Vies de saints
Source: gallica.bnf.fr

The extract above is an image from the manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 412, which is not (despite the title given on Gallica) a saint’s life, but a copy of Richard de Fournival’s Bestiary of Love (I sent them an update via their feedback form to this effect, so expect to see it corrected within a couple of years!). Like the copy of the same poem in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308, it has the text ‘Merci de qui j’atendoie secours et aie m’est si del tout eslongie’ added to the end. This text is refrain vdB1308 in the standard catalogue of refrain texts by Nico H. J. van den Boogaard. It is also found at the start of the motet voice no.792 (in the standard numbering by Ludwig and van der Werf), which is a motet copied in four motet manuscripts W2, Mo, StV, and N (for a key to these sigla and links to those MSS online, see my earlier post).

What is a refrain from a motet voice doing at the end of a long and generically strange and innovative prose narrative (which combines the idea of a bestiary with the reality of an amorous exchange between male ‘je’ and his desired — and resisting — lady)? Why is this refrain in only two sources of this widely copied work? Does that mean they’re related?

The author of this work, Richard de Fournival, is someone who, if he hadn’t lived in what we now call the Middle Ages, might have been considered a ‘Renaissance Man’. He was multi-talented: a licensed surgeon, Fluent in French and Latin, and a writer of prose, narrative poetry, and lyric on subjects as diverse as love, alchemy, and the contents of his own library. He was clearly widely read (in both senses: he’d read widely and his own works were read widely). Some of his lyrics ended up being entirely set to music as voices in polyphonic motets so it is clear that he knew about the permeability of various genres of imaginative writing in the thirteenth century and the special ability of music to provide a  conduit for generic transgression. Perhaps the refrain is authorial, perhaps not, but it’s certainly in keeping with Richard’s penchant for generic mixing. Richard is someone I’ve been intrigued by ever since I read the Bestiary of Love when researching Sung Birds, and I’m increasingly fascinated by his output and would like to work on him further. Like Machaut, Richard’s multi-faceted life and artistic output — with its clear musical links — makes him a challenging object for study, but probably also a rewarding one. I have plans!

The journal Early Music commissioned a number of short opinion pieces for their anniversary issue, which is just out. Mine is on doing early music in the age of social media. OK, so it’s in part a plug for my own blog, but, hey! you’re here so you don’t need it!. And I do mention some other people, so here are the links to the full text, courtesy of OUP journals.

Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘Early music and Web 2.0′, Early Music 2013 41: 134-135.

Read the full text as a pdf

Read the full text in html

I recently reviewed John Haines’s new edition of the music inserted into one of the late (13thC) branches of the Old French stories of Renart the Fox, Renart le Nouvel. Lots of the songs that are sung by the various animals have music in some of the sources and concordances in the repertoire of motets, balletes, and trouvère songs, including the songs of Adam de la Halle. In the spirit of my other pages aggregating sources for particular musical repertoires, I thought I’d do one for the four sources of Renart le Nouvel. So here it is!

MS L. F-Pn fr. 1581. Blank staves except for one melody, but some interesting pictures (including the one above). Contains only Renart.

MS V. F-Pn fr. 25566 = Trouvère W; Adam de la Halle manuscript which also contains a lot of other things; DIAMM description. Contains Renart on ff.109v-177v. With musical notation.

MS F. F-Pn fr. 1593. Contains Renart as first item, ff.1r-58r. At least four different musical hands, some clearly 14thC (see D’un joli dart in picture below) and some probably by Claude Fauchet, the 16thC owner of the MS, who has annotated it liberally in the margins.

MS C. F-Pn fr.372. Contains only Renart. Black-and-white microfilm images only. Do email me if/when Gallica upgrades this! With musical notation.

Français 1593
Source: gallica.bnf.fr

The newly recognized relevance to musicology of a short article from 1905 about words for driving beasts of burden.

