Research Catalog

Title

Song, landscape, and identity in medieval northern France : toward an environmental history / Jennifer Saltzstein.

Author

Saltzstein, Jennifer

Publication

• New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023]
• ©2023

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

viii, 274 pages : illustrations, music; 24 cm

Summary

"This book investigates how northern French vernacular poets and musicians writing in the late Middle Ages expressed relationships between people and their environments. It explores medieval French song through the critical and disciplinary lenses of ecocriticism and environmental history. The repertoire under scrutiny embraces the gamut of forms and genres of 13th- and 14th-century French music, considering the songs of the trouvères, the ars antiqua motet, the formes fixes, the plays of Adam de la Halle, and the lyric-infused narrative poetry of Guillaume de Machaut. Although these works have never before been conceptualized as a corpus of nature poetry, they routinely evoke nature and the outdoors. They feature the gardens, meadows, and trees found in the countryside that many of their authors inhabited, and they conceptualize nature as crucial to poetic inspiration, to the fulfillment of desire, and as a space symbolic of the sacred. Through a deep contextualization of these songs and the people who wrote them, Song, Landscape, and Identity offers a novel account that demonstrates how song could present modalities of engagement with nature that were determined by geography, gender, and status. Key questions include: How realistic is the nature imagery in these songs? What ways of interaction with a landscape do they encourage? Where, and for whom, were such experiences available? The answers to these questions reposition medieval song as a privileged vehicle through which songwriters expressed relationships between nature, place, and class"--

Alternative Title

Song, landscape, & identity in medieval northern France

Subject

• 500-1400
• Songs, French > 500-1400 > History and criticism
• Landscapes in music
• Landscapes in literature
• National characteristics, French, in literature
• Songs, French

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages [247]-265) and indexes.

Contents

Introduction : Landscape, group identity, and the songs of the Trouvères -- Part I. Lands and identities. The lay of the land ; Trouvère identities : Rank, status, and geography -- Part II. Song and spring in town and country. In the meadows : Feeling the landscape through the songs of knightly Trouvères ; In the city : Landscape, season, and plant-life in the works of cleric-Trouvères -- Part III. In the pasture and the garden. Rural landscapes and the Pastourelle : Boundaries, spatial and social ; The song-space of the Medieval garden : Performance and privacy in the Rondet -- Conclusions : Nature, culture, and change in the Middle Ages and beyond.

Call Number

JME 23-390

ISBN

• 019754777X
• 9780197547779
• 0197547788
• 9780197547786

OCLC

1368145240

Author

Saltzstein, Jennifer, author.

Title

Song, landscape, and identity in medieval northern France : toward an environmental history / Jennifer Saltzstein.

Publisher

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023]

Copyright Date

©2023

Type of Content

text

notated music

still image

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages [247]-265) and indexes.

Chronological Term

500-1400

Cover Title

Song, landscape, & identity in medieval northern France

Research Call Number

JME 23-390