page_title: Maldit-comiat
section_title: Maldits in Catalonia
hierarchical_section_title: Maldit-comiat / Maldits in Catalonia
caption_attribution_description: Dompna gentil, vos m'enculpats a tort poem
context_page_description: A maldit was a genre of Catalan and Occitan literature practised by the later troubadours. It was a song complaining about a lady's behaviour and character. A related genre, the comiat, was a song renouncing a lover. The maldit and the comiat were often connected as a maldit-comiat and they could be used to attack and renounce a figure other than a lady or a lover, like a commanding officer. The maldit-comiat is especially associated with the Catalan troubadours. Martí de Riquer describes un autèntic maldit-comiat as a song where a poet leaves a mistress to whom he has long been fruitlessly devoted, and explains her failings which have led him to depart.
  The earliest comiat is probably a fragmentary work by Uc Catola, of the first generation of troubadours.
context_section_description: The most famous maldit is probably poem XLII of Ausiàs March. It is a virulent attack on several named women. The poem is only explicitly named as a maldit in one minor manuscript, but since the term could refer, at its most general, to any poem "cursing" another, the term is accepted by modern scholars as accurate. Other Catalan authors who wrote maldits, so identified in the manuscripts or by later scholars, include Pau de Bellviure, Pere de Queralt, Simon Pastor, Jordi de Sant Jordi, Joan Basset (two), Guillem de Masdovelles (three), Johan Berenguer de Masdovelles (ten), and Pere Johan de Masdovelles (two). Francesc Ferrer in Lo conhort quotes from six other authors, works which may have been maldits. It was evidently a popular genre in the second quarter of the fifteenth century. 
  All of the above poets do not name their lovers and do not include a comiat in their poems. On the basis of this, March has been argued to be creating a new form, politically motivated and less encumbered by the ethics of courtly love. The composers of traditional maldits often refer to their women by senhals (code names) like Na Maliciosa (Lady Malicious) and Na Mondina (Worldly Lady). Simon Pastor, however, wrote a maldit against an unnamed man. The Leys d'amor, the guiding treatise of the Consistori de Tolosa and the Consistori de Barcelona, condemned the maldig especial (regarded as usually a type of sirventes), which attacked a specific individual (alquna certa persona: some certain person).
caption: Maldit of Pau de Bellviure
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