Culture and Society in Medieval Occitania

Medieval Occitania, a geographical and linguistic area often referred to as ‘the South of France’, ‘the South’, ‘the Midi’, or more loosely ‘Provence’, was politically diverse but culturally coherent. It was here that the troubadours created Courtly Love and a new poetic language, which together were to affect the whole course of European literature and sensibilities. The essays made readily accessible in this collection reflect the author’s many-sided interests in the troubadours and the society from which they sprang: the historical and cultural place of the women forming the ostensible objects of their desire, veneration, or anxieties; the extent to which French notions of chivalry penetrated the South; the nature and meaning of various elements of court culture; the precocious development of medical science in this region; its complex responses to the Crusades; and the question of Occitan identity. Mostly complementing her major publications (The World of the Troubadours, collaborative editions of the songs of the troubadour Marcabru, of the epic fragment the Canso d’Antioca, and of the medieval Occitan tensos and partimens), they provide either more detailed material than found its way into those works, or developments from them. ‘Occitan literature and the Holy Land’ anticipates a new project on responses to the Crusades in Occitan and Old French lyrics.