Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours

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

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.(American Historical Review) 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.(The Medieval Review) 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.(Choice) 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.(Speculum) 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.(The New York Review of Books) 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.(H-France)