lifetime by his son, the future emperor Louis the Pious (778–840), and was the origin of
the area later known as Catalonia.
After the crisis of 830 at Louis’s court, the emperor allocated the march to his son
Charles the Bald (823–877). Its last count commissioned by a Frankish king was Guifred
le Velu (d. 897), whose descendants ruled Catalonia for more than half a millennium.
When the Umayyad caliphate in Spain fell in the early 11th century, the area became part
of the group of Christian states that gravitated around the count of Barcelona.
Celia Chazelle
[See also: MARCH]
Bonnassie, Pierre. La Catalogne du milieu du Xe a la fin du XIe siècle: croissance et mutations
d’une société. 2 vols. Toulouse: Association des Publications de l’Université de Toulouse-Le
Mirail, 1975–76.
Riché, Pierre. The Carolingians: A Family Who Forged Europe, trans. Michael I.Allen.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
SPONSUS
. An 11th-century Latin music drama based on the parable of the Wise and Foolish
Virgins. Forty of its eighty-seven verses are in Occitan, making it the earliest dramatic
work with vernacular passages. The text, found in a unique manuscript from Saint-
Martial of Limoges (B.N. lat. 1139), also includes stage directions. The play is set to a
small number of non-liturgical melodies in heighted Aquitanian neumes.
Lynette R.Muir
[See also: LITURGICAL DRAMA; STAGING OF PLAYS]
Thomas, Lucien-Paul, ed. Le sponsus: mystère des Vierges Sages et des Vierges Folles. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1951.
SQUIRE
. See ESQUIRE/ESCUIER
STAGING OF PLAYS
. A large amount of material on medieval staging in France has survived in the form of
stage directions in play manuscripts, lists of stage properties in municipal records and
account books, and eyewitness descriptions in memoirs and letters. Most of it, however,
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1678