Abstract

"Quod habet principium sed caret fine": this idea of the perpetual is expresssed in both the schools and courts of the twelfth-century renaissance. The philosophers conceive the perpetual as intermediate between time and eternity; according to masters of the school of Chartres, moreover, the world itself is perpetual. For the troubadour poets, the perpetual functions rhetorically. The moralist Marcabru treats the personified abstraction as perpetual, continuous in identity yet subject to change, thus achieving a satiric duality of vision. The love poet Bernart de Ventadorn develops a "poetics of perpetuity", using the very tensions and instabilities of fin'amors to fashions ideal and endless courtly worlds