Where Troubadours Were Bishops. The Occitania of Folc of Marseille (1150-1231) (review)

Abstract

REVIEW Nicole M. Schulman, Where Troubadours Were Bishops. The Occitania of Fole of Marseille (?50-1231). New York and London: Routledge, 2001 . xlvii + 305 pp. Nicole Schulman brings together what are often dispersed materials on different aspects ofthe career ofa single late-twelfth/ early-thirteenth century individual, Fole ofMarseille. Here (pp. 3177 ) we have an account ofthe troubadour Fole, Fole the Cistercian and Fole the bishop ofToulouse. Schulman has also provided us with a series oftexts and translations in her appendices (pp. 181278 ), which contain on facing pages the Occitan poems and her English translations, manuscript variants of the vidas and razos and a chronology and discussion ofFolc's dates. Schulman's notes and bibliography are extensive and it is clearthat she has attempted to exhaust every possible source. This is a very welcome collection of materials and work of reference for those of us working on Cistercians in the Midi as well as those working on troubadours. It is, indeed a life of an Occitanian in context which can easily be placed alongside Fredric Cheyette's recent Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours. Fole is one ofseveral troubadours who eventually became Cistercians, and one of many Cistercians and others who convert as adults to the religious life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when conversion was all the rage in Western Europe. He seems to have been a bourgeois, possibly the son ofa Genoese merchant in Marseilles, whose religious conversion led him to enter the Cistercian house of Ie Thoronet. Schulman's treatment of Fole the troubadour is rather limited in comparison to that of Fole the Cistercian or Fole the bishop, a fact that has much to do with the type and abundance of sources which become much more considerable for his years as bishop and campaigneragainst heresy. For the last years ofhis life, indeed for the period after Cistercians began preaching against the Cathar heretics, several chronicle accounts provide considerable mention ofFole. In her introduction 55 REVIEW Schulman discusses the problematic aspects of these chronicles which present various interpretations oftheAlbigensian Crusades. She then uses them to piece together the later life ofthis son ofa merchant, become troubadour, who was married and had two sons before converting to the religious life and becoming a Cistercian monk, an abbot, bishop ofToulouse, a Crusader against Catharism, an important supporter ofthe early Dominicans, participant in the Peace negotiations of 1 229 and as such, founder ofthe university ofToulouse and supporter ofthe newly-emerging Inquisition. As a historian ofthe region and the Order, I wanted to know more about what things were unique to Fole as a troubadour turned Cistercian — things that might have been seen better if the "conversion" aspects of his life had been taken up in an explicit comparison between what we can know of his life in comparison to those of Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Waldo, or mendicant founders, Dominic and Francis, or indeed in that ofthe southern-French knight turned Cistercian, Pons de Leras, whose twelfth-century life has been examined by several historians (see Kienzle, for example). Fole is far from the typical Cistercian, or at least our ideal ofthe typical Cistercian. First, he had married and had two children before he converted to the religious life. He seems to have decided to enter the religious life with his entire family, but what happened to his wife and sons immediately after his conversion is less clear. I would certainly not discount the possibility that all four ofthem entered Ie Thoronet as Schulman suggests. (For whole families entering reformed religious communities at this time, see Berman, pp. 196 ff, and Women andMonasticism, pp. 79-81 .) Little is said about the wife. In my view she may have been one ofa group of women attached to Ie Thoronet who would later form the core of the separate house of Cistercian nuns at Saint-Pons-de-Géménos near Marseilles, which was founded circa 1205. There are numerous examples ofeleventh and twelfth-century reform houses having women attached who would eventually found a separate community (see Berman, pp. 14-15; or Women andMonasticism, pp. 77-96). Thus, her move to a separate community may have...