Musical Lives: Towards an Historical Anthropology of French Song, 1100-1300 (MUSLIVE)

How did song shape human experience in the medieval period? What can a deeper knowledge of the lives of the people who composed and performed medieval song add to our understanding of human history? Musical Lives: Towards an Historical Anthropology of French Song, 1100-1300 (MUSLIVE) is an interdisciplinary project which approaches one of the earliest written European vernacular (non-Latin) song traditions – French ‘trouvère’ song – as a transnational social practice. It investigates how making poetry and song influenced identities and connected people not only in the northern French space with which this tradition is usually associated, but also across the Mediterranean where song makers travelled on pilgrimage and crusade. The project takes a multilingual and multicultural approach to song practices, bringing contemporary Arabic, Hebrew, Occitan and French traditions into dialogue with each other.

Emerging in the northern French courts of the nobility during the twelfth century and remaining in practice until at least the early fourteenth century, around 2,200 trouvère songs survive, many of which can be connected to known historical figures. These songs were sung by the people who composed them and by others in their social circle, including professional performers. They often focused on themes of courtly love and loss. Working with musicologists, literary scholars, historians and performers, MUSLIVE explores both these songs and, through historical archival work, the lives of the people who made them, building networks of people who participated in and interacted through a shared song culture.

Recordings of medieval music and accompanying performance materials will be added to this collection as these become available.

The data on songs and people underlying the outputs will be collected throughout the project and will be made available at the end of the project. MUSLIVE is a qualititative project and it is not the aim of the project to produce a comprehensive dataset on the trouvères, their networks and their songs. However, the project uses a relational approach to structuring its data which allows connections to emerge. In making the data underlying our outputs available in this structured way, we hope that others will be able to use and build on it.