Activities
Poetry competition
Contestants in the poetry competition were invited to write a poem of up to 50 lines in English with the title ‘Crusade’. The poet Grevel Lindop has now decided on the winners and runners-up and offered his comments: see the results page, which provides links to the poems and, in some cases, comments by the poets themselves.
Music
A group of Warwick University students and staff led by final-year French Studies undergraduate Liam Lewis, with the assistance of Jude Rees who plays a variety of medieval instruments, set up a medieval music group. They hope to give a free public concert and to record some or all of this, along with individual performances of Occitan and/or Old French crusade songs, which will be posted on this site. Click here to watch and hear them rehearsing the Old French Chevalier, mult estes guaritz., and see their current blog.
On 14 May 2014 at Warwick University Francesco Carapezza recorded musical performances of some Old French and Occitan lyrics. Listen to a recorded interview in Italian where he describes the music and his personal feelings about them, discusses what the manuscripts tell us about the melodies, and explains his approach to performing them; or download a transcript of the interview in Italian or a translation into English.
The Medieval Song at Warwick group will be performing at a number of events this academic year (2014-15), including a short lunchtime concert for the Hearing the Voice, Hearing the Soul symposium on Friday 5 June, and the Warwick Student Arts Festival (WSAF) on Monday 22 June, at 6pm in the Warwick Arts Centre's Ensemble Room. The group will be singing a selection of Crusade songs, medieval French secular songs, and the Occitan Lai Nompar.
History research workshop
A one-day research workshop open to the general public took place in London at Senate House on Saturday 22 March 2014. The speakers included members of the project team and various eminent historians. Download the programme here. A book containing some of the papers given at the workshop and some others added since will be published by Boydell in c. 2017, with the title Literature of the Crusades. For further details see Crusades workshop.