Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song

Home to the troubadours and a creative monastic center, twelfth-century Occitania (the south of France) fostered a vibrant musical culture that encompassed both secular and sacred, vernacular and Latin, spanning a wealth of locally cultivated genres. Such musical-poetic impulses reflected and responded to regional practices of courtly love, chivalric ideals, votive worship, monastic theologies, pilgrimage, and Holy War. This book demonstrates the rich cross-fertilizations between early Christian Crusades and two roughly contemporaneous musical-poetic repertories of Occitania: the sacred, Latin Aquitanian versus and the vernacular troubadour lyric. These two repertories are known largely in medieval and musicological studies for reasons apart from the Crusades—for monastic piety and Marian devotion in the case of the versus, and for courtly love and authorial voices in the case of the troubadour repertory. Yet, when considered against unfolding Crusade events, these poetic-musical repertories illuminate shifting Occitanian identities and worldviews as refracted by contemporaneous devotional practices, religious beliefs, and geographies, both physical and metaphoric. The author’s contextual investigations and musical-textual interpretations reveal how Crusade songs distinctively arose out of their southern French environments, at a historical moment when Holy War and new genres of musical composition coincided. Engaging both the outer world and the poet’s subjectivity, Crusade songs shaped regional identities, enacting individual concerns, the communal homeland, religious and military aspirations, and specific historical and geopolitical positions.