Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song

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.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures List of Musical Examples List of Tables Introduction: "And so I cannot prophesy" Chapter 1: Identity, Space, And Song in Crusading Occitania Construing Local & Global Contexts Space & Place Crusade Songs in Scholarship Motz e So The South and Its Songs Song Genres, Themes & Contexts Sounding Objects in the Distance Chapter 2: Occitania, Court, and Cloister France, Spain & Kingdom St. Martial, Monastery & Movement Versus, Expression, and Resistance Beyond Cloister, Beyond Court An Occitanian Homeland Conclusion Chapter 3: Place, Frankishness, and Regionality Pope Urban's Message Crusade Chronicles Recruitment & Regional Implications Local Heroism in Chant et deport Urban's Synthesis: Love, War, and Vow Indulgence and Penance Embodiment, Violence, and Affirmations of the Tongue God's Wonders, Visions, and the Holy Lance Selfhood, Identity, and Frankishness Chapter 4: Situating the Holy Land: Juxtapositions and Circular Paths Circular Paths Pilgrimage and Devotions Self & Enemy The Allure of Distant Lands Motion, Cross, and Territory in Ara pot hom connoisseur Real & Imagined Journeys Chapter 5: Near and Distant Lands in First Crusade Songs Desiring Distant Lands: Ierusalem mirabilis Pointing Toward Jerusalem Distance, Wonder, and Variation Nomen a solemnibus: Reclaiming Jerusalem Jerusalem, Near & Far Chapter 6: Locality, Distance, and Troubadour Song in the Second Crusade The Second Crusade & Reconquista Marcabru's Moralizing and Invective Marcabru Makes War Jaufre's Distant Desire Singing Across the Sea Chapter 7: Conclusions: Singing Crusade Journeys Re-Creation, Recycling, and Contrafacture Sounding Journeys and Songs in Motion Appendix Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Rachel May Golden is Associate Professor of Musicology in the School of Music at the University of Tennessee, where she heads the Musicology area. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Musicology, Music & Letters, Musical Quarterly, and Opera Quarterly, among other publications. She has been an American Council of Learned of Societies Fellow and an NEH Summer Scholar.

Review :
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. 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. 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. 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.