Among other databases, JSTOR has made it possible to make new and surprising scholarly connections, often to much older material whose relevance would never have been noticed without the possibility of full-text searching. I have ended up citing from journals I didn’t even know existed just because articles in them turned up in a particular search. The quality of research in the humanities today is radically inflected by the individual’s scholar’s ability to conduct online searches in a productive way: too specific and you miss stuff; too open-ended and you can’t deal with it all. On the other hand, sometimes serendipity is just as valuable (and just as possible online as in a physical library!). A search for one thing can often turn up something else as well.

One search I’m particularly pleased by is the one that turned up an article from 1905 that has a surprising relevant for musicologiusts of late-medieval song. This is the article (now freely available because it’s so old):

Holbrook, Richard (1905), ‘Hez! Hay! Hay Avant! and Other Old and Middle French Locutions Used for Driving Beasts of Burden’, Modern Language Notes, 20 (8), 232-35. 

Little about its title would suggest it is at all relevant to medieval music, but for my book on music and birdsong I was eager to find out how far back composers notated animal noises. I turned Holbrook’s article up when I was trying to ascertain whether, as some have suggested, the polyphonic song of the ass from Beauvais makes a noise imitating braying in its chorus ‘Hez, hez, sire asne, hez!’.  Holbrook’s short article makes it clear that ‘hez, hez’ is not the sound of braying, but rather a goading cry of a handler to the beast, so I concluded that the Beauvais piece notates human shouts but not animal noises.

So much for the song of the ass. But my eye was caught by one of the other expressions for goading an ass that Holbrook’s title gives — ‘Hay avant!’ — which is a cry that occurs in a fourteenth-century song by Matheus de Sancto Johanne, Science n’a nul annemi, and has always, it now seems, been misunderstood. Matheus’s song laments the ignorance of bad singers and has a two line refrain: ‘Qui plus haut crie “Hay avant!” / C’est trop bien fait disons ainsy’. The cry itself is aurally prominent in the three-voice musical setting because the two lower voices, which don’t ordinarily carry any text and would have been played or sung wordlessly, have the words ‘Hay avant!’ copied underneath their musical imitation of the little motif that these same words have in the cantus part. Thus all three parts sing ‘Hay avant!’ in musical imitation in the refrain.

In an article in Early Music 2003 these lines are translated as ‘Whoever shouts loudest “Me first!” / Let’s just say, it’s very well done’ with a short note on the text saying, ‘This expression might also be translated as “Forward march!”; the sense seems to be that the ignorant are pushing themselves into the limelight’. However, unless one reads the idea that this is ‘very well done’ with heavy sarcasm, that reading makes no sense given that the rest of the text castigates these ignorant people. Holbrook’s article allows a much better reading of the refrain as: ‘Whoever shouts “Go away, [ass]!” the loudest is doing very well, so say all of us!’. This is the refrain of the entire singing body, the three people singing this song, all of whom shout ‘Hay avant!’ in imitation — and each presumably trying to be the one who shouts it the loudest — in the refrain, which they (the first person plural subjects of ‘disons’, i.e. the singers of the song) direct against the bad singers described by the first person singular ‘je’ in the rest of the text, song only by the singer of the cantus part.

It’s a small gain, perhaps, but it is significant for our understanding of this particular song. Implying that an ignorant singer is an ass, often by saying what Guido of Arezzo said (which was that an ignorant singer would prefer the loud, tuneless braying of an ass to the well-tuned pitches of a nightingale), accords with a long tradition in the Middle Ages.

Le tournoi de Chauvency is a fascinating French narrative poem, recounting the events of a multi-day tournament and mêlée fight, accompanied by singing, dancing, games, and feasting from 1285. It is part of the manuscript Douce 308 in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, where it sits among other narrative poems and a large collection of song lyrics, some of which are those songs in the Tournoi.

