Description: Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song focuses on two twelfth-century musical-poetic practices of southern France - the sacred Aquitanian versus and the vernacular troubadour lyric - and newly interprets them within their shared context of the early Crusades.
Review Quotes: "Golden's music-textual study of geospatial themes in (especially) Occitanian crusade song, as well as her appendix (which provides a concordance of over sixty songs that invoke crusade together with existing modern editions), rounds out a body of material that could readily serve as the foundation for an illuminating academic course on the culture of medieval crusade." -- Jennifer Saltzstein, Journal of the American Musicological Society
"Focusing on fundamental concepts of crusade such as circularity, pilgrimage, dualism, and the spatio-temporal coordinates related to both Biblical topography and contemporary geography of military campaigns, Golden provides innovative readings of crusade songs as sonic and mobile phenomena. Mapping Medieval Identities successfully demonstrates how these songs cultivate regional (Occitan) and personal identities inflected by the experience of crusade." -- Marisa Galvez, Associate Professor of French and Italian, and by Courtesy, German Studies, Stanford UniversityÂ"Rachel Golden has produced a study that ranges over a wide variety of crusader song and successfully situates it in the rich cultural, social and political context of the Central Middle Ages. The book offers vivid insights into a body of song that illuminates the dynamics of a conflict between civilizations that occupied societies of the Mediterranean basin for half a millennium and strongly resonates in today's society." -- James Grier FRSC, Professor of Music History, University of Western Ontario"No suitable quote." -- Valentin Portnykh, Journal Of Ecclesiastical History "Employing a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives, engaging with music and literature in different languages, anthropology, historiography, and literary criticism, this book contributes to a holistic understanding of the phenomenon of the Crusades and actively invites its readers to reflect on uses of us-versus-them rhetoric and modern perceptions of Otherness." -- Stefano Milonia, Medium Ævum