Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours (Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past) - Softcover

Fredric L. Cheyette

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801489253 ISBN 13: 9780801489259

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Before France became France its territories included Occitania, roughly the present-day province of Languedoc. The city of Narbonne was a center of Occitanian commerce and culture during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. For most of the second half of the twelfth century, that city and its environs were ruled by a remarkable woman, Ermengard, who negotiated her city's way through a maze of everchanging dynastic alliances.

Fredric L. Cheyette's masterful and beautifully illustrated book is a biography of an extraordinary warrior woman and of a unique, vulnerable, doomed society. Throughout her long reign, viscountess Ermengard roamed Occitania receiving oaths of fidelity, negotiating treaties, settling disputes among the lords of her lands, and camping with her armies before the walls of besieged cities. She was born into a world of politics and warfare, but from the Mediterranean to the North Sea her name echoed in songs that treated the arts of love.

The land between the Rhone and the Pyrenees was a delicately balanced world in which honor, dispute, and the fragile communities of loyalty and family held a "stateless" society together. In Cheyette's prose there rises before us a world we had not imagined, in which women were powerful lords, moving back and forth across what we now call Spain, France, and Italy to play the harsh political games essential to the preservation of their realms. But the region was also fertile ground for religious practices deemed heretical by the Church. The attempt to eradicate them would spawn the Albigensian Crusade, which destroyed the cosmopolitan world of Ermengard and the troubadours―the world that lives again in this book.

About this title

About the Author:

Fredric L. Cheyette is Emeritus Professor of History at Amherst College.

Review:

"Ermengard is enchanting! This is an exciting and erudite adventurea visit to the fascinating world of medieval Provence and the complex people who lived in it."

(Sharan Newman)

"Fredric Cheyette's long awaited book is a tour de force. Ermengard of Narbonne serves as the unifying thread in his exhaustive penetrating examination of the Narbonnais in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Cheyette explores Ermengard's identity, her options as a woman, and the ways in which she was constructed, constrained, and empowered in relationship to her gender. Cheyette's prose evokes the physicality of Narbonne and its countryside, as well as the parchments and stone ruins that make up the evidence of the story. If power, politics, and eroticism are the essence of Provençal lyric, they are at the heart of Ermengard of Narbonne and the Troubadours. By connecting the Narbonne of the Middle ages to literary evocations of the region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Cheyette adds a deeply layered sense of the region's present and past that not only enlightens but charms."

(Patrick J. Geary, University of California, Los Angeles)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0801489253
• ISBN 13: 9780801489259
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496