Salut d'amor

A ''salut d'amor'' (, ; "love letter", lit. "greeting of love") or (''e'')''pistola'' ("epistle") was an Occitan lyric poem of the troubadours, written as a letter from one lover to another in the tradition of courtly love. Some songs preserved in the Italian ''Quattrocento'' and ''Cinquecento'' chansonniers are labelled in the rubrics as ''saluts'' (or some equivalent), but the ''salut'' is not treated as a genre by medieval Occitan grammarians. The trouvères copied the Occitan song style into Old French as the ''salut d'amour''. There are a total of nineteen surviving Occitan ''saluts'' and twelve French ones, with a Catalan examples (of the ''salutació amorosa'') also.

The poetic form probably derives from the classical Latin love letter and through a blending of the '' ars dictaminis'' and the early Occitan '' canso''. Occitan scholar Pierre Bec argued that the ''salut'' was tripartite, possessing an introduction, body, and conclusion. Christiane Leube believes that the Latin five-part division of ''salutatio'', ''captatio benevolentiae'', ''narratio'', ''petitio'', and ''conclusio'' formed the basis for the ''salut'', but that the ''salutatio'' and ''captatio'' blended into one segment and all but the ''conclusio'' being less rigidly delineated. Dietmar Rieger regards the ''salut'' less as a letter than as a variant of the ''canso'' intended not to be sung in performance but to be read. The Occitan ''saluts'' do not have stanzas or refrains, but several French ones do (''salut à refrains''). Structurally they are usually octosyllabic rhyming couplets, but a few are hexasyllabic and Raimon de Miraval wrote a heterometric ''salut''.. They often end with a one-word verse, unrhymed with anything previous, that gives the addressee: ''Domna'' or ''Dompna''.

The first ''salut d'amor'' was probably ''Domna, cel qe'us es bos amics'', written by Raimbaut d'Aurenga and he served as a model for many later troubadours. Arnaut de Mareuil wrote five ''saluts'', the most of any individual, and Don Alfred Monson has crowned him the ''maître incontesté du salut'' ("the uncontested master of the ''salut''"). They served as a model for Amanieu de Sescars, who wrote two precisely datable ''saluts'' in 1278 and 1291. Falquet de Romans wrote a ''salut d'amor'' (''epistola'' in the rubric) of 254 lines. The only female author of a ''salut'' was Azalais d'Altier. Her 101 verses of rhyming couplets were designed to reconcile two lovers and were addressed to a woman, possibly Clara d'Anduza. In French the only named author of a ''salut'' with refrains is Philippe de Rémi.

''Destret d'emors mi clam a vos'' is a 708-line long anonymous Catalan ''salut''.

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Folio 8r
from the Cançoner Gil, showing Cerverí de Girona's ''Apres lo vers comença del comte la lissos'', a ''pistola'' according to the rubric

{{Western medieval lyric forms
Western medieval lyric forms
Occitan literary genres
Medieval poetry