(2013) and editor of Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle (2019). She is the recipient of both the Summer Stipend (2014) and year-long Fellowship (2016–2017) of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2018, she was honored with the H. Colin Slim Award by the American Musicological Society for her article, “Rape and Repentance in Two Medieval Motets” (Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2017).
Saltzstein applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History, and reported the following:
Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France explores how medieval song expressed relationships between people and their environments. Informed by environmental history and harnessing musicological and ecocritical approaches, I draw connections between the nature imagery that pervades songs written by the trouvères of northern France and the physical terrain and climate of the lands on which their authors lived. The songwriters I profile in the book use of nature imagery as realistic, aspirational, or nostalgic.Learn more about Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France at the Oxford University Press website.
Page 99 occurs in my book’s third chapter, “In the Meadows: Feeling the Landscape in the Songs of the Knightly Trouvères.” This chapter explores love songs written by a group of knights during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Many of the figures I explore were battle-hardened warriors. They nonetheless write songs that appear to be in their own voices in which they walk out onto a beautiful, expansive landscape and sing in emotional language about love. In most cases, the songs are set in springtime and the sensory delights of singing birds, fresh air, flowers, and meadows inspire the song’s speaker to think of their beloved and often to sing. This device has been called the “nature opening” (Natureingang in German) and I show that it is especially loved by knightly songwriters. Through extensive research in the field of environmental history I establish that the landscapes described by knightly trouvères are often a realistic reflection of land management practices on medieval lordly estates (land knights either held or wished to hold).
Page 99 focuses on such a song by the Châtelain de Couci, a knight who likely fought in the third and fourth crusades. This song’s form is in two distinct parts (musicologists call it pedes cum cauda form), the first part (the pedes) uses the “nature opening” while in the second (the cauda), the speaker cries out with emotion over his love. I present a melodic transcription of the music accompanying this passage, arguing “The restrained pedes contrast sharply with the speaker’s emotional outpouring in the cauda on the exclamation ‘Alas’!” In this song and others I highlight, the songwriters use changes in the melody in ways that encourage listeners to feel the shift from their description of the landscape to the expression of emotion.
The Page 99 Test works for my book. The device I describe on page 99 is central to the argument of chapter 3, in which I show that knightly songwriters used the “nature opening” in ways that expressed a key aspect of their identity—the intertwining of land, love, and song. The approach I adopt in chapter 3 is representative other chapters of Song, Landscape, and Identity, which explore how medieval songs demonstrate the intertwining of landscape and identity formation for other medieval social groups (clergymen, noblewomen, peasants, and city dwellers). My book shows that the intertwining of landscape and identity pervades medieval songs of many genres written by many different types of people. It also shows that many of these songs are nostalgic in the way the represent the land. My book is set temporally during the shift between the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age, and the songs I explore show that once images of land are tied to identity, they become culturally durable, often persisting even when the management of that land or the state of the climate changes.
--Marshal Zeringue
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