Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History

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Jennifer Saltzstein (Presidential Professor and Associate Professor of Musicology, Presidential Professor and Associate Professor of Musicology, University of Oklahoma)

Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France

Toward an Environmental History

Jennifer Saltzstein (Presidential Professor and Associate Professor of Musicology, Presidential Professor and Associate Professor of Musicology, University of Oklahoma)

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English

Oxford University Press Inc
04 October 2023

Music reviews & criticism; Western "classical" music; Medieval & Renaissance music (c 1000 to c 1600)

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.

By: Jennifer Saltzstein (Presidential Professor and Associate Professor of Musicology Presidential Professor and Associate Professor of Musicology University of Oklahoma)
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 158mm, Width: 235mm, Spine: 17mm
Weight: 431g
ISBN: 9780197547786
ISBN 10: 0197547788
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 04 October 2023
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

"Jennifer Saltzstein is the Presidential Professor and Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Oklahoma. She is author of The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry and editor of Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle and received the H. Colin Slim Award from the American Musicological Society for her 2017 article, ""Rape and Repentance in Two Medieval Motets."" Saltzstein has received grants and awards from the Huntington Library Foundation, the International Machaut Society, the American Musicological Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded her both a summer stipend (2014) and a year-long fellowship (2016-2017)."

Reviews for Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History

"""Jennifer Saltzstein's new book is absolutely eye opening. Sharing the recent tendency to take exordial stanzas at their word rather than as empty rhetorical gestures, Saltzstein asks what aspects of nature, exactly, the Natureingang describes. Her search for answers uncovers the fascinating historical and social geography of medieval French landscape reflected in these songs. [...] Throughout, landscape is brilliantly conjugated with poetic texts, musical settings, social class, and the framing effects of vision that turn land into landscape, whether it be the commanding vistas of the powerful, the perilous seclusion of rape victims, or the privacy of ladies in a walled garden. Saltzstein's corpus is wide but the implications of this impressive book go wider still, making this a must-read for anyone interested in France in the long thirteenth century."" -- Sarah Kay, author of Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera ""From the moment when Jennifer Saltzstein writes that she aims to explore the songs of twelfth- and thirteenth-century France in relation to 'plant-life, topography, climate, and patterns of land use' it is clear that this book will be something very special indeed. And so it is. This is a brilliantly conceived, well written, and most persuasive study that explores some of the richest repertoires of medieval music in terms of their natural environment on the fertile grasslands and undulating hills of the north-European plain."" -- Christopher Page, University of Cambridge ""This rich and essential study excavates the trouv�res' musical and poetic landscapes with insightful attention to the complex conditions of their songs' composition and transmission. Combining environmental history with musicological analysis and manuscript studies, Jennifer Saltzstein offers a holistic account of the intertwined cultures of chivalry, clergy, and city, and the ways that the human experience of the natural world resonated in song throughout the long thirteenth century - whose end coincided with that of the Medieval Climatic Optimum and the waning of the trouv�re tradition itself."" -- Carol Symes, author of A Common Stage: Theatre and Public Life in Medieval"