Known as the Joan of Arc of Southern France, Esclarmonde de Foix is the powerful, brilliant, and courageous leader of spiritual resistance against the genocidal 13th century Albigensian Crusade. Her life and teachings come alive when Isobel, who is in France researching the link between the troubadours and the Cathars, is shown an unpublished manuscript (Sovinensa), hidden for centuries. This is an eyewitness account of the period written by Esclarmonde’s student that describes the original core spiritual teachings of the Cathars, shedding new light on the Crusade. As Isobel reviews and discusses the Sovinensa with the manuscript’s owners, Agnès and Guilhèm, she recognises the lies created by centuries of carefully constructed Church-inspired misinformation and sees a remarkable similarity between then and what is happening all over the world today. While the contemporary setting is fiction, the Sovinensa is fact. Occitania was a land on the verge of the Renaissance where Esclarmonde fought to preserve the light of truth against the encroaching darkness.
