Authors: Mary Hoffman
Troubadour (26 page)
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GLOSSARY OF MEDIEVAL WORDS
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Bailey
Courtyard of castle
Ballista
Siege engine, like a giant crossbow
Bastide
Fortified town
Consolamentum
Ceremony of being received into the Cathar faith
Believer
What would now be called a Cathar
Chansons de Geste
French songs about heroic deeds
Demesne
A lord’s lands, castle and property
Faidit
A lord who has lost his demesne
Fealty
Allegiance owed by subjects to their lord
Fief
A vassal’s source of income, land and labour
Hippocras
Spiced wine
Keep
The main tower of a castle
Mangonel
Wooden siege engine
Perfect
A man or woman who had received the consolamentum and lived according to the strictest rules of the Cathar belief
Rebec
A small stringed instrument played with a bow
Saltarello
A lively dance involving jumping or leaping
Seigneury
The position and authority of a feudal lord
Solar
A private or upper chamber in a medieval house
Suzerain
Sovereign or feudal lord over other kings or lords; overlord
Trebuchet
Wooden siege engine, like a massive catapult
Trencher
Platter, sometimes wooden, sometimes made of bread
Vassal
A free man who held land (fief) from a lord to whom he paid homage and swore fealty. A vassal could be a lord in his own right.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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Dr Susanna Niiranen, of the Department of History in the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, kindly read and commented on this novel. She specialises in the women troubadours of Southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries. Norman Allum was most helpful in the Languedoc.
And Alessandro Barbero, Claudia Grosso and Riccardo Pergolis all provided invaluable information on the court of Monferrato. In spite of their assurances that the court would have moved around, I have taken the view of the
Enciclopedia de La Repubblica
(Utet, 2003) that it would have been at Chivasso, because I needed it to be somewhere!
I am very grateful to Nicolas Gouzy and Véronique Marcaillou of the Centre for Cathar Studies in Carcassonne for their assistance and support.
I have read many books and articles about troubadours,
trobairitz
, Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade while researching this book. Among the most useful have been Yves Rouquette’s
The Cathars
(Loubatières, 1998), Jonathan Sumption’s
The Albigensian Crusade
(Faber, 1978), Stephen O’Shea’s
The Perfect Heresy
(Profile Books, 2001) and Laurence Marvin’s
The Occitan War
(Cambridge University Press, 2008). On troubadour life and poetry, Linda M. Paterson,
The World of the Troubadours
(Cambridge University Press, 1993), and F. R. P. Akehurst and Judith M. Davis (eds),
A Handbook of the Troubadours
(Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995), have been invaluable.
I’m grateful to the Bodleian and Taylorian libraries in Oxford and, as always, the utterly wonderful London Library.
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Also by Mary Hoffman
The Falconer’s Knot
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The Stravaganza Sequence:
City of Masks
City of Stars
City of Flowers
City of Secrets
City of Ships
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Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
36 Soho Square, London, W1D 3QY
Text copyright © Mary Hoffman 2009
Map illustration © Peter Bailey 2009
The moral rights of the author and illustrator have been asserted
Raymond Lévesque,
Quand les hommes vivront d’amour . . .
, used by permission of
Éditions Typo, 1989 © 1989 Éditions Typo and Raymond Lévesque
This electronic edition published in September 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4088 1337 9
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