As I’m currently writing a chapter on the songs in this manuscript, I was delighted to review this collection. I’ve already blogged a slightly longer comment on the two essays in it that deal with the Vows of the Peacock, but for access to the full review, please use the links below, kindly provided by OUP.

Full text access

Pdf access

Gautier involved in book-making

Recently I very much enjoyed Tony Hunt’s book on Gautier de Coinci‘s exuberant but meaningful use of punning rhymes, anaphora and other rhetorical tricks in the poems that make up his Miracles of Our Lady. These features were much derided by earlier commentators and the secular thrust of twentieth-century studies of medieval French literature led to the neglect of Gautier’s work and its exclusion from canons it ought to be in: for example, it is rarely listed among French narrative poems with interpolated lyrics set to music, probably, as Hunt alleges, because it’s not proper secular courtly literature (for my impatience with these categories, see my earlier post).

Despite the large bibliography on Arlima, Gautier’s work deserves to be even better studied not just by literary scholars but also by by musicologists, because he not only includes songs with notated music in many sources, but also uses musical as fact and metaphor centrally within several miracles. He also seems to have been a serious precursor to Guillaume de Machaut in terms of overseeing the collection of his work and taking an interest in ordering it and making books. This very interesting-looking collection of essays is awaiting me in a local non-borrowing library just as soon as I can get down there (I’m currently rather immobile while on crutches with a sports injury — the perils of sabbaticals!). But in aid of making the study of Gautier a little easier (given the huge source base), I’ve decided to write this post and try to get the manuscripts all together. I’ve used the listings in the editions by Koenig (text) and Chailley (music), a list on Musicologie Médiévale by Arturo Tello, and some additional general web searching. Musicologie Médiévale (which everyone who’s read this far down should join!) also has a link to Kathryn Duys’s list of manuscripts with the songs in them in a chapter in the essay collection just mentioned (log-in required). The beauty of a blog is that I can update it as my own work on Gautier progresses; and anyone reading this can send me updates and corrections too!

Luckily, many of the MSS are online now, some in old black-and-white microfilm uploads, but others in newly done digital colour images. The manuscripts listed below are colour-coded into those that have musical notation, space for musical notation that was never entered, the songs’ verbal texts only or lack the songs entirely. I’ve added a ball-park century dating from Duys. Arlima’s good listing of primary and secondary sources only has links through the libraries’ home pages and/or to Arlima’s own manuscript inventories, not to images themselves. They’re a bit hard to aggregate on Gallica because of variant spellings of Coinci, Coincy, Coinsi, Coinsy, Courci…(*sighs deep medievalist sigh*) so here’s a list with links where they exist. Please submit corrections, questions, and updates via the comment box below!

A — Blois, bibl. mun.34. 13thC; no musical notation. Some images.

B — Brussels, Bibl. roy. 10747. 13thC; has musical notation. DIAMM description.

C — GB-Lbl Harley 4401. 13thC; has musical notation. BL listing and some images.

D — F-Pa 3517-3518. 13thC; has musical notation. DIAMM description. Link to complete colour images here (vol. 1) and here (vol. 2).

E — F-Pn fr. 817. 15thC; no musical notation. Black-and-white microfilm images.

F — F-Pn fr. 986. 13thC; has musical notation.Black-and-white microfilm images.

G — F-Pn fr. 1530. 13thC; has musical notation. Black-and-white microfilm images.

H — F-Pn fr. 1533. 13thC; musical notation envisaged but not completed. Black-and-white microfilm images.

I — F-Pn fr. 1536. 13thC; has musical notation. DIAMM description. Black-and-white microfilm images.

K — F-Pn fr. 1613. 13thC; no musical notation. No images. Duys excludes this MS from a list of Gautier’s songs, since she notes that the song is not by Gautier. It is, however, listed in Koenig’s text edition of the Miracles.

L — F-Pn fr. 22928. 14thC; has musical notation. Colour images.

