Jo Livingstone, interviewed by Merve Emre. From Episode Six of “The Critic and Her Publics”,
Love poetry has a very close relationship with the seasons and the weather in the Middle Ages. In a poem about “spronge blostme,” things springing, you might talk about the fish and the flood and the flowers growing. In springtime, flowers grow and people fall in love. That’s where all of these rhythms come from. It’s exactly right that it’s all mixed up with the idea of coming across an actual hottie at the harvest.
You mean a “swete levedi.”
Yes, coming across a “swete levedi” at the fair. Her beauty isn’t really her, it’s the integumentum—the veil that God has drawn over reality, the world that we perceive. Her beauty is a metaphor that helps you to understand the theology of the Virgin Mary, and hence the great mysteries of everything. Also, it is a miracle that she lives and breathes in front of you, in your lifetime. She’s part of an eternal presence, connected to the way that the universe is bolted together.
It’s easy to think of these as separate traditions—the Virgin Mary and love poems, courtly love, balladry, troubadours. There were lots of secular traveling musicians in the Middle Ages. But these traditions are never really separate to begin with. There’s no disembodied theology of the Virgin Mary. It’s in medieval music, especially in the medieval English music that survives.
