Ermengard of Narbonne and the world of the troubadours / Fredric L. Cheyette.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cheyette, Fredric L.

Series:

Conjunctions of religion & power in the medieval past

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ermengarde, vicomtesse de Narbonne, 1127?-1196?.

Ermengarde.

Troubadours.

Narbonne (France)--Kings and rulers--Biography.

Narbonne (France).

Narbonne (France)--History.

Troubadours--France--Narbonne.

France--Narbonne.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xiii, 474 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2001.

Summary:

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 ever-changing 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.

Contents:

Chapter 1. The Viscountess Comes of Age 14

Ermengard's City

Chapter 2. Names and Titles, Histories and Myths 41

Chapter 3. The Urban Marketplace 54

Chapter 4. City and Countryside 66

Chapter 5. Cities of Mammon, Cities of Mars 80

Chapter 6. The Bishop in the City 103

The Sinews of Power: Lordship and Serfdom

Chapter 7. Lordship 129

Chapter 8. Serfdom and the Dues of Domination 149

Chapter 9. Ermengard's Entourage 168

The Sinews of Power: The Culture of Fidelity

Chapter 10. Oaths and Oath Takers 187

Chapter 11. Anger, Conflict, and Reconciliation 199

Chapter 12. Giving and Taking 220

Chapter 13. Love and Fidelity 233

Dynastic Politics: 1162-1196

Chapter 14. Raymond V Builds His Empire 253

Chapter 15. The Ravaging of Occitania 274

Chapter 16. Sowing the Seeds of Crusade 286

Chapter 17. A War Like an Omen 308

Chapter 18. Impatient Heirs 331

Chapter 19. The Undoing of Occitania 347.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 441-461) and index.

ISBN:

0801439523

OCLC:

46882708