Rachel May Golden, Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. xviii + 284 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-094861-0.

The study of crusade songs has had something of a renaissance in recent years. From early attempts to edit and codify the corpus of crusade lyric to in-depth studies of songs and their context, the twentieth century witnessed continued interest in these songs but little in the years after the turn of the century. Renewed scholarly interest led to journal articles on crusade songs appearing in the 2010s and a flurry of monographs around 2020. The project ‘Lyric Responses to the Crusades in Medieval France and Occitania’, spearheaded by Linda Paterson and involving researchers from the University of Warwick, Royal Holloway University of London and the University of La Sapienza in Rome, yielded a monograph and a collection of essays (both 2018), as well as an invaluable website that provides editions, translations, historical information and recordings for all surviving troubadour and trouvère crusade songs.¹ Marisa Galvez’s 2020 monograph explores the treatment of crusading in lyric from a range of linguistic traditions.² Rachel May Golden’s monograph on crusade songs from Occitania takes the field of research further still, and is the first book by a musicologist of which I am aware that is dedicated to crusade song.

Golden’s monograph explores the history of Occitan and Latin crusade songs composed in Occitania, an area roughly equivalent to the southern half of modern-day France. The study is innovative in its focus on Occitania, which, as Golden notes, tends to be neglected in favour of northern French crusade song. Golden also challenges the scholarly compartmentalisation of genres and language by discussing both troubadour lyric, considered to belong to the musical culture of courts, and Aquitanian versus, a Latin genre of monophony or polyphony (though Golden only looks at monophonic examples), which scholars have attributed to the Abbey of St Martial in Limoges and other related monastic institutions. Golden resists being too prescriptive in her definition of crusade songs, which enables this broad approach. In their 1909 edition of Old French crusade song, Joseph Bédier and Pierre Aubry suggested that most crusade songs belong to one of two categories: (1) an exhortation to go on crusade, related to the genre of the serventois; (2) a love song, related to the genre of grand chant, in which crusade causes the lover to be separated from the beloved.³ Various attempts have been made to refine this definition, with scholars expanding or reducing the corpus of songs as a result. Golden sidesteps these debates by taking ‘a deliberately inclusive approach’ (p. 28) that analyses songs whose texts and melodic setting demonstrate the broader ideas and practices that early crusading generated.

Studies of crusade song have tended to concern themselves with dating individual songs and explaining how topical references within songs relate to the history of crusades. With their references to contemporaneous events and historical figures, crusade songs are unusual among medieval songs in the extent to which their date, place and context of composition can be adduced. While Golden’s monograph richly details the context in which these Occitanian crusade songs were composed – the First and Second crusades, the reconquista, and the Albigensian crusade – her purpose is somewhat different from that of other studies. As she demonstrates throughout the book, Occitanian crusade songs were preoccupied with space and place, and poet-composers used ideas of space and place to exhort listeners to go on crusade, to understand the theological significance of crusading and to conceptualise, through dialectic, both the place of home (Occitania) and the destination of a crusade. Drawing on principles from cultural geography, Golden asserts that crusade songs aimed to transform the Outremer (the medieval term for the Holy Land) from a space (an unknown Cartesian volume or area) into a place (a region that is known and knowable through beliefs and practices). Poet-composers could engage in such exercises of ‘mapping’ by inflecting their poetry with first-hand experience of travelling outremer if they had been on crusade, or by imagining what the Holy Land was like, based on the sacred geographies set out in the Bible and in liturgy and on reports given by returning crusaders. This broad application of mapping allows Golden to include songs by poet-composers who would not themselves have travelled to the East, such as those cloistered at the Abbey of St Martial. Mapping Medieval Identities is therefore just as much a contribution to the study of music and place as it is a study of medieval song.

