Consistori de Barcelona - Legacy and Influence

Legacy and Influence

The Consistori of Barcelona is generally considered a transitionary period in Catalan literature, away from the prestigious treatment of Occitan and the pervasiveness of occitanisms and towards an independent Catalan poetry. In many respects it is the last phase of medieval literature and of the troubadours, opening the way to what can be considered Renaissance literature in Catalan. The Consistori, or more specifically the Gay Science that it fostered in the Iberian peninsula, extended its influence slowly over Castile and Portugal to the west. Enrique de Villena's Castilian Arte de trovar was probably written with the intention of exhorting its dedicatee, the Marqués de Santillana, to found and patronise a Consistori in Castile modelled after the Barcelonan example:

Somehow anyways the Marqués did absorb the concept of the Gay Science, for he wrote to Duke Pedro of Coimbra a famous letter, Prohemio e carta, which extols the divinely inspired, charismatic yet frenetic nature of the gaya sçiençia. This conception of the troubadours' art was fundamentally altered by the infusion of neoplatonism that came with the Renaissance and Italian influence. Nonetheless, Spanish poetry of the fifteenth century, moreso than anywhere else, sought to emulate classic Occitan poetry. Alfonso the Magnanimous in particular, despite his classicism, brought a distinctly medieval, Occitan, and troubadour-esque poetry to Naples with his 1443 conquest. This Spanish literary tradition at Naples remained outside Renaissance currents. In Spain, troubadour scholarship got off to a quick start in the sixteenth century, but the influence of the Consistori can hardly be spoken of past the mid-fifteenth century.