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Occitania, known today as the "south of France," had its own language and culture in the Middle Ages. Its troubadours created "courtly love" and a new poetic language in the vernacular, which were to influence European literature for centuries. There are many books on the troubadours, but this is the first comprehensive study of the society in which they lived. For readers of literature it offers a wide-ranging insight into the realities that lay behind the poetic mystique. For historians it opens up an important and neglected area of medieval Europe.
The Second Crusade (1145-49) was an unprecedented attempt to expand the borders of Christianity in the Holy Land, the Baltic, and the Iberian peninsula. This wide-ranging collection offers a series of original interpretations of new and partially explored evidence of the crusade. The essays examine the planning, execution, and consequences of the crusade for Western Europe, the Crusader States of the Holy Land, and the Muslim Near East.
"The Music of the Troubadours is the first comprehensive critical study of the extant melodies of the troubadours of Occitania. It begins with an overview of their social and political milieu in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, then provides brief biographies of the troubadours whose music survives. The four manuscripts that transmit this music are described in detail, with attention to their genesis in the overlapping roles of composers, singers, and scribes"--Back cover
The thirteenth century saw such a proliferation of new encyclopedic texts that more than one scholar has called it the “century of the encyclopedias.” Variously referred to as a speculum, thesaurus, or imago mundi—the term encyclopedia was not commonly applied to such books until the eighteenth century—these texts were organized in such a way that a reader could easily locate a collection of authoritative statements on any given topic. Because they reproduced, rather than simply summarized, parts of prior texts, these compilations became libraries in miniature. In this groundbreaking study, Mary Franklin-Brown examines writings in Latin, Catalan, and French that are connected to the ...
The Speculum musicae of the early fourteenth century, with nearly half a million words, is by a long way the largest medieval treatise on music, and probably the most learned. Only the final two books are about music as commonly understood: the other five invite further work by students of scholastic philosophy, theology and mathematics. For nearly a century, its author has been known as Jacques de Liège or Jacobus Leodiensis. ’Jacobus’ is certain, fixed by an acrostic declared within the text; Liège is hypothetical, based on evidence shown here to be less than secure. The one complete manuscript, Paris BnF lat. 7207, thought by its editor to be Florentine, can now be shown on the basi...
The dazzling culture of the troubadours - the virtuosity of their songs, the subtlety of their exploration of love, and the glamorous international careers some troubadours enjoyed - fascinated contemporaries and had a lasting influence on European life and literature. Apart from the refined love songs for which the troubadours are renowned, the tradition includes political and satirical poetry, devotional lyrics and bawdy or zany poems. It is also in the troubadour song-books that the only substantial collection of medieval lyrics by women is preserved. This book offers a general introduction to the troubadours. Its sixteen newly-commissioned essays, written by leading scholars from Britain, the US, France, Italy and Spain, trace the historical development and setting of troubadour song, engage with the main trends in troubadour criticism, and examine the reception of troubadour poetry. Appendices offer an invaluable guide to the troubadours, to technical vocabulary, to research tools and to surviving manuscripts.
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.
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 analys...
In a series of essays readers will find information about modern scholarship on the subject of chivalry and various suggestions for ways to teach some familiar and unfamiliar chivalric materials. Short bibliographies are provided for teachers' further use.