librarian and scholar. celebrated them once again in an eloquent dedicatory epistle, where he likewise did justice to the qualities of his heart and those of his mind. (See Delights of the Erudite original Latin: Deliciæ eruditorum, a multi-volume collection of historical documents published by Lami..)

If the French academician has exhausted, so to speak, all the libraries of Italy, this species of conquest required incredible activity, expense, and care. Let one judge this by a particular fact. The Fathers Mabillon and de Montfaucon Jean Mabillon (1632–1707) and Bernard de Montfaucon (1655–1741) were giants of 17th-century scholarship; their inability to access these texts highlights the difficulty of Sainte-Palaie's task. had been unable to obtain permission for certain manuscripts in Rome to be shared with them: M. de Sainte-Palaie, to obtain access to them, required a papal brief A formal letter or decree from the Pope; here, it served as a high-level security clearance for restricted archives.; whether a misguided literary jealousy or a self-interested policy had placed obstacles in the way of the progress of our knowledge.

After having collected about four thousand pieces, and the original lives of several poets; after having verified that the fragments scattered in various places, numbering twelve hundred, were all found in his collections; he still had the greatest difficulties to overcome. How was he to properly understand the troubadours? Men of Letters, though familiar with the Provençal tongue The Occitan language of Southern France, which was the medium of the troubadours.