"[Jacques] Roubaud suggests that there were many trobairitz [women troubadours] in Occitanie, and that the Church destroyed their work during the Catholic Inquisition that was carried out in the region from 1229 until 1329. For Glissant this Inquisition, and the 1209–29 crusade against the Cathars, constitute the beginning of the political construction of the defensive concept of a bordered, exclusive, rationalist and racialised Europe, and also the start of European colonial destruction of local cultures, languages and peoples. Ostensibly aiming at the military destruction of the Cathar heresy, a radical mystic sect antithetical to the Catholic Church, the Albigensian crusade served more broadly to root out heretical thought and practices from a Europe just then beginning to construct a universalist regime that organised itself around King and Church. Glissant stresses that the heretical, mystical strains of thought that had flourished within a heterodox Europe were, in the medieval period, separated out from the official thought systems precisely in order to be expunged from Europe’s self-representation. ‘All the dramas of mystic or heretical thought in the Middle Ages are truly dramas, meaning that they end badly. This means that this is a thought that was either devastated, as they did to the Cathars, or castrated, as they did to Abelard, who they reproached less for his amorous relationship than his spiritual exchange with Héloïse, as they did to all the women tied to the stake, up to and including Joan of Arc, and as they did to all who found pleasure in obscure thought...’ Glissant says. As for the troubadours, Roubaud concludes that the crusade was responsible for the end of the two-century flourishing of a culture of song. ‘Song was born, and was killed’, he states. So the culture of troubadour song, heretically marginal to authority, was part of Europe ’s self-inflicted loss." —Lisa Robertson, Anemones: A Simone Weil Project
Love this Robertson book but am still confused about how the Cathar disdain for the material world (à la the gnostics) can be squared with the troubadour philosophy of love... I can definitely see the influence of Arabic poetry and Andalusian mysticism on the troubadour tradition, though.
