the essential
Every summer, while in the lists of the City, knights in armor recreate medieval tournaments, various Aude communes organize more peaceful representations. What to remember from these various festivities?
In the reconstruction of the festivals studied by Véronique Hochedé, while the men engage in actions requiring strength such as making swords or armor, the women devote their time to cooking. When, exceptionally, by erasing their femininity, they participate in battles, they guard the camp deserted by the men who are fighting, and take care of the equipment. In any case, if women can sometimes play a masculine role, the reverse is not possible, because this would discredit male virility, while women promote themselves by participating in activities normally reserved for men. men. As for the cinema, when they exercise a profession, particularly in the case of widowhood, or when the husband has gone on a religious pilgrimage, women devote themselves to textile activities, to the grocery store, to the apothecary, and are waitresses in taverns. or work the fields. However, films sometimes feature intriguing women who can assert their power violently through the sword or magic.
Local personalities
If these representations are certainly valid in general for our region as for other parts of medieval France, we can nevertheless highlight a few notable exceptions. This is how Anne Brenon showed the role played by women in the world of Catharism of the 12th-13th centuries. To stick to the example of Blanche, widow of the powerful lord Sicard de Laurac, she converted to Catharism before 1200 and kept a house of perfects where notable believers listened to the sermons. In another area, that of Courtly Love, we can note that the woman is valued, because her nobility is of a higher rank than that of her lover/suitor. In yet another area, Eleanor of Aquitaine (1124-1204), queen of France then of England, participated in the second crusade. In the previous period, Ermessende, daughter of the Count of Carcassonne Roger the Elder, had married in 993 the Count of Barcelona Raymond Borrel. Widowed in 1017, she played a key role in the direction of Catalan affairs until her death at the age of 83! From the comparison between these few examples and the representations mentioned above, we can think that it is more for the organizers to meet the expectations of spectators who are fans of historical fiction than to reproduce medieval reality. Véronique Hochedé, in conclusion of her study, even wonders if the stagings which claim to represent the Middle Ages are not the reconstruction of the past of the 19th or 20th century, very present in the minds of designers who lived in the rural world of this period.
