Manuscripts, Music, Machaut: Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp. Jared C. Hartt, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel, and Benjamin lbritton

The status of Lawrence W. Earp as a prince of Machaut studies is beyond dispute. His Guillaume de Machaut: Guide to Research (New York and London, 1995) remains foundational, not least because it reached out across the full spectrum of disciplines relevant to Machaut studies—art history, literary studies, history, and musicology. Earp’s many other outputs, from his 1983 Princeton University dissertation (‘Scribal Practice, Manuscript Production and the Transmission of Music in Late Medieval France: The Manuscripts of Guillaume de Machaut’) to collaborative works, which include two book-length volumes investigating central Machaut sources—The Ferrell-Vogüé Machaut Manuscript, with Domenic Leo and Carla Shapreau (Oxford, 2014), and Poetry, Art, and Music in Guillaume de Machaut’s Earliest Manuscript (BnF fr. 1586), with Jared C. Hartt (Turnhout, 2021)—testify to his unabated vigour and long-standing acumen as a scholar, while also highlighting the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration for today’s medieval studies.

In the light of Earp’s impressive achievements, it is hardly surprising that a group of younger scholars, Jared C. Hartt, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel, and Benjamin L. Albritton, undertook the creation of an essay volume in Earp’s honour on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. And what a volume it has become! Weighing in heavily, both literally (with no fewer than 628 pages) and in terms of its content, the book lives up both in quantity and quality to the lofty standards of scholarship set by its honorand. The roster of authors is distinguished, and the impact of the volume on current Machaut studies and the study of late medieval music and music cultures at large will be considerable for a long time to come.

The Introduction, co-authored by the three editors, provides an informative account and succinct assessment of the laureate’s distinguished accomplishments, followed by the customary overview of the contents of the book. The twenty-six essays that follow are grouped into seven sections, moving from questions of reception history (‘Guiding Research’) to considerations of fourteenth-century music in general (‘(Re)examining and (Re)assessing the Fourteenth Century’), to three Machaut-centred sections covering key disciplines in Machaut research, i.e. literary studies (‘Reading Machaut’), art history (‘Image and Illumination’), and music (‘Machaut Musicology’). The final two sections (‘Motets and Chant’ and ‘Music in Medieval England’) once more enlarge the scope of subjects treated, now focusing on genre and geography. Readers may not always find this organization entirely convincing; some of the most fascinating contributions to Machaut studies lurk in the second and sixth sections, while other contributions have little or at most a tenuous connection to Machaut or, in one case, even the long fourteenth century. This, of course, is no detriment to quality, and the breadth of the title sagaciously chosen by the editors certainly allows for such a wide spread. But it does raise the question of cohesion; does it makes sense, from the author’s and the editors’ as much as the potential readers’ point of view, to publish an article on the impact of historiography and cataloguing on our views of Hildegard of Bingen in a volume with a focus on Machaut and the Machaut period? Here a bit more—or a different kind of—editorial intervention might have been called for.

Kicking off the main body of the volume, Helen Swift takes Earp’s Guide to Research as a point of departure for some richly resonant musings about the nature of didacticism and guidance in general, and in French-language narrative texts (dits) of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in particular, taking the reader from Machaut (d. 1377) across two centuries to the Burgundian court poet and historiographer Jean Molinet (1435–1507). Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel and Jennifer Bain both engage with the historiography of monumentalized authorial figures, investigating the impact of Earp’s Guide on Machaut scholarship (Mahoney-Steel) and the history and impact of various bibliographies and catalogues on Hildegard of Bingen research (Bain). Closing out this opening section, Julie Singer provides an overview of the current state of research into performances by child actors in late medieval France.

