Devotional Refrains In Medieval Latin Song

This book reveals the importance of sung refrains in the musical lives of religious communities in medieval Europe.

Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France offers a new perspective on how medieval song expressed relationships between people and their environments. Informed by environmental history and harnessing musicological and ecocritical approaches, author Jennifer Saltzstein draws connections between the nature imagery that pervades songs written by the trouvères of northern France to the physical terrain and climate of the lands on which their authors lived. In doing so, she analyzes the different ways in which composers' lived environments related to their songs and categorizes their use of nature imagery as realistic, aspirational, or nostalgic. Demonstrating a cycle of mutual impact between nature and culture, Saltzstein argues that trouvère songs influenced the ways particular groups of medieval people defined their identities, encouraging them to view themselves as belonging to specific landscapes. The book offers close readings of love songs, pastourelles, motets, and rondets from the likes of Gace Brulé, Adam de la Halle, Guillaume de Machaut, and many others. Saltzstein shows how their music-text relationships illuminate the ways in which song helped to foster identities tied to specific landscapes among the knightly classes, the clergy, aristocratic women, and peasants. By connecting social types to topographies, trouvère songs and the manuscripts in which they were preserved presented models of identity for later generations of songwriters, performers, listeners, patrons, and readers to emulate, thereby projecting into the future specific ways of being on the land. Written in the long thirteenth century during the last major era of climate change, trouvère songs, as Saltzstein demonstrates, shape our understanding of how identity formation has rested on relationships between nature, culture, and change.

Wie beeinflussen Tanzbewegungen die musikalische Spielweise? Und umgekehrt: Welche Wirkung hat die musikalische Interpretation auf die Ausführung einer Choreografie? Wie stehen tänzerische und melodische Phrasierung zueinander? Derlei Fragen zum Verhältnis von Tanz und Musik ergeben sich sowohl bei der praktischen Ausführung als auch bei der Erforschung historischer ‹Tanzmusik›. Entsprechend vielseitig sind die Zugänge, mit denen dieser interdisziplinäre Band ‹Tanzmusik› vom Mittelalter bis zur Romantik untersucht, kontextualisiert und im Sinne historischer Musikpraxis erschließt. Im Mittelpunkt steht die Wechselbeziehung zwischen Klang und Bewegung in verschiedenen historischen Repertoires, Gattungen und Formen.

Stories between Christianity and Islam offers an original and nuanced understanding of Christian–Muslim relations that shifts focus from discussions of superiority, conflict, and appropriation to the living world of connectivity and creativity. Here, the late antique and medieval Near East is viewed as a world of stories shared by Christians and Muslims. Public storytelling was a key feature for these late antique Christian and early Islamic communities, where stories of saints were used to interpret the past, comment on the present, and envision the future. In this book, Reyhan Durmaz uses these stories to demonstrate and analyze the mutually constitutive relationship between these two religions in the Middle Ages. With an in-depth study of storytelling in Late Antiquity and the mechanisms of hagiographic transmission between Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages, Durmaz develops a nuanced understanding of saints’ stories as a tool for building identity, memory, and authority across confessional boundaries.

This in-depth exploration of key manuscript sources reveals new information about medieval songs and sets them in their original contexts.

Redefines musical analysis for a period that marks the beginnings of composition as we know it now.

Ranging from 500 to 1200, this book considers the neglected vernacular music of this period, performed mainly by women.

First full comprehensive guide to one of the most important genres of music in the Middle Ages.