M — F-Pn fr. 2163. 13thC; has musical notation. Black-and-white microfilm images.

N — F-Pn fr. 25532. 13thC; has musical notation. DIAMM description. Black-and-white microfilm images.

O — I-Rvat pal. lat. 1969. 14thC; musical notation envisaged but not completed. No images.

R — Russia, St. Petersburg, Fr. F. v XIV9. 14thC; has musical notation. DIAMM description. No images.

S — F-Pn n.a.f. 24541. 13thC; has musical notation. DIAMM description. Colour images.

T — Besançon, bibl. mun. 551. 14thC; musical notation envisaged but not completed. Some images.

a — Brussels, Bibl. roy. 9229-30. 14thC; does not contain the songs.

e — Neuchtel, 4816. 15thC; no musical notation.

d — La Haye, Bibl. roy. 71-A-24. 14thC; does not contain the songs.

f — F-Pa 3527. 14thC; musical notation envisaged but not completed. No images.

g — F-Pa 5204. 14thC; does not contain the songs. No images.

h — F-Pn n.a.f. 6295. 13thC; musical notation envisaged but not completed. No images.

i – F-Pn n.a.f. 4276. 14thC; does not contain the songs. No images.

l – F-Pn fr. 818. 13thC; does not contain the songs. Black-and-white microfilm images.

m – F-Pn fr. 1546. 13thC; does not contain the songs. Black-and-white microfilm images.

n –  F-Pn fr. 1807. 13thC; does not contain the songs. Black-and-white microfilm images.

o — F-Pn fr. 2193. 13thC; musical notation envisaged but not completed. Black-and-white microfilm images.

p — F-Pn fr. 19166. 13thC; does not contain the songs. Black-and-white microfilm images.

r — F-P Ste-Geneviève 586. 14thC; does not contain the songs.

s — Tours 948. 14thC; no musical notation.

t — F-Pn fr. 23111. 13thC; no musical notation. Black-and-white microfilm images.

v — Florence Laur. 45, Ashb 53. 13thC; no musical notation.

x — F-Pn fr. 15110. 13thC; does not contain the songs. Black-and-white microfilm images.

8. Lille 130. 14thC; does not contain the songs. No images.

10bis. GB-Lbl Egerton 274. 14thC; has musical notation. DIAMM information. BL inventory and some images.

18. F-Pn fr. 375. 13thC; does not contain the songs. Black-and-white microfilm images.

26. F-Pn fr. 24300; no musical notation. Black-and-white microfilm images.

32. Rennes 593. 14thC; does not contain the songs.

Peacock in bestiary (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KB, KA 16, Folio 97v)

I recently wrote a short review of Chazan and Regaldo’s edited volume on the Tournoi de Chauvency (‘The Tournament at Chauvency’) in the manuscript Douce 308 for French Studies. The review had a limit of 500 words, so I didn’t have room to do more than describe the contents of such a large and varied conference proceedings volume. Given my earlier work on music and birdsong I was struck by a difference of opinion between the two essays in the volume that focus not on the Tournoi de Chauvency itself, but on one of the other long narrative poems that the manuscript contains, Jacques du Longuyon’s Voeux du Paon (‘The Vows of the Peacock’). These two essays, by Michel Margue and Jean-Marie Privat respectively, disagree as to the interpretation of the peacock on whose body the vows of the title are sworn: Margue reads it as the image of vanity and pride, a negative symbol which functions as a warning from the poem’s patron to the target of the narrative; Privat says it is a symbol of Christ, specifically of the immortality of the flesh, for which the peacock is renowned in bestiaries and goes on to read the moment as a piece of courtly canivalesque play with sacred themes.

I should add that although The Vows of the Peacock seems quite obscure now, it was very widely copied and was part of a much larger network of medieval romances about Alexander the Great. In this particular part of that tradition, Alexander is advised by the Cassamus; the Douce 308 MS even calls the poem the ‘Romance of Cassamus’.

