In medieval Occitania (southern France), troubadours and monastic creators fostered a vibrant musical culture. In response to the early Crusade campaigns of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Christians of the region turned to producing monophonic, poetic song, encompassing both secular and sacred genres. These works assert shifting regional identities and worldviews, exploring devotional practices and religious beliefs, overlaid with notions of contemporaneous geopolitics and secular, intellectual interests. Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song demonstrates the profound impact the Crusades had on two seemingly discrete musical-poetic practices: the Latin, sacred Aquitanian versus, associated with Christian devotion, and the vernacular troubadour lyric, associated with courtly love.
Rachel May Golden investigates how such Crusade songs distinctively arose out of their geographic environment, uncovering intersections between the beginning of Holy War and the emergence of new styles of poetic-musical composition. She brings together sacred and secular genres of the region to reveal the inventiveness of new composition and the imaginative scope of the Crusades within medieval culture. These songs reflect both the outer world and interior lives, and often their conjunction, giving shape and expression to concerns with the Occitanian homeland, spatial aspects of the Crusades, and newly emerging positions within socio-political history. Drawing on approaches from cultural geography, literary studies, and musicology, Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song provides a timely perspective on geopolitical and cultural interactions between nations.
Industry Reviews
"Golden's music-textual study of geospatial themes in (especially) Occitanian crusade song, as well as her appendix (which provides a concordance of over sixty songs that invoke crusade together with existing modern editions), rounds out a body of material that could readily serve as the foundation for an illuminating academic course on the culture of medieval crusade." -- Jennifer Saltzstein, Journal of the American Musicological Society
"Focusing on fundamental concepts of crusade such as circularity, pilgrimage, dualism, and the spatio-temporal coordinates related to both Biblical topography and contemporary geography of military campaigns, Golden provides innovative readings of crusade songs as sonic and mobile phenomena. Mapping Medieval Identities successfully demonstrates how these songs cultivate regional (Occitan) and personal identities inflected by the experience of crusade."
-- Marisa Galvez, Associate Professor of French and Italian, and by Courtesy, German Studies, Stanford UniversityÂ
"Rachel Golden has produced a study that ranges over a wide variety of crusader song and successfully situates it in the rich cultural, social and political context of the Central Middle Ages. The book offers vivid insights into a body of song that illuminates the dynamics of a conflict between civilizations that occupied societies of the Mediterranean basin for half a millennium and strongly resonates in today's society." -- James Grier FRSC, Professor of
Music History, University of Western Ontario
"No suitable quote." -- Valentin Portnykh, Journal Of Ecclesiastical History
"Employing a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives, engaging with music and literature in different languages, anthropology, historiography, and literary criticism, this book contributes to a holistic understanding of the phenomenon of the Crusades and actively invites its readers to reflect on uses of us-versus-them rhetoric and modern perceptions of Otherness." -- Stefano Milonia, Medium Ævum
