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

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.