Hearing Song and Conversion in Medieval France

What does it mean to convert from one religion to another? What about from one language to another? Or from one cultural context to another? This talk explores the concept of conversation literally and metaphorically through the lens of French, Hebrew, and Latin song in thirteenth-century France. Framing conversion as an ongoing, reversible, and retraceable process, two case studies detail the movement of people, ideas, text, and music between Judaism and Christianity. The first considers a pair of French-texted songs narrating a protagonist’s conversion from Judaism to Christianity credited to the trouvère Mahieu le Juif. The second focuses on Hebrew songs converted from a secular French Christian sphere to a Jewish devotional milieu through the process of contrafacture, the setting of a preexisting melody to a new text.

Mary Channen Caldwell is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on early music and dance. Her research focuses on song in medieval Europe and appears widely in journals and edited collections. Caldwell’s current work explores the intersection of song and conversion in the long thirteenth century. View her full bio and website.