Paterson has earned the gratitude of students of the troubadours by producing "the first comprehensive study of the society in which they lived." Her sources include the troubadours themselves, especially sixteen of the major figures, and Occitan narratives including epics ( Aigar et Maurin, Daurel et Beton, Girart de Roussillon), histories ( Canso d'Antioca, Chanson de la croisade albigeoise), and romances ( Flamenca, Jaufre). Above all she has drawn on historians of many specialties, including feudal, legal, economic, local, urban, military, religious, monastic, Jewish, and medical history, and the histories of science, technology, and women. She has consulted sixteenth-century imprints of medieval medical treatises and combed the vernacular charters for items of interest. She has used unpublished dissertations, especially from Oxford, and books or articles not yet published or privately circulated. If she seems particularly well informed about British scholarship, that scarcely requires explanation; and she refers also to work from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United States. The only remotely comparable book known to me is A. Armengaud and R. Lafont, Histoire d'Occitanie (1979), which embraces the span from prehistory to the present without bringing Paterson's range of perspectives to bear on the medieval period.
The exposition proceeds in terms of sociological groups, like a medieval estates satire, but with a secular twist. The introduction on "Occitan Identity and Self-Perception" proposes a tolerance of difference among the people of the Midi, "a certain cosmopolitan openness." "France," however, "they always view as a foreign country." Chapter 2, "Occitan 'Feudalism,'" demonstrates a resistance to vassalic homage in several Occitan regions where more egalitarian compacts were preferred, such as the "convention," which involved no subordination of one man to another but an agreement to refrain from acts of aggression. "If vassalage in its strictest sense is the exchange by free men of military service for land, this chapter has revealed rather little of it." Chapter 3, "Knights and Non-Knightly Combatants," finds the urban knight characteristic of the region. Whether urban, household, or mercenary, however, the knight was more effective in battle or skirmish than in siege or devastation, tactics recommended by Vegetius and preferred at the time, which called for many kinds of non-noble but respected fighting men such as sergeants, crossbowmen, sailors, and engineers.
Chapter 4, "The Knight and Chivalry," shows that chivalry, "an ethos in which martial, aristocratic and Christian elements were fused together," developed in France and elsewhere around 1180, at the time of Chretien's Perceval. As a "crack professional fighter" the knight had appeared everywhere in Europe by the end of the eleventh century, but without the ethos, according to the work of J. Flori. Paterson finds that the earlier sense, the knight as fighting man, continued in Occitania without significant development of the ethos of chivalry. In troubadour lyric cavalier means "gentleman," "courtier," "suitor," or "lover," without ideological overtones. As for a possible knightly code calling for mercy towards one's opponent, and so on, "the silence of the texts on this point is deafening." Accordingly the evidence shows indifference to the tournament as an expression of chivalry, and squires were not apprentice knights, but simply servants. If Occitan culture was not chivalric, it was courtly, according to Chapter 5 ("Courts and Courtiers"), in which Paterson surveys the courts in the various regions as Jeanroy did in his Poesie lyrique(1934). The troubadours alternately idealized the court and complained about its shortcomings. Only one great court festival, held at Beaucaire in 1174, has left a trace in the Occitan records of these two centuries.
Chapter 6, "Peasants," surveys types of peasants and the kinds of work they did; peasant resistance to abusive lords helped produce the Peace and Truce of God. Chapter 7, "Towns," describes the lives of urban knights, burghers, merchants, artisans, consuls, lawyers, and Jews—who commonly suffered bleeding hemorrhoids, according to a contemporary medical treatise, because of habitual fear and anxiety. Chapter 8 shows that "Doctors and Medicine," including Arabic and Jewish physicians, thrived better in Occitania than in France.
Chapter 9, "Women," surveys the burgeoning literature on the subject. It would be reckless in the present state of research to affirm that Occitan women enjoyed greater autonomy than Frenchwomen, but "the place of women in land transactions was certainly far greater in the Middle Ages than it was at the time of the Napoleonic code." Before the twelfth century there were scarcely any nunneries in Occitania, and those few reserved for the daughters of the aristocracy; the twelfth century did not mark a major turning point but the thirteenth century did, with a major expansion of opportunities for female religious. Catharism probably did not attract a disproportionate number of women, as has sometimes been thought. "In thirteenth-century Europe women seem to have started menstruation at the same time as they do now," which "suggests that women were healthier and better fed ... than they were either in Antiquity ... or in the early nineteenth century." A few weeks before childbirth a woman "should practice sneezing, holding her breath and pushing down," much as in a twentieth-century Lamaze course.