The second section of the volume opens with Andrew Wathey’s report on Machaut’s service to Yolande of Flanders, countess of Bar, from May 1349 to May/June 1353, as well as—spectacularly—the presentation of Guillaume de Machaut’s recovered personal seal. This essay helps close one of the crucial remaining gaps in Machaut’s biography, (re-)constructing a highly plausible pathway for Machaut’s professional trajectory following the death of his first (and, for Machaut, always his most revered) patron, John of Luxembourg, the King of Bohemia, at Crécy in 1346. Next, Benjamin Albritton tackles established truths around the single-author manuscripts of Machaut by providing an illuminating study of the ‘fuzzy borders’ (pp. 129, 144) of the manuscript tradition. He zeroes in on a potential lost work of Machaut’s from c.1370—a chronicle of the counts of Rethel, a territory in the Francophone part of the Empire (in present-day terms, located in the French part of the Ardennes mountains just north of Reims near the border with Wallonia/Belgium), which, suggestively, included the town of Machault from which Machaut and his brother Jean derived their names. Kevin N. Moll looks at the position of Machaut’s Mass in relation to ‘French’ liturgical settings for the Mass; this text offers a useful synopsis of much older material (Schrade, Stäblein-Harder, Jackson), argues for a strong connection of Machaut’s settings with the so-called Tournai Mass, and ends with suggesting a hitherto unnoticed relationship between the three-voice Credo setting identified as ‘Cameraco’ in the lost Strasbourg codex (also transmitted in Barcelona 853d and Bologna Q15) and the Credo setting in Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria J.II.9, fos. 38^v–40^r. This is a tempting suggestion, especially if we allow for a reading of ‘Cameraco’ as meaning ‘from Cambrai’ as an alternative to interpreting it as the name of an—as yet unidentified—composer (‘[N.N.] de Cambrai’); the latter proposition was (plausibly) put forward by David Fallows with regard to one Henri de Cambray, bas vicaire at the collegiate church of St-Vincent in Soignies (Hainaut) between 1415–16 and 1427–8, for another Strasbourg piece, the chanson Belle volies, which, however, has quite a different pedigree from the Credo. It might be crucial in this context to note that the ascription of Belle volies is given in Coussemaker’s copy of the lost Strasbourg source as ‘Cameracy’, i.e. in the genitive, as opposed to the ablative ‘Cameraco’ for the Credo, which instead suggests a place of provenance and not an indication of the composer’s name. A similar reading, i.e. as indicating provenance ‘from Milan’, at least as far as the relevant contratenor is concerned, and not a shorthand for an as yet unidentified composer ‘N.N. from Milan’, has been suggested for the term ‘Mediolano’ by Michael Scott Cuthbert and Elizabeth Nyikos (‘Style, Locality, and the Trecento Gloria: New Sources and a Reexamination’, Acta Musicologica, 82 (2010), 185–212 at 210). The point is picked up independently in the essay by Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone on Machaut transmission in Italy, discussed further below; see pp. 363–4 in the volume here under review. In their essay, Plumley and Stone consider ‘Mediolano’ ‘an otherwise unknown composer from Milan’ (p. 363), but a revised reading of ‘Mediolano’ as meaning ‘from Milan’ would not only fit, but indeed strengthen their hypothesis of a potential route of transmission for some of Machaut’s music from the Visconti court to Padua. Moreover, a stylistic connection of the Turin Credo to a piece (or a style) that the Strasbourg compiler associated with the famous maîtrise of Cambrai would be far from implausible, not least because of the long-established connections of (some of) the Turin composer(s) with Cambrai, which are, however, inexplicably omitted by Kevin Moll; see my articles ‘The Repertory of Torino J.II.9, and the French Tradition of the 14th and Early 15th Centuries’, in Ursula Günther and Ludwig Finscher (eds.), The Cypriot-French Repertory of the Manuscript Torino J.II.9 (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1995), 151–81 at 171, and ‘Glorious Sounds of a Holy Warrior: New Light on Codex Turin J.II.9’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 65 (2012), 637–90 at 638, 641–2, and 669–70. Anna Zayaruznaya closes the second section with an investigation of the legacy of early twentieth-century scholarship on the duopoly of ‘great composers’ associated with fourteenth-century France: Vitry and Machaut, astutely tracing the trope of ‘Classical Vitry’ versus ‘Romantic Machaut’ to Heinrich Besseler’s ‘Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II’ (‘Die Motette von Franko von Köln bis Philipp von Vitry’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 8 (1927), 137–258), then proposing a revised genealogy of influence positing that Machaut also influenced the slightly older Vitry.

R. Barton Palmer opens the third section, ‘Reading Machaut’, with a virtuosic essay about Machaut’s most neglected and earliest surviving narrative, the Dit dou Vergier. His analysis brilliantly demonstrates—contrary to disparaging remarks about the Vergier made by earlier editors, notably Ernest Hoepffner—how the Dit ingenuously mixes elements drawn from that medieval classic of fin’amors, the Roman de la Rose, with ingredients from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and a touch of Augustine’s Confessions, smoothly blending Machaut’s identities as a cleric and a trouvère within what Palmer recasts as a highly promising poetic début. He also shows how the Vergier is cunningly inserted by Machaut himself towards the end of his life as a foil to the much later Prologue within a macrostructure that encompasses the entire ordering of his works in Machaut manuscript A (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France fr. 1584; hereafter BnF); there, Machaut arranges all the works of his that he chose to include in his author-curated edition of his oeuvre in an ordering that anticipates, and indeed in some ways surpasses, the great cyclically conceived works of the nineteenth century, notably Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen. As it were, in Palmer’s reading, MS A gives us an edition of Machaut that is the equivalent to a (fictitious) Gesamtausgabe of Wagner’s creative works by Wagner himself in which the poet-composer arranged his entire oeuvre (including, in Wagner’s case, his voluminous prose writings and his libretti) in such a way as to create innumerable cross-references among individual creations by means of his own, retrospective design—an interpretation that nicely leads back to the question of works that may have existed but did not make it into the complete-works manuscripts tackled earlier by Benjamin Albritton.

