"there is a castle on a cloud...." (Day 8)

Today in class we talked about Erec and Enide and the Cathars. Erec and Enide was written by Christien de Troys and it is about a knight from King Arthur's court. We know that he is so popular because there have been so many manuscripts found by him. Erec and Enide was originally a poem written in octosyllables. Le Roman was a new genre that evolved around 1150. It had characteristics of romance. It was the first literary genre intended to be read, and was read aloud. It was in the vernacular, rather than in Latin. In Erec and Enide, there was a lot of description. I found it very interesting to know that superlatives are often used to describe the main characters and the number 500 is like our "millions;" it represents a large number. At this time in history, there were no stories about peasants. The ones that did exist were making fun of them. This was because they wanted to write stories about the people who would read them and neither the peasants nor the middle class read them.

We also learned about the Cathars before we went to visit their last stronghold at Montesgur. The Cathars were a group of Christian heretics who believed that life was a struggle between the body and the spirit. They did not have any statues or objects, and they did not even have any places of worship. Their only sacrament was Baptism. Ordination occurred for priests and death was also observed. They only had three commandments: 1) Do not kill. 2) Don't pass judgment. 3) Do not invoke the name of God (like swearing an oath). Because of the crusades and general medieval life, these were very hard to live by.

For lunch we had chicken and french fries. After lunch, we left for Montesegur. It was a castle

on top of a mountain that the Cathars had for protection. It was a very steep walk with a lot of rocks and huge steps, but the view was absolutely amazing. There were a lot of clouds, so it made the visibility a little less, but when we made it to the top, we were literally in the clouds and it was really cool. Walking down was surprisingly difficult, but I'm actually proud to say I only fell down once. Then I walked with Peggy and Chad to the town. We weren't exactly sure we were gong the right way, but we made it. Not much was open in the town, but we did see a store with things made with a local blacksmith.

We then drove back and had dinner. We had asparagus (which was much better than at home!) We also had a dish with meat and mashed potatoes, which was also really good. After dinner, we had the first college night, where 6 different colleges put on skits about what makes their colleges unique.