Singing the Crusades: French and Occitan Lyric Responses to the Crusading Movements, 1137–1336 by Linda Paterson (review)

Linda Paterson has for many years been leading a collaborative project that makes available a corpus of around two hundred crusade-related songs in Old French and Occitan. It is the culmination of decades of study of the troubadours. This project was a collaborative effort involving the Universities of Warwick, La Sapienza (Rome), and Royal Holloway (London), and was funded by the AHRC from 1 June 2011 to 31 January 2016. The project website has been live for several years (<https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/research/french/crusades/background/>), and includes full translations of each text into English and Italian, accompanied by useful and detailed notes on the often murky issues of dating and context. The present book is a digest of 'the best bits' that places the songs in their historical contexts over the period 1137–1336.

Paterson's introduction is helpful and lucid, offering thoughts on thorny questions such as the extent to which these songs can be considered popular culture, public opinion, or secular voices. The introduction also discusses modes of performance, which are largely unknowable. From there, Singing the Crusades is structured chronologically, starting around the time of the second crusade because that is when the corpus of French and Occitan songs begins. There are chapters covering each of the major canonical crusades from the second to the eighth, as well as the Albigensian crusade and the Barons' crusade of Thibaut de Champagne. Each chapter begins with a short description of the crusading context in which the poems are placed, followed by a discussion of how the poems contribute to our understanding of motivations, emotions, and to a lesser extent the events themselves. The book has three appendices. The first is a linguistic analysis by Marjolain Raguin-Barthelmebs, in which she asks to what extent the Occitan troubadours and French trouvères were imitating the themes set forth by crusade preachers. The second and third appendices offer respectively a chronology of the texts and a table showing which songs have melodies preserved in the manuscripts.

Overall, the book does an important service in diversifying crusade studies away from Latin accounts. A 'best bits' approach saves one from trawling through hundreds of crusade poems on the website. The website and book thus complement each other, the former as a repository, the latter as a more approachable narrative of the crusades told through the songs themselves. The poems cover themes that are often difficult to get at through chronicle accounts, including love (of women, god, Jerusalem), piety, pilgrimage, masculinity, departure, commitment, service, duty, and irreverence.

The volume is overall incredibly helpful and enlightening, with translations that are accurate and readable, accompanied (as should be the case) by text in the original languages. I nevertheless found myself harbouring a few small complaints, as comes naturally to any scholarly reader. First, while the book is for the most part approachable, Paterson occasionally assumes knowledge of poetic terminology and indeed medieval poetic terminology (planh, canso, sirventes, etc.) that may alienate non-specialists. The nature of her material necessitates this, but a glossary (such as appears in Mary Egan, The Vidas of the Troubadours, Garland, 1984, pp. 113–14) could have been helpful. There is a glossary on the website, but it is not very thorough, and could indeed be improved post hoc.

More importantly, greater signalling of the existence of other crusade songs beyond her corpus would have been helpful. Every study must draw its boundaries, of course, and so I can understand why Paterson did not include discussion of German poetry, Latin poetry, or Old French and Occitan epic poems (such as Ambroise, or the famous Old French cycle relating to the first crusade). However, I worry that a student who picks up Singing the Crusades might leave with the mistaken impression that Paterson's is the only...