Kevin Brownlee explores the blurring of fictional and actual reality in Machaut’s last narrative work, the Prise d’Alixandre, analysing how Machaut positions himself as an author ‘with a history of his own’ (p. 217) in relation to real-life patrons like John of Bohemia and Peter of Lusignan, allowing him successfully to ‘mythologize’ both his narrative subjects and himself. Anne-Hélène Miller investigates the concept of destour (literally: detour, but also meaning ‘deviation’ and the resulting separation of the self from the community-at-large while engaging in the creative act). She traces its effects both inside Machaut’s and in his followers’ poetic texts, and articulates its effects with regard to the ordering (ordenance) of the single-author manuscript prototype developed by Machaut. The resulting state of melancholy is both a prerequisite for creativity and emblematic of the painful segregation of the author from his peers. At the end of this section, Deborah McGrady offers a fascinating study of how Machaut de-, then reconstructs contemporaneous ideas of masculinity in his Voir Dit.

Opening the fourth section on ‘Image and Illumination’, Kathleen Wilson Russo explores the theme of exoticism in early Valois court culture, taking as her point of entry two illuminations in Machaut MS C (BnF fr. 1586) that sport a male courtier wearing a turban topped by a feather of truly amazing length. Andrew Wathey’s earlier contribution to the Machaut biography is complemented in this section by a similarly impressive essay by Domenic Leo dedicated to the iconographic programme of manuscript Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, 5010 C (‘Machaut W’); this fragmentary and badly mutilated source, first described in detail by Earp in 1989, emerges as a sort of calque modelled on the first collected-works codex, MS C, during Machaut’s association with Yolande of Bar. Together with MS C, MS W thus forms an early group of collected-works codices which find their continuation only after a considerable, as-yet-to-be-explained chronological hiatus, starting with the Ferrell-Vogüé MS of the early 1370s. An earlier payment dated 1368 and connected to the court of Amadeus VI, Count of Savoy, through his wife, Bonne of Bourbon, may simply refer to a presentation copy of a single roman, not a complete-works manuscript; see Leo, ‘Reconstructing the Pictorial Program’, 282–3, Table 14.2. Leo’s study also highlights the importance of a network of female patrons for our understanding of Machaut’s career that is emerging only now as the result of the most recent research; this network reaches far beyond the frequently invoked Bonne of Luxembourg (d. 1349) and was of crucial importance to Machaut’s career in the 1350s and beyond—a point also made by Albritton with regard to Margaret of Male when investigating the connection between Rethel and Flanders/Burgundy in his essay on the potential lost chronicle of the counts of Rethel. Further insight into the world in which the real Machaut lived is provided by a contribution of Elizabeth Eva Leach highlighting the role of one generation of the Melun family in French politics of the time: Jean II de Melun (d. 1384) ruled over the county of Tancarville—a territory strategically situated near the mouth of the Seine in Normandy—and served in high secular functions at the French royal court, while his younger brother Guillaume II (d. 1376) was a paragon of the French clerical establishment as the Archbishop of Sens, the metropolitan see of the diocese of Paris. Leach’s article culminates in the elegant suggestion that both brothers are represented in the famous miniatures of the Prologue in MS A (Paris, BnF fr. 1584) under the allegorical guises of Sense (French: Sens) for the Archbishop, and Sweet Thought (Doux Penser) for his older brother, the Count of Tancarville.

Uri Smilansky opens up the fifth group of texts, all of which foreground Machaut’s music. Smilansky traces physical residues of eighteenth-century attempts at performing Machaut’s music directly from MS F/G (Paris, BnF fr. 22545–22546). In doing so, he sheds fascinating light on the earliest stage of the ‘early-music revival’ in Enlightenment France—still largely forgotten und woefully understudied at present. Yolanda Plumley’s and Anne Stone’s analysis of the transmission of Machaut’s works in Italy is a virtuosic piece of scholarship combining meticulous attention to detail with brilliant methodological ingenuity. The essay offers exciting insights into the peninsular branches of the Machaut transmission—an aspect that is notoriously hard to grasp. On top of that (as if that were not sufficient already), the authors provide new readings for the ‘ludic’ Machaut rondeaux which encode the names of Jehan (de Berry) and Isabelle (of Valois), fruitfully connecting the settings related to Isabelle with her marriage to Giangaleazzo Visconti in 1360 and the cultural changes that such marriages could bring about at late medieval courts, in this case regarding musical culture at the court of the Visconti.

