Consistori del Gay Saber

It was founded in 1323 in Toulouse[1] and later restored by Clémence Isaure as the Consistori del Gay Saber with the goal of encouraging Occitan poetry.

The best verses were given prizes at the floral games in the form of different flowers, made of gold or silver, such as violets, rose hips, marigolds, amaranths or lilies.

The Académie des Jeux Floraux has had such prestigious members as Ronsard, Marmontel, Chateaubriand, Voltaire, Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo and Frédéric Mistral.

The Consistori was founded by seven literary men of the bourgeoisie, who composed a manifesto, in Old Occitan verse, pledging to award prizes to poetry in the troubadouresque style and emulating the language of classical period of the troubadours (roughly 1160–1220).

In its efforts to promote an extinct literary koiné over the evolving dialects of the fourteenth century, the Consistori went a long way to preserving the troubadours' memory for posterity as well as bequeathing to later scholarship an encyclopaedic terminology for the analysis and historiography of Occitan lyric poetry.

[c] In 1390 John I of Aragon, one of the earliest Renaissance humanists to sit on a European throne, established the Consistori de Barcelona in imitation of the Toulousain academy.

Their isolation and their classicism cut them off from the literary movements giving life to other vernaculars, such as the dolce stil novo and the Renaissance in Italian and the work of Ausiàs March in Catalan.

Martí de Riquer is highly critical of the escòla poetica de Tolosa, which he charges with a thematically severely limited, weighed down by a narrow conception of art and imposing strictures governing poetic form and content, negatively influencing Catalan poetry by exporting occitanisms (until Italian trends wafted over the western Mediterranean sea routes to rejuvenate it), and sustaining an outmoded literary language.