Jennifer Saltzstein, Song, Landscape & Identity in Medieval Northern France. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2023, 274 pp., illustrations and tables.

This recent book by Saltzstein offers a strikingly original re-evaluation of the trouvère repertoire by placing landscape and environment at the center of poetic and musical meaning. Building on her earlier work on ethics and social responsibility in medieval song, Saltzstein now turns to the ways in which natural settings shape identity, emotion, and social experience in the thirteenth century. Her argument that landscape functions not as a decorative backdrop but as an active agent in the construction of lyric subjectivity is both persuasive and invigorating, and it opens new interpretive pathways for scholars and performers alike.