In the next two contributions, David Maw and Jacques Boogaart approach the complex topic of text–music relationships in Machaut, providing subtle analyses and interpretations of four polyphonic songs (two rondeaux and two ballads; Maw) and a motet (M11; Boogaart). Two complementary essays by Catherine A. Bradley and Robert Dudas expand the range of pieces under discussion, taking us out of the innermost gravitational field of Machaut: Dudas delivers a penetrating discussion of a Vitry motet, Gratissima virginis species/Vos quid admiramini, while Bradley’s case studies of three ars antiqua motets open a window on compositional processes at work in the late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century motet repertory, focusing on the use of pre-existing refrains. The string of studies on the motet repertory is continued by Alice V. Clark, who explores the relationships between two motets with a shared tenor, Dolor meus, that survive in the Ivrea codex (Ivrea, Biblioteca capitolare 115).

Closing section 6, Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert discusses two enigmatic entries from the same manuscript (Ivrea 115), which he reveals to be hitherto unrecognized traces of improvisatory practices. Cuthbert ingenuously decodes the notation of the two entries which so far resisted conventional readings, then reveals stylistic similarities to Italian compositional practices of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries that provide support for my view about the local connections of the Ivrea codex (‘Codex Ivrea, Bibl. cap. 115: A French Source “made in Italy”’, Revista de Musicología, 13 (1990), 527–61). Picking up on Cuthbert’s ingenuous readings, it may be worthwhile elaborating further on these peninsular connections by bringing (back) into discussion the fragment Ivrea, Biblioteca capitolare 104 (CV). This neglected fragment consists of a paper pastedown that is now preserved separately from its host manuscript, a miscellany of pious texts (Kurt von Fischer describes it as a collection of ‘Miracula, Passions-, Viten- und Legendentexten’ in his ‘Neue Quellen zur Musik des 13., 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts’, Acta Musicologica, 36 (1964), 79–97 at 84). The pastedown transmits, next to some scribblings, an untexted version of Francesco degli Organi’s (a.k.a. Landini’s) two-voice ballata Viditi, donna, già vaga d’amore, otherwise transmitted exclusively in the Squarcialupi codex. Based on his initial assessment, von Fischer localized the fragment in northern Italy (‘Oberitalien’). He described the version transmitted in Ivrea 104 as ‘korrumpiert’; indeed the tenor designation ‘Tenor de vidite vaga dona zamay’ suggests the possibility of the piece having been copied either in haste or—perhaps even more plausibly—from memory. The dating of the piece by Landini specialists (‘after 1380’) and by von Fischer for the copying of the fragment (‘im frühen 15. Jahrhundert’) fits well with the final copying phases of Ivrea 115 in the 1390s, making it possible—tentatively—to connect the Trecento fragment with the Italianate influences at Ivrea noted by Cuthbert in the two textless settings from Ivrea 115. None of the scribes involved in Ivrea 115 lend themselves to identification with the hand that copied Ivrea 104. But one of their successors at Ivrea in the early 1400s might have encountered the piece at an occasion such as the Council of Pisa (1409), where ecclesiastics from all over Italy, including of course Florence, were present. To ascertain the validity of what is at this stage nothing more than a speculation, the precise nature of the miscellany, of its binding, and the connection with the Ivrea chapter and its library will need to be (re-)ascertained; pending such an investigation, the possibility of the fragment having no direct connection to Ivrea at all must necessarily remain wide open.

The final three essays in the volume are dedicated to topics relating to music and sources from the British Isles. Karen Desmond collates the evidence of theoretical treatises, notably Robert de Handlo’s Regule (1326), regarding tempo (mos), with pieces transmitted in insular sources. Margaret Bent offers a characteristically meticulous analysis of another neglected fragment, Washington, Library of Congress, M2.1.C6 1400 Case, including numerous rectifications. Jared Hartt reconstructs the missing central voice of the motet A solis ortus cardine/…/Salvator mundi domine against the background of the prevalence in England of placing the tenor voice in the middle of a three-voice texture as a medius cantus.

As I hope was demonstrated in the above, the volume offers a treasure trove of scholarship. It stands out as much by the high quality of its contents as the diversity of its approaches, and will no doubt be consulted by scholars for a long time to come. The authors, editors, and publishers as well as the honorand are to be congratulated on this book that is truly a ‘gift that keeps giving’, regaling readers not only with a plethora of new insights but also with sturdy building-blocks for further research.

The volume is handsomely produced and beautifully illustrated, as one has come to expect of books published under the Epitome musical label.