Gilabert de Próixita

[1] He is credited by his first editor with a renovellament (renewal) of Catalan poetry through the incorporation of Italian and French ideas into a model of courtly love taken from the classical troubadours.

Gilabert was a member of an old Neapolitan family, the Procida [it], favourites of the Hohenstaufen and then of Peter III of Aragon, who established them in Valencia.

On returning from military service abroad to Valencia in 1396 Gilabert became involved in the conflict between the Centelles and the Vilaragut and in May that year was sentenced, along with the factional leaders, to exile by the city council.

On 11 November 1398 he and some other knights led a band of Centelles, including forty men-at-arms, in street fighting against Pere de Vilaragut.

Gilabert was basically unknown until his poems were published in a modern edition by Martí de Riquer in Poesies (Els Nostres Clàssics: Barcelona, 1954).

Many of his poems are found only in the Cançoner Vega-Aguiló, which has suffered damage to do poor humidity, rendering much of his work illegible to the naked eye.

Though Gilabert wrote in literary Occitan, clearly inspired by and learned from the classical troubadours, his language is not devoid of Catalan influences, especially where the adopted idiom lacks a solution to a problem.

Gilabert dwells on the cruelty (cruseltat granda) of the lady and the llanguiment (disease) of the poet, his love, which pushes him to extremes (like death) and obsession.

The lines Mas ya d'uymay sots en la derraria, que ma dolor e mos mals cesseran; car per vos muyr, d'on per mort fineran los gran turme[n]ts que·m donatz cascun dia.

Other ornaments of Gilabert's poetry, evidence of the scope of the poet's reading, are the story of the bird burned by flying near the Sun[2] and the foolish alchemist.

[3] There is similarity between Gilabert's phrase de valor coronada and Dante's coronata e vestita d'umilitate, but the coronation is the only commonality.