St. Francis of AssisiChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
St. Francis of Assisi
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Francis, of Assisi, Saint, 1182-1226
It is necessary to remember this in order
to realise that St. Francis was talking the true language of a
troubadour when he said that he also had a most glorious and gracious
lady and that her name was Poverty.
But the particular point to be noted here is not concerned so much with
the word Troubadour as with the word Jongleur. It is especially
concerned with the transition from one to the other; and for this it is
necessary to grasp another detail about the poets of the Gay Science. A
jongleur was not the same thing as a troubadour, even if the same man
were both a troubadour and a jongleur. More often, I believe, they were
separate men as well as separate trades. In many cases apparently the
two men would walk the world together like companions in arms, or rather
companions in arts. The jongleur was properly a joculator or jester;
sometimes he was what we should call a juggler. This is the point, I
imagine, of the tale about Taillefer the Jongleur at the battle of
Hastings, who sang of the death of Roland while he tossed up his sword
and caught it, as a juggler catches balls. Sometimes he may have been
even a tumbler; like that acrobat in the beautiful legend who was called
"The Tumbler of Our Lady," because he turned head over heels and stood
on his head before the image of the Blessed Virgin, for which he was
nobly thanked and comforted by her and the whole company of heaven. In
the ordinary way, we may imagine, the troubadour would exalt the company
with earnest and solemn strains of love and then the jongleur would do
his turn as a sort of comic relief. A glorious medieval romance remains
to be written about two such companions wandering through the world. At
any rate, if there is one place in which the true Franciscan spirit can
be found outside the true Franciscan story, it is in that tale of the
Tumbler of Our Lady. And when St. Francis called his followers the
Jongleurs de Dieu, he meant something very like the Tumblers of Our Lord.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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