Golden’s monograph can be divided into three principal sections. The first section, chapters 1 and 2, lays the foundation for later chapters’ discussion. Golden explains that her methodology draws on the work of anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz and cultural geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan to assert that place shapes cultural practices, and cultural practices shape understandings of place. This place-oriented approach, Golden argues, can be married with the close reading of poetry and music, which, in her view, together ‘present a single lucid conception’ (p. 22). In her setting of the historical scene that follows, Golden suggests that there was a distinct Occitanian identity during the twelfth century, an ‘Occitanianness’ (p. 49) that can be felt in the way that poets talk about places outside of Occitania such as Muslim Spain, northern France, or the Outremer. This is one of the book’s key claims: Occitania is defined in relation to other places, which might be characterised as near or far, depending on their perceived level of cultural or confessional similarity. Occitania was not France, for example, as Golden demonstrates through Raimon de Miraval’s Bel m’es q’ieu chant e coindei (PC 406.12), a response to the Albigensian crusade in which the French are too close (having invaded Occitania) when they ought to be far away.⁴ Nor is Occitania Muslim Spain, a place named as far away by the poet-composer (perhaps Folquet de Marselha) of Ja non volgra qu’om auzis (PC 155.12) because it is the location of a confessional Other, Islam. In other songs, Spain is suggested to be close, so as to make it a more attractive destination for crusading than the Holy Land. These binaries of near/far, home/away, Christian/pagan are central to the ‘mapping’ that Golden sees in Occitanian crusade song. Occitanian identity is also manifest in the distinctive musical practices of the twelfth century: versus cultivated at St Martial, and troubadour song in the various Occitanian courts. Golden justifies her discussion of them side-by-side by noting the interactions between courtly and monastic spheres in the period, which are suggestive of a distinct Occitanian musical culture shared by monastery and court.

The second section of the book takes a closer look at the ideas surrounding crusade. Golden notes that the first call to crusade by Pope Urban II in 1095 was an attempt to synthesise previous strands of culture into the new activity of crusading; the instant, extraordinary and widespread popularity of crusading indicates the effectiveness of Urban’s message. Urban transformed violence into a laudable activity through crusading; though the Church condemned violence between Christians, the violence of crusade was framed by Urban as a kind of Christian charity because it would aid Eastern Christians living in the Holy Land. Crusading was also cast as a kind of pilgrimage by Urban, similar to the more local journeying and veneration of saints with which Occitanian listeners would have been familiar. Veneration of relics was likened by Urban to the veneration that pilgrims ought to perform at sites in the Holy Land linked to Christ’s life, such as the Holy Sepulchre, or even the very land that Christ walked on, the Holy Land itself. Crusading was thus offered as a means to receiving complete penance for past sin, an attractive proposal to lay people of various classes, but especially to knights, who were considered to be especially prone to sinful behaviour. It was thanks to Urban’s preaching campaign in Occitania, and his appointment of Occitanian crusade leaders, that crusading became particularly associated with Frankish identity.

Golden proposes two key ways that twelfth-century Occitanians viewed geography and religion. The first of these, circularity, is most clearly seen in maps from the period. These circular maps reflected the view that the world was a round disc with Jerusalem at its centre. Golden also sees circularity in the emphasis placed on home and homecoming in crusade rhetoric. Various crusade songs include mention both of the journey to the Holy Land and the return journey, a kind of circularity. Jerusalem was also figured as a kind of spiritual home, to which Christians would return via crusading. The second key paradigm in crusade songs is ‘dualistic rhetoric’ (p. 135), a way of viewing the world in binary terms such as us/them, Christian/pagan, near/far or here/there. Golden demonstrates the presence of circularity and dualistic thinking in the text and melody of Raimbaut de Vaqueiras’s Ara pot hom conoisser (PC 392.3).

While brief analyses of crusade songs are peppered throughout the first four chapters, in-depth analysis is reserved for chapters 5 and 6, the book’s final section. First, Golden examines two Latin versus written around the time of the First Crusade. Ierusalem mirabilis was composed before Jerusalem had been captured by the crusaders in 1099, whereas Nomen a solemnibus was written some time after this victory for the Christians. Both songs make use of deictic language, a concept that Golden borrows from the linguist Karl Bühler to describe words that point to something else. Words such as ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘now’ or ‘then’ differ from ‘naming language’ (p. 162) because they show the speaker’s position to be situated and relational. Ierusalem mirabilis and Nomen a solemnibus use deictic language in different ways because their speakers have different attitudes towards the Holy Land. In Ierusalem mirabilis, Jerusalem has not yet been conquered and is a longed-for place. It is therefore presented as distant using words like ‘over there’ or ‘there’, and by mixing past and present tenses. By the time Nomen a solemnibus was composed, Jerusalem had become a place that was known to Christian crusaders, and the song consequently presents Jerusalem as proximate and welcoming. Golden also sees these different mappings of Jerusalem reflected in the melodies of the two versus, which I discuss further below.

