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

A book that is both about southwestern France in the twelfth century and also about the challenges of biography. It is a fascinating study, beautifully written.... This rich and highly rewarding work should find a wide audience: scholars of the Middle Ages, historians who are not medievalists, even advanced undergraduates.

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.

Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours is a spectacular recreation of the times in which Ermengard lived.... With melancholy nostalgia, Cheyette depicts a powerful woman in her vibrant and doomed society. To be clear at once: this is a fabulous book.... This book, with its recreation of a lost world, its challenge to historians and historiography, and its narrative drive, is extraordinary, brilliant, unique-and a little sad.

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 Provencal 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.

This book defies description: lyrical and scholarly, leisurely and densely packed, it meanders through a vast range of topics while keeping to its fundamental premise, that the Occitan region had a brilliant, lively, hybrid culture in which the 'traditional' Northern relationships of lords and vassals, city and countryside, sacred and secular held little sway. And in the midst of this complex region was Ermengard: daughter, wife, widow, warrior, patron, subject, diplomat-in short, a figure whose gender was not always connected to traditional notions about her sex.... This is a beautiful, if occasionally difficult, book that anyone interested in the period or in 'post-Annaliste' historiography should read. Highly recommended.

This is a book about much more than its title suggests. It is not just about the extraordinary viscountess of Narbonne, though it probably tells us as much as we can know about her, nor about the literary culture of her region. Rather, it is a book about myriad aspects of her world: about the city she ruled for half a century and its inhabitants; about relations within and among classes; about commerce, culture, religion, and politics, how they affected her, and how she reacted to and influenced them. It sets her fully within her context, a context that includes the poets but goes well beyond them.

This study of Ermengard and her world is an original and valuable contribution to our knowledge of an admirable woman-in the end an immensely sad figure-and of the endangered culture in which she lived.... Professor Cheyette says he meant this book 'to be read, not consulted,' and as a common reader with an amateur interest in that culture and its long shelf life, which continues into our own time and literature, I am indebted to him.

Though this book has all the trappings of a deeply scholarly excursus, it is ultimately directed to the general reader and reaches that mark successfully I believe.... This is not the sort of book that can be gobbled up in one sitting, while it is definitely one to read rather than consulted or dipped into.