In this collection of essays Gérard Gouiran, one of the world's leading and much-loved scholars of medieval Occitan literature, examines this literature from a primarily historical perspective. Through texts offering hitherto unexplored insights into the history and culture of medieval Europe, he studies topics such as the representation of alterity through female figures and Saracens in opposition to the ideal of the Christian knight; the ways in which the narrating of history can become resistance and propaganda discourse in the clash between the Catholic Church and the French on the one hand, and the Cathar heretics and the people of Occitania on the other; questions of intertextuality and intercultural relations; cultural representations fashioning the West in contact with the East; and Christian dissidence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Written in an approachable style, the book will be of historical, literary and philological interest to scholars and students, as well as any reader curious about this hitherto little-known Occitan literature.
Author(s): Gérard Gouiran, Linda M. Paterson
Series: Variorum Collected Studies
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 248
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Foreword
List of Original Essays
Part I Women and Saracens in the Occitan chansons de geste
1 Silhouettes of women in the Occitan and Old French Roland texts
2 Belauda’s garden
3 Aude, Iphigenia, Polyxena
4 So dis la donna: ‘Oy, bel sira Rollan, mos maritz es en malaür lo gran’: the Saracens and the Saracen woman in Rollan a Saragossa
5 The Saracen: from the depths of Hell to the gates of salvation
6 Between Saracens and Christians, or the decapitated horse
Part II Aspects of war in occitan chansons de geste and lyric poetry
7 Per las lurs armas devon tostemps cantier: intertextuality effects between Ronsasvals and certain lyric planhz
8 The first appearance of the herald in literature and the earliest war songs of Bertran de Born
Part III The albigensian crusade
9 Drama queen? Worse: a jongleur! – or how to discredit an opponent: the representation of Bishop Fulk of Toulouse, alias Folquet de Marseille, by the anonymous author of the Song of the Albigensian Crusade
10 The French against Montfort?: the war councils held by Simon de Montfort in the second part of the Song of the Albigensian Crusade
11 The good use of rebellion
12 The Toulousains cry ‘Toulouse!’, the Gascons ‘Comminges!’ . . . The Comminges parallels in the Song of the Albigensian Crusade
13 The troubadour and the overlord: history as viewed by the anonymous author of the Song of the Albigensian Crusade
14 Las Novas del heretje, or who benefits from propaganda?
Bibliography
Index
