Two Medieval Occitan Toll Registers from Tarascon

Download or read book Two Medieval Occitan Toll Registers from Tarascon written by William D. Paden and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two Medieval Toll Registers from Tarascon presents an edition, translation, and discussion of two vernacular toll registers from fourteenth and fifteenth-century Provence. These two registers are a valuable new source for the economic, linguistic, and transportation history of medieval France, offering a window onto the commercial life of Tarascon, a fortified town on the east bank of the Rhône between Avignon and Arles. William D. Paden discusses the developing fiscal policy of the counts of Provence, for whom the tolls were collected, and the practice and vocabulary of medieval toll-keeping. An afterword considers the toll registers in relation to the poetry of troubadours, arguing that the realism of the registers and the idealism of troubadour poetry overlapped in the world of medieval Tarascon.