Jocs Florals

A Mestre en Gay Saber, or ‘master of joyous knowledge’, was a troubadour, and if it seems peculiar that there was one running around Barcelona in the mid-19th century, it’s because of the overwhelmingly nostalgic nature of the Renaixença.

The first Jocs Floral, or Floral Games, a poetry competition between troubadours, took place in Toulouse in May 1324. In 1388, Queen Violante de Bar, a devotee of the Courts of Love in Provence, brought the games to Barcelona, where the third prize was a silver violet, the second a golden rose and the first prize a real rose, because, like the greatest poetry, a rose can never be successfully imitated —as the winning poem would presumably endure for ever, no poet could ask for a greater reward.

Much medieval Catalan verse, especially by the great Ausiàs Marc (1397–1459), is powerful, pithy stuff. In 1490 the genre went out with a bang with Joanot Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanc, Europe’s first prose novel, an epic mix of chivalry and satire. The heroics may well have been based on the ‘White Knight’, the Romanian-Hungarian Turk-crushing hero John Hunyadi, but the bawdy, ribald bits are pure Catalan. It was one of Cervantes’ favourite books.