Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context ed. by Helen Deeming, Elizabeth Eva Leach (review)

This eleven-chapter volume edited by Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach explores ten important manuscripts that contain different types of songs composed in England, France, and Germany between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. Each author has systematically examined a “famous but surprisingly little-studied manuscript” (p. 3), reconsidering how the contents, paleographical details, and codicological details relate to the context in which it was produced and used. Published in Cambridge University Press’s Music in Context series, the essays are generally quite technical and addressed primarily to musicologists who study the medieval song repertory. This collection might also find a place as course reading in an advanced undergraduate musicological seminar or in graduate courses on medieval musicology or the history of the book. Important for medieval musicology, however, these essays offer a musical context for larger scholarly conversations of codicology, paleography, and book history. Manuscripts and Medieval ong opens a path for medieval musicologists, in particular, to consider the whole manuscript—from an interdisciplinary perspective, not studying simply notes and song texts on the page—in analyzing meanings and the symbolism of medieval song.

Several scholars in this collection demonstrate that interdisciplinarity for song scholarship can constitute taking a holistic view of a manuscript that can reveal its larger socio-cultural purpose. Sam Barrett and Sean Curran respectively examine Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 1154 (F-Pn lat. 1154) and the “La Clayette” manuscript (F-Pn n.a.f. 13521) from this perspective. These discussions demonstrate what the nonmusical materials in a miscellany can reveal about the sociocultural function of a manuscript—here for training in devotional practice—although both of them could use the literary texts in the manuscripts they examine more effectively. Curran mentions the use of F-Pn n.a.f. 13521 in cultivating lay piety, “to be read by or to the lay devout” (p. 196) in his survey of previous literature on the manuscript, but most fully develops an argument around the fascicle that contains polytextual motets. The polytextual motets, many with Marian tenors, participate in the didactic purpose of the manuscript, being supermusical in their intent to purposefully challenge the attention of the listener (p. 217): the motets encourage cognitive labor to hone in on the meaning of the Marian prayer evoked in the slowest-moving and lowest voice, the tenor. While it is intriguing to consider this argument, the wide variety of texts in F-Pn n.a.f. 13521, some about Mary herself, could be considered in this didactic project. Barrett’s article is more effective in this vein; it suggests that music is part of a larger devotional project in F-Pn lat. 1154, which contains a litany, prayers (including two by Alcuin), collects, Isidore of Seville’s Synonyma, and a number of versus. F-Pn lat. 1154 could possibly have been intended as a didactic prayer book rather than a miscellany that happens to have a set of notated versus in the last 45 folios (pp. 10–11). The different liturgical and musical needs of the monastic audience of F-Pn lat. 1154 and the lay audience of F-Pn n.a.f. 13521 aside, Barrett’s work serves as a model of how music and literary works in miscellany can be read together in a way that Curran’s work does not. It is frustrating, however, that the strength of Barrett’s reasoning relies on scholars examining previous iterations of his work in which he describes the textual content of the versus in F-Pn lat. 1154 (Sam Barrett, “Music and Writing: On the Compilation of Paris Bibliothèque nationale lat. 1154,” Early Music History 16 [October 1997]: 55–96). In order to grasp the full import of Barrett’s project, his article in Manuscripts and Medieval Song needs...