Margue’s reading

Margue’s essay (‘Vows of the Peacock and Vows of the Sparrow Hawk: the Emperor and his “best knights” in courtly culture between Metz, Bar, and Luxembourg (early 14thC)’) considers the context of the Vows of the Peacock as a poem composed for a specific patron with a certain kind of purpose. Although little is known about the author beyond his name, the patron of the work is Thibaut de Bar, bishop of Liège, brother of the bishop of Metz (Raynaud de Bar) and with his brother, the supporter of Emperor Henri VII of the house of Luxembourg. Margue starts from the intertextual relation betwen the Vows of the Peacock and the Voeux de l’espervier (‘Vows of the Sparrow Hawk’), which rather than being about Alexander, has a near-contemporary topic: the Italian expedition of Henri VII as he travelled through Metz, with Raynaud, to Rome to be crowned; both Henri and Bishop Raynaud died in the course of the this campaign and the Vows of the Sparrow Hawk ends with a lament for Henri’s death, which compares him to Alexander.

Although the Vows of the Sparrow Hawk was not widely transmitted, Margue uses it as a key to reading the much more popular Vows of the Peacock, seeing Alexander standing for Henri VII and Cassamus for the poem’s patron, Thibaut de Bar. The poem then represents Thibaut’s admontio to Henri, warning him against being too proud in his pursuit of the Italian campaign.

Margue is concerned with the interactions of specific, major political figures and the role of vowing ceremoies, at the intersection of fiction and reality. As he points out, Thibaut attended Edward I’s ‘Vows of the Swan’, a real-life ceremony, not only described in literature but also possessing mundane record in medieval court financial account books, These ceremonies, he argues, gave a space in which to argue for military or political restraint. Margue’s reading is similar to how the interpolated Roman de Fauvel, from a similar date but pertaining instead to the French court, has been read by a wide variety of scholars. (See, for example, the many essays in this book — sadly no preview available on Google!).

Privat’s reading

Privat has a rather different focus, preferring to offer a close reading of the central section of the poem depicting the vowing ceremony itself (lines 3812-4357). He points out the blending of courtliness and violence in this scene: the beautiful peacock is bloodily slain; the courtliness of the feast has the bird’s corpse at its centre; and the highly courtly vows are promises of knightly violence. Privat’s reading of this is inflected significantly by Bakhtin’s idea of carnival: he views the vowing ceremony as a parodia sacra, reading the imagery of the source as deliberately reminiscent of the Last Supper. For Privat, the dead bird functions according to its bestiary moralization as a symbol of true immortality, its flesh undecaying, and thus as a symbol of Christ.

Privat doesn’t read the poem as religious, however, merely as playing with religious cultural symbolism. He views the vows as one of a number of carnivalesque acts that together create a festive, folkloric, utopian and polyphonic point of view on the world and give form and meaning to ludic play which keeps a playful and parodic distance from the eternally serious, official, religious, and monologic world of the Lenten church (p.148-9).

Sacred and secular

Although ultimately they both share a courtly reading of the poem, these two authors differ in how they read the central symbol of the peacock. Who is right? Is the bird a symbol of vanity or of Christ? Addressing this question involves noting the different methodological perspectives of Margue and Privat and also addressing the problematic multi-valent nature of medieval bird symbolism.

I’ve noted elsewhere that medieval scholarship has its own history of either Christianizing or secularizing the past. When the issue is the mixture of liturgical, devotional, religious, chivalric, courtly, political, violent, and erotic elements, the modern historiography forms an interference pattern that is hard to unpick, especially when it is ignored. Scholars rarely state their own religious convictions and even it they did, their personal beliefs would have to be offset against their methodological preferences and national traditions of scholarship, and against religious norms of their formative and host cultures. Scholarship generally finds it difficult to tackle this issue because it seems crass to say, X is a believing Catholic so of course they see the Middle Ages as the age of faith in which nothing was untouched by Christian belief; or Y is a card-carrying atheist, so of course they will minimize Christian elements and focus on secular concerns, which they presume to be a sign of progress towards an enlightened future. This difficulty arises because the contemporary West sees religion as a private, personal matter and scholarship as public and objective. (Lots of reviewers were at least slightly upset with me raising this issue in chapter 5 of my Machaut book – something I might blog about another time).

