I'll be leading a tambourine workshop on Saturday 12 Sept, so come along and join in! Check out what you can expect from this year's festival—I hope to see you there!
MMitD 2026:
This year’s Medieval Music in the Dales explores repertoires from the medieval Margins - geographically, culturally and socially.
The word Christendom originally had a more strictly religious connotation of Christianity, but by the 14th century it had acquired a geographical focus, fundamentally denoting the European land mass that was dominated by the Christian faith. Most of the European music that survives comes from this Christendom; indeed the bulk of what survives is explicitly Christian music. Christianity has always played a crucial role in the formation of European identity.
But the Europe of the middle ages was not mono-religious, nor mono-cultural. Jewish and Muslim communities existed in different areas at different times, and both religions moreover had a role in shaping the development of medieval music. There’s a problem in that little survives in written form - the writing of music in the European middle ages is very much Christian-dominated - but these communities had their musics and Margins will explore these musical worlds.
It’s also worth considering what is or was Europe/Christendom? Dig a little and it’s clear some regions counted more than others. Christian conversion came later to some areas towards the north and north-east. And in the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean, Christian authority was contested - did Christendom extend to include Orthodoxy? Or were these heretics, not entirely ‘one of us’? Margins will visit Cyprus and Greece, where eastern and western Christianity existed side by side.
Finally, let’s not pretend that medieval Europe wasn’t both patriarchal and hetero-normative. For all that, the human experience is inevitably wider and more diverse than what any society imposes as norms, and Margins will explore medieval diversity in many forms.