Song Landscape And Identity In Medieval Northern France

Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France explores how medieval song expressed relationships between people and their environments. Integrating musicology with literary studies, ecocriticism, and environmental history, author Jennifer Saltzstein compares the nature imagery that pervades the songs of the trouvères of northern France to the physical terrain and climate of the lands on which their authors lived. Through close readings of music-text relationships, she reveals how for many medieval songwriters, identity was tied to place and configured through attachment to specific.

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.

This collection presents fresh evidence and new perspectives on the diverse ways in which women created and interacted with cultures of song between c. 600 and c. 1500.

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

This book brings a new perspective to secular music sources from the Middle Ages and early modernity by viewing them as media communication tools, whose particular features shape the meaning of their contents. Ranging from the eleventh to seventeenth centuries, and across countries and genres, the chapters offer innovative insights into the historical relationship between music and its presentation in a wide variety of media. The lens of media enables contributors to expand music history beyond notated music manuscripts and instruments to include images, furniture, luxury items, and other objects, and to address uniquely visual and material aspects of music sources in books and literature. Drawing together an international group of contributors, the volume pays close attention to the medial and material dimensions of musical sources, considering them as multifaceted objects that not only contain but also determine the nature of the music they transmit. Transforming our understanding of musical media, this volume will be of interest to scholars of musicology, art history, and medieval and early modern cultures.

"This work provides an interdisciplinary and historical exploration of various techniques leveraging writing in order to capture sound. Collectively, the essays in this work focus on questions of language and expression as much as the method and theory of both sound and writing"--

In this study of vernacular French narrative from the twelfth century through the later Middle Ages, first published in 2000, Donald Maddox considers the construction of identity in a wide range of fictions. He focuses on crucial encounters, widespread in medieval literature, in which characters are informed about fundamental aspects of their own circumstances and selfhood. These always arresting and highly significant moments of 'specular' encounter are examined in numerous Old and Middle French romances, hagiographic texts, epics and brief narratives. Maddox discloses the key role of identity in an original reading of the Lais of Marie de France as a unified collection, as well as in Arthurian literature, fictions of the courtly tryst, genealogies and medieval family romance. The study offers many new perspectives on the poetic and cultural implications of identity as an imaginary construct during the long formative period of French literature.

Difference in medieval France was not solely a marker for social exclusion, provoking feelings of disgust and disaffection, but it could also create solidarity and sympathy among groups. Contributors to this volume address inclusion and exclusion from a variety of perspectives, ranging from ethnic and linguistic difference in Charlemagne's court, to lewd sculpture in Béarn, to prostitution and destitution in Paris. Arranged thematically, the sections progress from the discussion of tolerance and intolerance, through the clearly defined notion of foreignness, to the complex study of stranger identity in the medieval period. As a whole the volume presents a fresh, intriguing perspective on questions of exclusion and belonging in the medieval world.