Recovering Lost Lyric Theory: The Suma de tot lo Gay Saber and Medieval Catalan Poetry

From the late thirteenth century to around 1400, the consolidation of major vernacular compendia fostered the production of numerous poetic treatises, many of them written by Catalan authors engaged with the Occitan troubadour tradition. Central to this movement is the Leys d’amors, composed in mid-fourteenth-century Toulouse, whose Catalan manuscript tradition and reception are especially rich. These treatises combine descriptive and normative aims, yet they reveal a persistent tension between poetic theory and actual practice: authors frequently criticize poets for failing to follow prescribed rules and present their works as corrective interventions.This tension raises fundamental questions about the relationship between theory and practice in medieval lyric poetry, including the real influence of rhetorical, metrical, and grammatical doctrine on poetic composition, the validity of genre definitions, differing notions of poetic “fault,” and the musical and performative dimensions of lyric production.The article advances this discussion through the edition and analysis of a recently discovered Catalan poetic treatise from the second half of the fifteenth century, the Suma de tot lo Gay Saber. Preserved together with an index of incipits corresponding to a now-lost songbook, the treatise provides new evidence that fifteenth-century Catalan lyric production was far richer than the surviving manuscript tradition suggests. The text of the Suma is edited and interpreted in relation to other poetic treatises circulating in Catalonia, revealing a coherent and previously undocumented phase in the transmission of poetic theory.