Medieval France
CRUSADE SONGS/CHANSONS DE CROISADE
. The twenty-nine extant French crusade songs span the hundred years of the Second to Seventh Crusades; the thirty-five Occitan pieces include both earlier and later compositions. The latter, almost all the work of well-known troubadours, from Marcabru to Guiraut Riquier, belong to the lyric genre of the sirventes and deal with political, moral, or religious aspects of the Crusades, exhorting or rebuking. The French corpus is much more varied in form and, especially, in content. While over a third of the pieces are anonymous, many, most notably four by Thibaut de Champagne, stem from famous trouvères. In addition to composing polemical and hortatory songs of the Occitan type, the northern poets were concerned with the impact of the Crusades on their lives as lovers. Indeed, half of the corpus expresses, usually in the style of the grand chant courtois, the stress caused by the conflicting demands of love and religious duty, and the pain of separation from the beloved; two of the songs develop the separation theme from the woman’s point of view.
Samuel N.Rosenberg
[See also: TROUBADOUR POETRY; TROUVÈRE POETRY]
Bédier, Joseph, and Pierre Aubry, eds. Les chansons de croisade, publiées avec leurs mélodies. Paris: Champion, 1909.
Jeanroy, Alfred, ed. La poésie lyrique des troubadours.
2 vols. Toulouse: Privat; Paris: Didier, 1934, Vol. 2, pp. 200–12.
Bec, Pierre. La lyrique française au moyen âge (XIIe–XIIIe siècles): contribution à une typologie des genres poétiques médiévaux. 2 vols. Paris: Picard, 1977–78, Vol. 1: Études, pp. 150–58; Vol. 2: Textes.
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