This page hosts links to all six Vernacular Song lectures for Finals in Music at Oxford.
NOTE: As I couldn’t see why not, I thought I’d make these recordings publicly available (see the CC licence below), but please don’t think that these six podlectures represent the whole course that a student gets at Oxford for this topic! Lectures at Oxford (which is what these podlectures replace during pandemic restrictions) are recommended but optional, and are nowhere near as useful as the tutorials, which are both compulsory and are the USP and chief cost/benefit of the Oxford UG degree. In tutorials, students typically do c.11 hours of self-directed reading and writing for each hour of tutorial time and have to produce a 2000-word essay or a 15-minute presentation for each weekly session, on which they receive extensive personal feedback (often instant = the best kind!). There are typically three or four tutorials for this topic, which is one of six ‘Special Topics’ that form two papers out of the 8 taken for final-year exams. So, in short, these podlectures are a very introductory part of a much bigger pedagogical picture.
Podlecture 1: The Troubadours 1
Podlecture 2: The Troubadours 2
Podlecture 5: Gender, singers, and society
Podlecture 6: Reception; modern performance
Additional resources for Cantigas, laude, and English medieval song.
Podcast from the TORCH website: https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/embed/1748488de6ef808e430f
13thC Vernacular Song Course by Prof. Elizabeth Eva Leach, FBA is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Elizabeth Eva Leach 