NB&P: Jennifer Saltzstein - Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France

Host Kim Marshall interviews OU Professor of Musicology Jennifer Saltzstein about her new book Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History (Oxford University Press, 2023). In this book, Saltzstein offers a new perspective on how medieval song expressed relationships between people and their environments. Informed by environmental history and harnessing musicological and ecocritical approaches, author Jennifer Saltzstein draws connections between the nature imagery that pervades songs written by the trouvères of northern France to the physical terrain and climate of the lands on which their authors lived. Saltzstein argues that trouvère songs influenced the ways particular groups of medieval people saw themselves through the lens of their environment, creating durable landscape-based identities that persisted even when the environment itself changed. This durable connection between identity and landscape has compelling implications for our own time.