Here, both scholars actually share a basic orientation: courtly literature is about courtly and political things. Privat notes its engagement parodically with ecclesiastical culture, but only as a way of achieving a carnivalesque form of ludic play.

I don’t at all want to argue that a plurality of understandings didn’t exist in the Middle Ages, too, even for individuals, but certainly for mixed audiences. But for me the basic problem here is our present misunderstanding of the imbrication of elements that only we — post-Englightenment — would radically separate as sacred and secular. Thibaut, the commissioning patron the poem, is a prince-bishop, but he doesn’t have a prince body for days when he’s being ecclesiastical and a bishop body for days when he’s being temporal. The best way forward might be to combine the readings in Margue and Privat’s chapters as indicative both of the importance of Christian ceremonial — serious, monologic, official — in political life and also of the ability of medieval literature to create rich, complex, polyvalent narratives that are meaningful multiply to their audiences, from patron to attendant court functionary.

The bestiary is actually a really useful and indicative locus for what sacred-secular imbrication might look like in the Middle Ages. And a ‘both X and Y’ reading actually makes sense of the polyvalent nature of bird symbolism, and reads The Vows of the Peacock using reading skills that bestiaries taught: multiple and paradoxical readings, pointing to a single truth.

When I’ve taught ‘Music and Birdsong’ courses, students are often baffled by the conflicting and contradictory nature of ethical valence of symbolism in bestiaries. How can the same creature (the dog) symbolize disgusting servility and self-less loyalty? How can the same bird (the peacock) symbolize proud vanity and the sacrifice of Christ for humanity? But the bestiary is a way of interpreting the world — scientific, natural, non-human — as a hidden reflection of human-divine relations and ultimately of divine truth. In order for the non-linguistic natural world to reveal divine truth, the world must be read allegorically, which actually means that it can BOTH something AND something else, rather than having to be either/or. This both/and reading is typical of Christianizing moralization: how else could Orpheus both be excoriated as a sodomite (for renouncing relations with women) AND praised as a type for Christ (for going down to Hell to rescue the dead)? I am quite content, therefore, that the peacock should mediate Thibaut’s caution to Henri about the sins of pride and vanity at the same time that it reminds him of Christ’s sacrifice (and by extension of the ecclesiastical power of Thibaut the prince-bishop). Perhaps Henri is meant to think that this non-ecclesiastical, courtly version of the Last Supper confirms that his potential self-sacrifice in the Italian campaign will not save humanity but merely punish his own vanity.

Regardless of all this, as I did manage the say in my commissioned review, the book in which these two essay appear is a wonderfully thought-provoking collection.

Those of you who’ve read my review of Judith Peraino’s interesting new book, will know that one of the things that pressed my ‘huh?’ button there was her insistence on drawing analogies with contemporary technologies that I thought just didn’t work. Peraino was comparing medieval refrain citation to sampling, without allowing either for the important layers of mediation present in medieval sources (musical notation chief among them) but not present in modern sampling, or for the significantly different social and artistic structures underpinning the two practices.

As I said in part in my review of Peraino, I can understand why one might do this in a teaching context, orally, especially if the session is a fairly introductory one to students who live in a world with no palpable medieval echoes. But that’s no reason to commit it to print, especially when a hundred, fifty, even perhaps twenty years from now, both these practices might be equally historically opaque to the readers, much as if we were to read an eighteenth-century account of an ocular harpsichord, comparing it to the cat piano: we’d have to look them both up and then puzzle out what the eighteenth-century writer could possibly have thought related them.

