Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song, by Rachel May Golden

Abstract

Review| December 01 2021 Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song, by Rachel May Golden Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song, by Rachel MayGolden. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. xviii, 284 pp. Jennifer Saltzstein Jennifer Saltzstein JENNIFER SALTZSTEIN is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry (D. S. Brewer, 2013). Her article “Rape and Repentance in Two Medieval Motets” (this Journal, 2017) received the H. Colin Slim Award of the American Musicological Society. Her current book project explores relationships between song, landscape, and identity in medieval northern France. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2021) 74 (3): 673–677. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2021.74.3.673 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer Saltzstein; Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song, by Rachel May Golden. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2021; 74 (3): 673–677. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2021.74.3.673 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search In Mapping Medieval Identities, Rachel May Golden explores the topic of crusade in the songs of twelfth-century Occitania, illustrating how song became a vehicle for the formation of crusader identity. This identity, she underscores, was forged collaboratively by knights and monks: crusade rhetoric appears first in the Latin monastic versus genre and subsequently in vernacular songs written by troubadour-crusaders. Golden illustrates the ways in which many crusade songs worked to articulate a geography of the crusade journey in which songs, through their lyrics and melodies, mapped a spatialized exploration of the experience of crusade and its dynamics of place and movement. Golden’s contention that crusade songs “acted as means for negotiating imagined and real geographies” (p. 233) relies fundamentally on relationships between lyrics and melody. Her close readings of such relationships explore how some songwriters combined music and words to articulate the geography and temporality of crusade. Golden argues... You do not currently have access to this content.