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Bezig met laden... Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours (2001)door Fredric L. Cheyette
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. Ermengarde was the viscountess of Narbonne, in what is now southern France, during the twelfth century. Despite her political prominence at the time, and her rule over what was then a very important port city, almost no sources about her life have survived. Even among medievalists she has been a minor figure. Fredric Cheyette sets out to recover Ermengarde from the historical shadows; given that there are only 64 documents which can be securely associated with her, Cheyette does this in large part by focusing on the world in which she lived. As a woman with her own inner life, Ermengarde does remain frustratingly elusive, but Cheyette's mastery of the documents means that he is able to give us a sense of Ermengarde the ruler. Some of the chapters on heresy might need revision in light of recent work on the Cathars by historians like R.I. Moore, but this is overall an excellent book which has held up well over the past decade. It is very useful reading for anyone working on medieval female lordship. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Onderdeel van de reeks(en)
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. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)944.87History and Geography Europe France and region Languedoc AudeLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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I complained recently about a historian who provided too little data in support of his conclusions; author Fredric Cheyette almost provides too much in the way of documentary references, maps, graphs, and quotations. With that understood, there’s much of interest here, although it’s a little tedious to wade through. One of the educating items was the discovery that, at this time, you weren’t (for example) Count of Toulouse; you were a count that happened to live in Toulouse. Noble holdings overlapped extensively, and it would have been impossible to draw a line on a map defining the borders of the county of Toulouse. In fact much of nobility’s wealth and power was not drawn for land and serfs but from various other dues and obligations; a family might be obligated to provide four cheeses and a chicken to some lord every year, or a lord might have the right to a monopoly on wine sales in the month of August or (a disconcerting one) the right to the beds people died in. Cheyette notes that people would have been puzzled by the question “Who is your lord?”; they might owe cheese to one, chickens to another, and their deathbed to a third. The people of Languedoc (Cheyette uses the term “Occitania” for the region) considered the King of France to be their ultimate overlord, but didn’t think of themselves as “French”; the “Franks” lived up north somewhere and didn’t concern themselves much in local affairs. The complexity of these arrangements in a marginally literate society led to an interesting phenomena; contracts and legal documents were cast in a sort of poetry, and were read aloud (as evinced by statements conjuring all those who “read or hear” the text to remember it). I imagine this made things easy to remember; perhaps I’ll suggest that EPA rewrite Title 40 of the Code of Federal Regulations in blank verse.
This changed during the time under discussion, and Cheyette thinks it was due to the papacy of Innocent III. Innocent apparently wanted to deal with as few temporal lords as possible, and felt the best way to do this was by strengthening royal power and weakening more local rulers. A tool toward this end was the Albigensian Crusade; rather than having to trek all the way to Jerusalem you could get the benefits of taking the Cross merely by smiting those neighbors who were heretics, or who were “soft” on them. It’s unclear if Innocent planned the whole strategy in advance, but that’s the way it ended up; an important factor was a papal letter authorizing temporal rulers to apply capital punishment to heretics. This was a surprise to me; I had always assumed that to be in effect since the days of Constantine but apparently previous heretics had just been exiled, fined, or excommunicated. This decision, of course, was the impetus for the famous statement of Papal Legate Amaury after the capture of the heretic city of Beziers; when the crusaders asked how they were supposed to tell the heretics from the “true” Christians, Amaury replied “Kill them all; God will know his own”. From a strict theological standpoint, this makes perfect sense; if you spared any of the heretics they might seduce others into heresy but solid believers would end up in heaven. I wonder, though, how the crusaders explained to children that they were being decapitated for their own protection.
It took me an unusually long time to get through this; it was my bus reading for weeks and I kept falling asleep. However, I’m glad I never abandoned it. ( )