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

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. Cover 1 Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 List of Tables 10 List of Figures 12 List of Examples 14 Introduction: Landscape, Group Identity, and the Songs of the Trouvères 16 Medieval People and Their Environments 20 Of Songs and Identities: Authorship, Anonymity, and Group Identities 22 The Design of This Book 26 PART I LANDS AND IDENTITIES 32 1. The Lay of the Land 34 Medieval Environments: Climate and Human Flourishing 35 Northern French Cities and their Rural Surroundings 37 Rural Topographies: Forests, Fields, Meadows, Parks, and Gardens 42 2. Trouvère Identities: Rank, Status, and Geography 50 Knightly Trouvère Biographies: Lives and Careers 52 Clerkly Trouvère Biographies: Lives and Careers 55 Group Identities, Knightly and Clerical 60 Representing Individual and Group Identities in Medieval Songbooks: Knights, Clerics, and Performers 66 Songbooks and Songbook Patronage as Projections of Noble Identity 78 Songbook Portraits and Authorial Persons: Author Portraits as Seals 80 PART II SONG AND SPRING IN TOWN AND COUNTRY 88 3. In the Meadows: Feeling the Landscape through the Songs of Knightly Trouvères 90 Landscape and Knightly Identity in the Songs of Gace Brulé 92 Autobiography, Variability, and Authorial Persons: Approaching Trouvère Song in Manuscripts 96 Feeling the Landscape in the Songs of Gace Brulé 104 Generating Feeling: Landscape and Melodic Form in the Songs of Knightly Trouvères 110 4. In the City: Landscape, Season, and Plant-​Life in the Works of Cleric-​Trouvères 133 Rejecting the Nature Opening in Clerical Song: Adam de la Halle, Moniot d’Arras, Richard de Fournival 135 The Nature Opening and Chaillou de Pesstain’s Additions to the Roman de Fauvel (fr.146) 141 Landscapes and Plant-​Life in the Songs of Simon d’Authie and Gilles le Vinier 145 The Nature Opening and the Motet: Trees of Virtue and Trees of Vice 154 PART III IN THE PASTURE AND THE GARDEN 176 5. Rural Landscapes and the Pastourelle: Boundaries, Spatial and Social 178 Space, Place, and Identity in Pastourelle Narratives 183 Boundaries Transgressed: Topographies of Rape in the Pastourelle 188 Urban Composers and Rural Life: Pastourelle Landscapes of Arras 196 6. The Song-​Space of the Medieval Garden: Performance and Privacy in the Rondet 211 The Medieval Rondet: Aspects of Genre, Register, and Transmission 212 Re-​placing the Rondet: “Bele Aeliz” and “C’est la jus” on the Landscape of the Estate 217 Ornamental Landscapes: Experiencing Space, Place, and Movement through the Rondet 220 The Promise of Privacy: Watching, Being Watched, and Overhearing in the Rondet 223 Conclusions: Nature, Culture, and Change in the Middle Ages and Beyond 237 Continuities Amid Change in Machaut’s Remede de Fortune 240 Culture, Identity, Climate, and Change, Medieval and Modern 247 Acknowledgments 252 Appendix: “Au renouveau” by Gace Brulé 254 Manuscript and Print Sources 256 Bibliography 262 Song Index 282 General Index 286