Sorry, Tabster - As you might have gathered I'm not an academic, more of proletarian reveller on the fringes of anything so much as resembling scholarship; maybe I should have pointed this out with a footnote? Instead of 'evident' I should have said 'conjectured' - my apologies for any confusion this may have caused.

As for the conjecture... Are you familiar with Yves Rouquette at all? From what I can gather he's something of an authority on both the Cathars & Troubadours - he did the Vida / Razos recitations on the old Clemencic Consort albums. I must confess all this gets mixed up in my head rather, along with those awful books by Arthur Guirdham (The Cathars & Reincarnation, Great Heresy etc.) which I read in my youth, along with a novel called 'A Note that Breaks the Silence' by Adam John Munthe, quoted liberally in Martin Best's performances of the songs of Guiraut Riquier (which yielded the Last of the Troubadours album), which certainly gave the impression that he had sympathies with the plight of the Cathars, if not their cause, and had further links to the court of Alfonso X, who was responsible for Cantigas de Santa Maria. The whole Gnostic / Troubadour thing has been seeping into my soul for more years than I care to remember - I still love what Clemencic & Zosso did on those old albums, no matter how derided they were at the time, and since if it comes to that, by those who might question such a liberally modernistic approach to what has since become a particularly post-modern issue.