«Un démon dans mon ventre». Cortezia, amour, hérésie avant la Croisade albigeoise

Abstract

«A Demon in My Belly». Cortezia, Love and Heresy before the Albigensian Crusade. In 1222 a pregnant adolescent girl named na Aimerzens Viguier was mocked by two «good women » for having a demon in her belly. The «good women » (or «good ladies ») were fugitive heretics and their insult was recalled by na Aimerzens two decades later for the inquisition in Toulouse. In the twelfth century there was no «heresy of the good women » or «heresy of the good men » between the Garonne and Rhone. Indeed, there were no heretics anywhere in Latin Christendom in the twelfth century, Waldensians included, if by that category we mean any individual purposely choosing to be labelled as hereticus or knowingly putting themselves at risk of persecution and punishment on account of what they believed or practiced. Of course, there were feverish accusations of heresy polluting the lands of the count of Toulouse by Latin Christian intellectuals in the twelth century, but such polemics, while sometimes efforts at explaining actual phenomena, were not, as modem scholars all too frequently read them, journalistic reportage. This does not mean I do not take such polemics seriously, I just do not think accusations of heresy, however sincerely believed by those making them, is the same as heresy actually existing as a historically verifiable entity. Moreover, accusations of heresy between the Garonne and the Rhône in the twelfth century rarely focused on the good men and good women, the targets being counts, bishops, abbots, wandering preachers, hermits and mercenaries. This diverse landscape of “heresy” is lost when we read backwards from the thirteenth century. This essay evokes the world of the good men and good women before the Albigensian Crusade, when they embodied cortezia, when they were not yet heretics, ultimately suggesting what it meant for an adolescent girl to be mocked in a time of holy war for having a demon in her belly.