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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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Dr Susanna Niiranen, of the Department of History in the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, kindly read and commented on this novel. She specialises in the women troubadours of Southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries. Norman Allum was most helpful in the Languedoc.

And Alessandro Barbero, Claudia Grosso and Riccardo Pergolis all provided invaluable information on the court of Monferrato. In spite of their assurances that the court would have moved around, I have taken the view of the Enciclopedia de La Repubblica (Utet, 2003) that it would have been at Chivasso, because I needed it to be somewhere!

I am very grateful to Nicolas Gouzy and Véronique Marcaillou of the Centre for Cathar Studies in Carcassonne for their assistance and support.

I have read many books and articles about troubadours, trobairitz, Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade while researching this book. Among the most useful have been Yves Rouquette’s The Cathars (Loubatières, 1998), Jonathan Sumption’s The Albigensian Crusade (Faber, 1978), Stephen O’Shea’s The Perfect Heresy (Profile Books, 2001) and Laurence Marvin’s The Occitan War (Cambridge University Press, 2008). On troubadour life and poetry, Linda M. Paterson, The World of the Troubadours (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and F. R. P. Akehurst and Judith M. Davis (eds), A Handbook of the Troubadours (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995), have been invaluable.

I’m grateful to the Bodleian and Taylorian libraries in Oxford and, as always, the utterly wonderful London Library.