Ermengard of Narbonne and the world of the troubadours
by Fredric L. Cheyette

Cornell, 2001
Hardcover met stofomslag. In uitmuntende staat
Tekst in Engels

Before France became France its territories included Occitania, roughly the present-day province of Languedoc. The city of Narbonne was a center of Occitanian commerce and culture during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. For most of the second half of the twelfth century, that city and its environs were ruled by a remarkable woman, Ermengard, who negotiated her city's way through a maze of everchanging dynastic alliances. Fredric L. Cheyette's masterful and beautifully illustrated book is a biography of an extraordinary warrior woman and of a unique, vulnerable, doomed society. Throughout her long reign, viscountess Ermengard roamed Occitania receiving oaths of fidelity, negotiating treaties, settling disputes among the lords of her lands, and camping with her armies before the walls of besieged cities. She was born into a world of politics and warfare, but from the Mediterranean to the North Sea her name echoed in songs that treated the arts of love.The land between the Rhone and the Pyrenees was a delicately balanced world in which honor, dispute, and the fragile communities of loyalty and family held a "stateless" society together. In Cheyette's prose there rises before us a world we had not imagined, in which women were powerful lords, moving back and forth across what we now call Spain, France, and Italy to play the harsh political games essential to the preservation of their realms. But the region was also fertile ground for religious practices deemed heretical by the Church. The attempt to eradicate them would spawn the Albigensian Crusade, which destroyed the cosmopolitan world of Ermengard and the troubadours — the world that lives again in this book.

Books 4 Life is niet zomaar een winkel voor tweedehands boeken. De opbrengst van de verkoop gaat, na aftrek van met name de huur, naar goede doelen.
Sinds april 2025 zijn we gevestigd aan de Kanunnik van de Putstraat 39, in de wijk Brakkenstein, winkelcentrum "De Fest".
Wij maken deel uit van een keten van zes bijzondere boekwinkels die gevestigd zijn in de grotere steden. Books 4 Life verkoopt tweedehands boeken, die door particulieren aan ons gedoneerd worden. We werken uitsluitend met onbezoldigde vrijwilligers, zodat er zoveel mogelijk geld naar de goede doelen gaat.
De helft doneren wij aan onze vaste begunstigden Amnesty International, Oxfam Novib en het Armoedefonds. De andere helft verdelen wij in Nijmegen ieder jaar onder kleinschalige lokale goede doelen.