Peraino, however, seems to be in good company. A few weeks ago I was at Jeffrey Hamburger’s Medieval Studies Lecture in Oxford, a wonderfully well attended event and a great one-hour talk on the subject of ‘Script as Image’. Whizzing us through a powerpoint showing dozens of fascinating manuscript images, at one point I’m pretty sure Hamburger said that a Book of Hours was ‘the medieval equivalent of an iPad’ because at that point one of my graduate students, who was sitting in front of me in the hall, turned round and gave me a meaningful look. This was because when my grad and postdoc group had last met, they’d discussed the demerits of this very same analogy — ‘these books, the iPads of private devotion’ (p.174) — in medieval musicologist Emma Dillon’s most recent book.

Now Hamburger’s might just be a throw-away comment (although it didn’t sound like the first time he’d used the analogy) and Dillon’s is another example, I think, of a teaching strategy making its way into a research monograph. But having heard why my graduates and postdocs were so irked (in that completely delightful way that people get reassuringly ranty because they have strong views and musicology matters to them!), I find I, too, am disquieted. When added together, the three medievalists mentioned here seem to represent a pretty high-powered trend in making medieval technologies comprehensible by what I (and my grads and postdocs) find a glib and, more importantly, misleading comparison to our own everyday technology.

What might an iPad and a medieval manuscript, specifically a Book of Hours, have in common? Both are designed to be held in the hand, although the iPad is considerably larger (and, yes, I know there’s now iPad mini, but there presumably wasn’t when this analogy was formulated); both can be put on a small portable stand; they are both things one looks at, reads, and spends time with.

Beyond those fairly generic similarities (each of which could be said of all sorts of other objects and is inflected with a degree of difference, too), there are many more very significant differences. The iPad is a mass-produced commercial object, designed with built-in obsolescence so that you don’t keep it for more than a few years; the Book of Hours is a singular luxury item, designed to last a lifetime and even be passed down to one’s offspring within noble households (how many iPads will survive in 650 years?!). Getting sucked into the analogy, one might say ‘ah, but Books of Hours are mass produced, too, according to a sort of cut-and-paste set of contents’. But this is nonsense: the users of Books of Hours are not a mass, but a small, significant, elite section of Europe’s population in the Middle Ages. And the atelier is host to steady but small-scale and highly specialized artisanal production of items which are specifically adapted for their users.

And that’s before we even get into the nature of the content — intrinsically dynamic, fluid, changing, connected on an iPad and made with light, electricity and glass compared to  flat, static, palpable, pigment on skin with no power source for a manuscript book. Again, the analogy might lead some to claim that the interconnection to the web of the iPad is like the intertextual connections of Books of Hours to images, sounds, and texts outside it, but these require human agency and memory to uncover — not Google — and the use of the Book of Hours is all about contemplating them, whereas typical iPad use is hardly about long-studied contemplation. As a Director of DIAMM (and ardent social media advocate), I can hardly be said to be a luddite, so could it be that conversely it is those making the analogy — despite all making it in the home of the iPad, the US — who fail to appreciate the exact nature of the possibilities offered by the iPad? Actually it’s not just for women who want to contemplate the Psalms! An iPad is for sending emails and other forms of direct communication with non-present individuals, for playing games, for playing music and video, for making and sharing music and video, for drawing (as David Hockney’s use of it makes clear).

And I could go on, but I think the point is made. In print especially, there is no need to mis-compare the technologies of writing, musical notation, and manuscript book-making with the technologies that are currently interacting with our own cultures of writing, reading, and listening. It might seem to provide a handy short-cut, a way of insisting on the magical, special, and contemporary nature of the medieval book, but in my view the connections are too vague and general, and the risks of eliding difference and misunderstanding too large.

