Daughters of the Inquisition by Christina Crawford

Author:Christina Crawford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504049054
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

In a stroke of great good fortune for those of us who live in their wake, Meg Bodin discovered a small group of twenty women troubadours, all of whom wrote and lived in Occitania during the twelfth century. Their very existence, let alone the survival and translation of their poetry, revealing as it does a decidedly female vantage point through which to view courtly love, is amazing.

Only Occitania produced female troubadours. They were all married women of the nobility. The women preferred less word play, choosing more straightforward language, because the relationships they describe are neither totally idealized nor allegorical, but more reality-based and recognizable to us today.

These women do not worship men; they do not behave subserviently toward them nor do they apparently seek to be worshipped by their lovers. These women reject symbolic love and concentrate on the tangible, which is the love relationship itself with all the feelings aroused. Finally, women troubadours wrote as women and were not required to hide behind male pseudonyms to mask their female identity.

In the feudal male society through which female troubadours came into being, all men were inextricably tied to other men in an intricate vertical system of vassalage, wherein from the lords at the top to the serfs at the bottom, every man owed the one above him loyalty and service and then extracted from those beneath him the exact same. When a man was last in the chain, his right was relegated to demands made upon spouse and children, sometimes with less success. This idea of vassalage was the central metaphor of troubadour love poetry, only now it was transmuted from man’s vassalage to man, to become instead man’s vassalage to woman, in an exact reversal of medieval women’s ordinary status as subordinate to men.

But the old laws of Roman Gaul (Occitania) were more favorable to the women of Southern France than elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire, largely because the laws of Justinian were greatly influenced by his wife and co-ruler, Theodora. She made sure that a woman could retain ownership of her own land, even though her husband could make use of it, short of selling or gifting it away. Then the Theodosian code of law brought to Occitania by Visigoths in the sixth century gave sons and unmarried daughters equal shares of their fathers’ estates, land and wealth. Therefore, in the tenth century a number of southern fiefs (land holdings) were held by women: Auvergne, Beziers, Carcassonne, Limosin, Montpellier, Nimes, Perigord, Toulouse. During this same time, the weather improved, enabling peasants to make new progress in food production, and the population increased, putting demand on wilderness lands to be brought into field production.

Monastic orders seeking missionary work and conversions, such as Cistercians and Benedictines, moved to previously wild and uninhabited areas building monasteries. They then required the princes and lords of the secular communities to construct towns nearby the new church establishments.

Occitania was a major route for both increased commerce and pilgrimages to the Holy Land. An estimated 500,000 people traveled the pilgrimage route at the height of this movement.

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