"This volume brings together literary and musical compositions of medieval France, identifying the use of voice in these works as a way of articulating gendered identities"--

This volume brings together literary and musical compositions of medieval France, including the Occitanian region, identifying the use of voice in these works as a way of articulating gendered identities. The contributors to this volume argue that because medieval texts were often read or sung aloud, voice is central for understanding the performance, transmission, and reception of work from the period across a wide variety of genres. These essays offer close readings of narrative and lyric poetry, chivalric romance, sermons, letters, political writing, motets, troubadour and trouvère lyric, crusade songs, love songs, and debate songs. Through literary, musical, and historiographical analyses, contributors highlight the voicing of gendered perspectives, expressions of sexuality, and power dynamics. The volume includes feminist readings, investigations of masculinity, queer theory, and intersectional approaches. The contributors interpret literary or musical works by Chrétien de Troyes, Aimeric de Peguilhan, Hue de la Ferté, the Chastelain de Couci, Jacques de Vitry, Christine de Pizan, Anne de Graville, Alain Chartier, and Giovanni Boccaccio, among others. Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song offers a valuable interdisciplinary approach and contributes to the history of women’s voices in the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. It illuminates the critical role of voice in negotiating culture, celebrating and innovating traditions, advancing personal and political projects, and defining the literary and musical developments that shaped medieval France. Contributors: Lisa Colton | Emily J Hutchinson | Daisy Delogu | Tamara Bentley Caudill | Katherine Kong | Meghan Quinlan | Lydia M Walker | Rachel May Golden | Anna Kathryn Grau | Anne Adele Levitsky

This volume brings together literary and musical compositions of medieval France, identifying the use of voice in these works as a way of articulating gendered identities.

This collection presents fresh evidence and new perspectives on the diverse ways in which women created and interacted with cultures of song between c. 600 and c. 1500.

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.

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.

The number of surviving medieval secular poems attributed to named female authors is small, some of the best known being those of the trobairitz the female troubadours of southern France. However, there is a large body of poetry that constructs a particular textual femininity through the use of the female voice. Some of these poems are by men and a few by women (including the trobairitz); many are anonymous, and often the gender of the poet is unresolvable. A "woman's song" in this sense can be defined as a female-voice poem on the subject of love, typically characterized by simple language, sexual candor, and apparent artlessness. The chapters in Medieval Woman's Song bring together scholars in a range of disciplines to examine how both men and women contributed to this art form. Without eschewing consideration of authorship, the collection deliberately overturns the long-standing scholarly practice of treating as separate and distinct entities female-voice lyrics composed by men and those composed by women. What is at stake here is less the voice of women themselves than its cultural and generic construction.