Singing Crusade Journeys

In mapping geopolitics and spirituality, Crusade songs enacted motion and travel. Directionality and circularities typify Crusade songs and Crusaders alike. Songs variously embody dialogues between singing and hearing, the actions of Crusaders traveling both outremer and homeward. As songs moved through geographical spaces, bodies, air, and time, they articulated new contexts. Multiply re-created, songs emerged from composite and collective processes that included monks, troubadours, performers, scribes, and listeners. Contrafacture, seen in the relationship between Walther von der Vogelweide’s Palästinalied and Jaufre Rudel’s Lanqan li jorn, demonstrates the dialogic nature of these layers of creation, and how differing Crusade perspectives re-inscribe a song’s expression of striving, movement, or conclusion. Overall, Occitanian songs rendered the Crusade front as areas inflected by regional perspectives, from unknown spaces to meaningful places. Using techniques like deictic language, oppositional rhetoric, and circular motion, Crusade songs reinforced contemporaneous ideologies in both their poetic texts and directed melodic shapes.