Two troubadour songs written around the time of the Second crusade offer insights into vernacular discourses of crusading: Marcabru’s Pax in nomine Domini (PC 293.35) and Jaufre Rudel’s Lanqan li jorn (PC 262.2). For the Christian forces, principally from France and the Holy Roman Empire, the crusade was unsuccessful, and the Fall of Damascus to Muslim forces in 1148 was widely considered a failure of Christendom. Marcabru’s song calls on returning crusaders to redeem themselves by crusading in Iberia in the movement known as the reconquista. Marcabru portrays Iberia as nearer than the Outremer to encourage crusaders to join the fight without undergoing another long and dangerous journey that involved crossing the sea (something medieval crusaders seem to have particularly feared). Jaufre’s song – perhaps the best known crusade song for modern audiences – is concerned with love, and uses the idea of distance that is so ubiquitous in crusade rhetoric to explore his concept of amor de loing (love from afar). As Golden shows, deictic language, circularity and dualistic thinking are at work in these songs in different ways.

Other themes emerge throughout the book and deserve brief mention. First, Golden shows that the sacred and secular were intertwined in distinctive ways in crusade song. This linking of secular and sacred concerns was central to Urban’s project, since it gave a sacred purpose to lay people and gave to the Church the military power possessed by secular lords. Crusade songs sit at the intersection of sacred and secular worlds, with monastic songs (versus) concerned with secular power and courtly songs (by troubadours) concerned with the spiritual and the divine. Second, crusade songs often collapse temporally distinct periods: the time of Christ is situated in the same place as the destination for crusading ‘now’. This temporal merging enabled crusaders to connect their actions directly to Christ. Third, crusade songs are indiscriminate in their categorisation of racial and religious others. Non-Christian peoples are all considered pagan under the dualistic mentality of Christian composers; this explains, in part, the violence meted out on Jews by crusaders on their way to the Holy Land. Finally, Occitanian crusade songs sometimes betray an anxiety about Occitanian and French identity. Although the Albigensian crusade did not take place until the later stages of the troubadour tradition, earlier troubadour songs sometimes try to draw a distinction between France and Occitania. This was perhaps necessary, given that crusaders from various countries were often simply labelled ‘Franks’.

Locational hermeneutics

Golden’s book is a rich and detailed account of the historical context in which crusade songs were composed, performed, heard and written down. Her exhaustive knowledge of scholarship on the crusades and her meticulous synthesis of previous scholarly work makes the book a wonderful resource, particularly for musicologists and students who have little to no knowledge of medieval culture. Perhaps the most significant intervention made by Golden is her detailed analyses of versus and troubadour song, which will be of interest to musicologists and non-musicologists alike. Golden’s readings of crusade songs attempt to analyse melody through the lens of crusade mentalities such as circularity, dualistic thinking and deictics. In so doing, Golden implies that melody is as much involved in the process of mapping as poetry. This hermeneutics of musical location is intriguing, and merits a closer look via the discussion of two examples below.

Metaphors of location abound in music theory of the period, suggesting that musicians then, as now, would have been comfortable thinking about pitch in locational terms. Susan Rankin notes that a transition had occurred in the description of pitches by the mid-ninth century: by this point, commentators specifically talk of ‘high’ and ‘low’ pitches, and conceive of musical space vertically.⁵ While the relative ‘height’ of a pitch was not represented in the vertical placement of some adiastematic neumes, pitches are stacked vertically in the Dasian notation diagrams of the Musica enchiriadis and in the staff notation in Guido d’Arezzo’s writings.⁶ Later writers would attribute the location of solmized pitches on the hand to Guido, an indication that the spatial conceptualisation of pitch was strongly associated with him throughout the later Middle Ages.⁷ As Anna Maria Busse Berger shows, these practices were related to the art of memory, a means of organising knowledge by using imagined or metaphorical spaces such as a many-roomed house, a beehive or a grid.⁸ Mary Carruthers has also demonstrated that medieval people experienced performance arts (poetry, music, drama) as a kind of journey or ‘ductus’, a path that one follows that unfolds in time but also leads to new places.⁹ Although Golden does not use these locational paradigms for her analyses, it seems likely that medieval musicians and listeners would have been willing to think about melody in terms of a movement through or mapping of loci, especially when prompted by songs’ texts.

The features that Golden identifies and interprets in the songs she studies are not unique to the crusade repertory. Aspects of a song such as its strophic form, multiple and hierarchically related tonal goals or melodic repetition are commonly found in vernacular song and in versus. While it could be argued that the conventionality of such gestures weakens Golden’s claims, in my opinion conventional musical moves can still be meaningful, especially when geographic themes in a song’s text have the potential to shape the way that a listener hears a melody. In the following discussion of juxtaposition and circularity, I consider how applicable these crusade mentalities are to medieval melody.

