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*
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