“They were innovators and progressives,” Taylor writes of the troubadors, “interested in the arts and sometimes pressing for social reforms; they eschewed the use of force: they delighted in gay and colorful clothes. Above all, they erected the Virgin Mary into their especial patron: many of their poems are addressed to her, and in 1140 a new feast was instituted at Lyons—a feast which, as Bernard of Clairvaux protested, was ‘unknown to the custom of the Church, disapproved by reason and without sanction from tradition’—the feast of the Immaculate Conception.”