Juxtaposition and deictics

Golden applies the idea of ‘dualistic thinking’ to her analysis of melody by identifying where a pitch space is divided in two different ways, or where a melody has two different tonal goals. This approach is one that is broadly applicable outside of crusade song, especially in genres where poet-composers make use of strong binary oppositions in their texts, as both Thomas Payne and I have recently argued.¹⁰ In her discussion of the versus Ierusalem mirabilis, Golden notes the presence of ‘musical and poetic binary juxtapositions’ and a ‘dualistic rhetoric’ that distinguish between Jerusalem and Occitania (p. 160). This binary is not explicit in the text – Occitania is not mentioned – but because the poem describes Jerusalem as ‘there’ (ibi) or ‘that place’ (illuc, illic) throughout and is addressed in the vocative in the first two stanzas, ‘here’ (Occitania) is implied. The poem has a tripartite structure, as shown in table 1. The melody is different for each stanza, but there are strong similarities between all of the stanzas’ melodies, such that Golden speaks of ‘strophic variability’ (p. 169). Two tonal goals emerge: g and d. The pitch g predominates in the first two stanzas, then d becomes dominant such that from stanza IV onwards, d and its neighbour notes are the final pitches of most lines (see table 1).

Table 1 Summary of text and melody of Ierusualem mirabilis

Golden mixes what might termed a ‘processual’ approach with the ‘Aubrey’ approach. The ‘processual’ approach follows the principle that the text of each stanza interacts in a different way with the melody (something that is especially true of a melody with variation from strophe to strophe such as Ierusalem mirabilis), so that the analysis must account for the unfolding of the song over time.¹¹ Golden notes, for example, that the g–c′ tetrachord recedes in importance at the point in the song where the vocative addresses to Jerusalem cease. The ‘Aubrey’ approach is that set out by Elizabeth Aubrey in her study of troubadour melodies, in which she suggests that the poetic trajectory of a multi-stanza poem is encapsulated in the melody regardless of that melody’s interaction with the text.¹² Golden suggests that the two poles of the melody, g and d, are emblematic of ‘here’ and ‘there’, and that the overall melody of the song is a ‘dynamic melodic migration that gradually arrives at an initially distant goal, namely d, which unfolds as the song’s ultimate resolution’ (p. 174).

Golden’s consideration of the unfolding melody is laudable, and the narrative that she constructs – one of gradual arrival at the tonal destination – compellingly combines ideas of place and space with melodic ductus. I question, however, if this reading makes most sense when the melody is read against the poetic text. I infer from Golden’s interpretation that ‘resolution’, the arrival on d, first happens in stanza III and is cemented from stanza IV onwards (see Example 1). Golden reads cadences on g as ‘open’ (p. 172) and, by implication, cadences on d as closed and the final destination, which for this crusade song equates to Jerusalem. But this sense of arrival at the destination is not reflected in the text at stanzas III and IV; in fact, I would suggest that at stanza III there is a definite shift in the text to make Jerusalem seem distant. In the first two stanzas, Jerusalem is described, first as a timeless city of wonders, and then as the point of arrival for Christ on a donkey, before he suffers the passion. Present participles are used in these stanzas (‘permanens’ (line 3), ‘veniens’ (line 5), ‘residens’ (line 7)), suggesting that these events are happening now and are thus temporally (and therefore also geographically) proximate. At stanza III, the tense shifts to the pluperfect, and distancing deictics such as ‘there’ and ‘in that place’ are introduced: Jerusalem is consequently depicted as much more distant than the first two stanzas implied. At the very point in the melody where Golden sees the emergence of arrival in the melody, then, the text evokes distance.

Example 1 Ierusalem mirabilis, stanzas I–IV, set exactly following Golden’s edition on p. 168

An alternative interpretation would be to see g as the tonal area for Jerusalem and d as the tonal area for Occitania. Golden claims that g is heard as an open pitch in the first two stanzas because the overall tonal centre of the song would seem to be d (the final pitch of all stanzas except the first two) and because d is the first pitch of the song. If stanzas I and II are considered in isolation, g instead emerges as a strong tonal centre, with five of the eight lines ending on g and one line ending on its lower neighbour, f. In listening to a performance of the song, listeners would therefore associate g with a near and present Jerusalem. After stanza II, g recedes in importance, and listeners would come to realise that the tonal centre of the song is not g, but in fact d. This realisation coincides with the distancing of Jerusalem in the text, so that the absence of music centred on g becomes emblematic of the distance between Jerusalem and the place of performance, Occitania. By figuring Jerusalem as absent, a musical rendering of the deictic ‘not here’ (i.e. ‘there’), the song also makes Jerusalem more desirable. In its stubborn refusal to reinstate g as a tonal centre, the song instils in listeners the sense that being ‘here’ in Occitania is unsatisfactory and that, as the song puts it, ‘to that place [Jerusalem] we have to proceed’ (l. 25).

