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).

• List of Tables


• List of Figures


• List of Examples


• Introduction


• PART I: LANDS AND IDENTITIES


• 1. The Lay of the Land


• 2. Trouvère Identities: Rank, Status, and Geography


• PART II: SONG AND SPRING IN TOWN AND COUNTRY


• 3. In the Meadows: Feeling the Landscape through the Songs of the Knightly Trouvères


• 4. In the City: Landscape, Season, and Plant-Life in the Works of Cleric-Trouvères


• PART III: IN THE PASTURE AND THE GARDEN


• 5. Rural Landscapes and the Pastourelle: Boundaries, Spatial and Social


• 6. The Song-Space of the Garden: Performance and Privacy in the Medieval Rondet


• Conclusions: Nature, Culture, and Change in the Middle Ages and Beyond


• Acknowledgements


• Appendix: "Au renouveau" by Gace Brulé


• Manuscript and Print Sources


• Bibliography


• Song Index


• General Index

Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France explores how medieval song expressed relationships between people and their environments. Integrating musicology with literary studies, ecocriticism, and environmental history, author Jennifer Saltzstein compares the nature imagery that pervades the songs of the trouvères of northern France to the physical terrain and climate of the lands on which their authors lived. Through close readings of music-text relationships, she reveals how for many medieval songwriters, identity was tied to place and configured through attachment to specific landscapes.