Crusade Songs and the Old French Literary Canon

Old French crusade songs tend to differentiate themselves progressively from those of a more religious and political bent composed by the troubadours, introducing and developing the theme of courtly love typical of the grand chant courtois. This evolution of the crusade song in the direction of love is probably emphasized and amplified by the particular characteristics of the Old French manuscript tradition, which mainly consists of songbooks of a markedly aristocratic cast based on a canon exclusively devoted to courtly love. Some texts of a political or moral nature, closer to the Occitan tradition of the sirventes, survive outside the aristocratic songbooks in peripheral traditions which are not strictly confined to the lyric, namely in some Occitan songbooks, miscellaneous Anglo-Norman manuscripts containing historical and legal texts, or French chronicles of the crusading period. Such texts provide insights into the reality of the problems of expeditions to the Holy Land and constitute an extraordinary source of historical documentation complementing that of chronicles and official documents.