Circularity

Circularity is a concept employed in several analyses by Golden, and she sees it manifested in various aspects of melodies: ‘melodic movement, structural repetition, refrain forms, strophic organizations, and cadential returns’ (p. 129). I am less convinced by her claims about circularity than I am about juxtapositions and deictics, principally for two reasons. First, Golden describes both the conception of the world as round and the outward and homeward crusade journey as circular. Although, as Golden shows, many crusade journeys were intended to end where they started, at home, circularity does not to me encapsulate the sense that crusade journeys could have two destinations: the Holy Land and then home. I suggest that it might be more useful to think of centripetal and centrifugal forces acting on crusaders, impelling them into the centre of the world to Jerusalem while also drawing them back home on the world’s rim. Second, the musical elements that Golden hears as circular are very conventional. That a gesture is conventional is not a reason to assume it cannot be meaningful in particular circumstances. However, musical features such as strophic form, AAB structure or repetitive cadences are so common in troubadour song that I find it more difficult to hear them as manifestations of circularity, especially when they are rarely accompanied by explicitly circular themes in their texts.

In her analysis of Marcabru’s Pax in nomine Domini (PC 293.35; Example 2), Golden hears circularity in the final cadence of the melody on a′, a pitch only reached at the end of one other line, line 2. For Golden, this recalls the opening of the song, a sense that is reinforced by the return of the opening melody at the start of the following stanza. While Golden’s reading here is possible, other aspects of the melody might be read as inflecting a sense of return or circularity more strongly, in particular other repetitions of opening material. As it is also not uncommon for line endings after the opening section to avoid the primary pitch until the final line (as Marcabru does here), and as strophic form is so ubiquitous in troubadour song, it is hard to imagine it being particularly salient to listeners at this point.

Example 2 Marcabru, Pax in nomine Domini (PC 293.35), stanza 1

As Golden notes, the melody moves between tessituras that are low (lines 3–5) and high (lines 8–9), with middle tessituras in between (lines 1–2 and 6–7). As Example 2 shows, and as Golden herself points out, line 6 is almost a repetition of line 1; line 7 evokes line 2 (though much less closely than lines 1 and 6), occupying the same tessitura and with similar rising and falling shapes.¹³ For me, this repetition of the opening material, in an elaborated form, is the most salient moment of musical circularity. It means that the same material is heard every four or five lines in performance, a striking frequency that goes beyond the repetition inherent in strophic form. Furthermore, the return of the opening material coincides with the use of the word ‘lavador’ at the end of line 6 in every stanza. This term, which Golden notes has been debated by scholars, means ‘washing place’ and seems to refer to Iberia as a place where failed Second Crusaders can spiritually redeem themselves. Wherever the melody goes – whether to high or to low places in the tonal space – it is drawn back to this melodic segment, which becomes associated with Iberia. Marcabru thus imbues his melody with a centripetal force that pulls listeners towards Iberia as the destination of the crusade, recentring the globe on western Europe.

Golden’s analyses open up a hermeneutic discourse on the musical aspects of these songs that is new (lacking in earlier studies, which focus on text alone, like Galvez, Paterson and others) and valuable. Part of their value lies in the stimulation they give to others, to which my own disagreement with her readings is a testimony. In asking the kinds of questions about the sung and performative aspects of these poems, Golden will allow other scholars to respond to, refine and disagree with her readings in a way that will establish the value of musicological study more fully for crusade song. Overall, I found Mapping Medieval Identities to be a rich, detailed and in-depth investigation into a fascinating repertory of medieval song. The book’s chapters are helpfully illustrated with musical examples and accompanied by full texts and translations of the songs (those from Latin by Golden herself) that Golden discusses in detail. A useful appendix also lists the crusade songs that Golden examines, with information about the attributed poet-composer, editions and approximate date of composition. As a thought-provoking and rich study of the geography of medieval song, Golden’s monograph will surely find its place on many curricula and bookshelves.