I spent the week before Christmas writing a draft of the chapter for a volume on medieval jugement poetry that will be edited by R. Barton Palmer and Burt Kimmelman for Florida University Press. It will probably appear in a year or so and I’ll certainly post the chapter when it’s out.

I volunteered for the volume because I think that jugement poetry — the lengthy debate poems of fourteenth and fifteenth-century French literature — is very tightly bound up with music and I thought there should be a musicologist in the volume. It meant, however, revisiting a poem that I’ve already devoted a whole chapter to in my 2007 book, Sung Birds, Gace de la Buigne’s Le roman des deduis.

It’s probably one of the perils of the mid-career stage that one ends up writing a lot of things that are a rehash of earlier work, partly because one is too busy to do new research, partly because people ask you to write on what they know you’ve already written about. The process can sometimes be a bit wearisome — an endless cut-and-paste with re-wording — but on the positive side it also gives one an opportunity to reflect on the development of one’s thinking.

About ten years after I first read it, I still think Gace’s poem (all 12,210 lines of it), is extremely interesting and deserves to be better known and more widely read (at least, certainly among medievalists). That is isn’t, is probably partly because there’s no English translation. But there is also a problem with its genre: it appears to be nothing more than a rather lengthy hunting treatise, cast in a long narrative poem with a first part that is a battle between the vices and virtues, and a second part that is a debate between representatives of hawking versus representatives of hunting with hounds as to whose sport is nobler and more pleasurable. This makes it too literary for historians with an interest in hunting and too cynegetico-technical for literary scholars. And musicologists (only interested in composers, musical works, and musical genres, of course!) have looked only at three short passages: one which mentions Philippe de Vitry as the author of a motet (Douce playsence/Garison selon nature/NEUMA; recording here) whose texts are alluded to, one which mentions lesser-known singer-composer Denis le Grant as the author of a chace (Se je chant; recording here) whose text is alluded to, and a third passage which praises the sound of dogs running after a stag in terms that compare their noise to the hocketing of a polyphonic motet.

In my treatment of this poem in my book, I was interested in correcting what I viewed as the incorrect understanding of the last of these three passages by musicologists, and in viewing the whole poem within the broader literature of Latin music theory, which underpins many of its key arguments and which had been missed in the literary and historical discussions of the poem. In the chapter for Palmer and Kimmelman’s Judgement Book, I am interested more narrowly on the mirror-for-princes aspect of the poem and the ideological role of music at court that its citation of two real pieces of music implies.

My consideration of music as ideology allows me to use some things I’ve thought and written about since my 2007 book. My new piece uses the idea of distributed cognition in the performance of medieval song (which I first developed here) to think about song as mimetic of political functioning in a communal setting. It also uses my engagement with the creation of meaning in polytextual music (which I talk about most clearly here, but have also dealt with in my more recent book on Machaut) to claim that song functions as a means of prompting contemplation as well as being itself an object of (silent) contemplation, reasoned discourse, visual spectacle. Oh, yes — and pleasurable sound.

My strong conviction, arising from engaging with open and explicitly intertextual texts like Gace’s poem, that music in the middle ages is not just sound (and sometimes, not even sound) is currently adding to my growing disquiet at the boxing of musicology into the soi-disant ‘emerging field’ of Sound Studies in the modern academy. Music is so much more than sound! Not only is music more multimedia and multi-sensory than that (and not just in the middle ages), but it is also something present in non-sensory ways, i.e. intellectually. And this, I think, is the problem — the social mistrust of elite (i.e. difficult, speculative, and highly informed) intellection and contemplation in a market-driven society that has elided democracy and populism as a single unassailable moral good. Sound Studies typically claims that it studies sound in a way broader than musicology but fails to see how it also studies it in a much, much narrower way.

But now this is turning into a rant and I don’t have space to get into this particular polemic in the chapter, but I think it might be something I’ll write or blog about in the future…

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 19,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 4 Film Festivals

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