Chapter 10, "Children," rebuts P. Aries's assertion that the Middle Ages had no "sentiment de l'enfance" by showing that "from the twelfth century children were valued, noticed, differentiated from adults, and subject to special care"—especially boys, that is, while girls were "virtually invisible." A section of "Paediatric literature, 1256-1315" includes a miniature illustration of a noblewoman choosing a wet-nurse by testing her exposed breast, while "in the margin a monkish observer pulls a disgusted face." In last place comes Chapter 11, "Clergy, Heretics and Inquisitors," in which Paterson follows Magnou-Nortier's view of the Gregorian reform as no reform but a crisis, an "inept authoritarian intrusion" which provides the best explanation why Catharism flourished in Occitania. The skilfully chosen illustrations enliven the text throughout, and sometimes clinch the argument (for example, figures 15 and 16 on the two models of marriage).
It is natural that a synthesis of such broad scope, and one drawing on a specialty which is allied to the author's but indubitably distinct from it, should show a preference for consensus among specialists rather than controversy. Paterson does not show the critical attitude one might expect of a professional historian. I believe, for example, that historians of feudalism have been a more contentious lot than Paterson's reader might realize; she follows the path-breaking work of J. Flori without reviewing the broader debate. She is most combative on the issue of medieval sensitivity to children, on which she takes up the cudgels against poor Aries, as other medieval historians have done before her. She notes Boyle's criticisms of Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou but is not deterred from using his insights. Her most polemical claims, that Occitania was not a chivalric society and that the Gregorian reform was no reform but a crisis, are both well supported in the work of historians.
The great value of this work for the student of the troubadours will lie in the interaction of the social background with the fictions they produced. Such interaction can change the meaning of the text as hitherto perceived. Thus, if Occitan society resisted vassalage, why did the troubadours introduce feudal metaphors so abundantly into their poetry? One part of the answer is that we have read these metaphors too vaguely, without recognizing pertinent distinctions such as the one between vassalic and servile homage; by adopting the voice of a serf the troubadour echoed real social custom for erotic effect. Images of specifically vassalic homage, however, are shown to have had a fictional quality; they may have implied an orientation toward French feudalism of the north, possibly inspired by songs of Bernart de Ventadorn for Eleanor of Aquitaine as Queen of France (29). Another example involves urban law in Toulouse under the French count, after the Albigensian crusade; the evolution to the advantage of the prince through procedures of judicial torture "may help to explain the troubadour Peire Cardenal's attacks on legistas"(174). And again, medical teaching that sexual intercourse can prevent heart or brain disease by purging the humors, while abstinence can cause illness or death, suggests a possible undercurrent of physiological realism in "troubadours' exhortations to their ladies to alleviate their love-sickness" (273). The advice of medical dietetics to avoid sex in summertime but to seek "a fresh-skinned woman hiding under the bedclothes" in winter, on the other hand, suggests that the troubadours' conventional spring setting ran counter to doctors' orders (217).
Other sections of the book may seem to have slight relation to the troubadours, such as the discussion of pediatrics or Catharism, the latter scarcely mentioned in the poetry, the former not at all. But of course they do. Catharism triggered the crusade which made Occitania "the first spectacular casualty" of the "persecuting society" described by R. I. Moore ( The Formation of a Persecuting Society, 1987). Without addressing the problem directly, Paterson allows us to infer that she might agree with the view that the crusade brought troubadour poetry to its demise. Her extensive discussion of pediatrics can serve to remind us that insofar as the troubadours succeeded in their entreaties to their domnas, they just might have made babies. If their songs do not say so, that silence is a meaningful one. Paterson's expert survey of the multifaceted reality that surrounded the troubadours helps us both to realize how much they left out of their songs, and to understand more realistically what they put in.