A decade after I blogged about a web-only version of my paper proposing the Melun brothers as possible Machaut patrons, a revised version has been published in print. The original version of this thesis was deemed unsuitable by Gesta because it was too much about music and unpublishable by JAMS because it was too little about music. Feeling that it was simply one of those articles that needed to be out there but which the current configuration of university disciplines was never going to permit to be in a peer-reviewed journal, I self-published it online. That version has been relatively wide ..read more

By Henri Manuel – [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90018140 In November 2022 my book group read Colette’s novella, La Chatte, translated (by Antonia White) as The Cat (quotations and page numbers are from the Vintage paperback re-issue, London 2001). This 1933 publication is a rather torrid tale of 24-year-old mummy’s boy Alain, scion of a rather ritzy but declining family of silk merchants, marrying Camille, the somewhat lower class 19-year-old daughter of the owners of a mangle-making empire. The complication is that Alain is actually in love with his femal ..read more

I took over (from Helen Deeming) as one of the co-editors of Early Music in October 2021 and my first editorial for the journal has now been published in advanced access. This is for the February 2022 edition, which is not yet out (like many journals, Early Music was slowed by the pandemic , although we’re gradually catching up). Generically, an editorial is something that seemed quite different from the sorts of things I’ve written before, perhaps closer to a blogpost than anything else ..read more

Links to manuscripts of Huon de Méry’s narrative poem. Huon de Méry’s Tournament of Antechrist is a fairly widely copied poem, the last item in Douce 308, the manuscript I’ve been working for a while, and a relatively frequent bookmate with Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire of Love (which I’ve also been working on for a while). It’s an interesting mix of courtly tournament, Prudentian Psychomachia (although Prudentius is not mentioned), anti-heretical tract, political statement, dream-vision, and Chrétien de Troyes fan fiction (because the narrator gets lost in the forest of Brocéliande trying ..read more

My article revisiting the dating, provenance and putting together of the manuscript Bodleian Library, Douce 308 has just appeared in the journal Speculum. As readers of this blog (and people who know me) will know, I’ve been working on a manuscript in my local University library, Douce 308, for over a decade. In this newly published article, I offer a review of the dating information based on people named in the manuscript’s contents and suggest a potential patron, giving a rationale. It’s all pretty speculative (one of the readers thought it was really very speculative!) but I am a believer i ..read more

1st UK Edition cover This month my book group read Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay, a novel set in London in 1922, published in 1923. I hadn’t read it before and we picked it because it seemed a good way to celebrate 2022, 100 years on from the action of the novel. (As the novel is available online, I will omit page references here as those interested can use the search function in the text.) I have to say that I wasn’t thrilled with Antic Hay on a first reading, and that wasn’t because many of the characters are petty, obnoxious, self-satisfied, and vapid, but more because I felt that it wasn’t rea ..read more

My free copy reached me in the post yesterday, which alerted me to the fact that this new volume on Machaut’s earliest collected works manuscript has just been published. What I wasn’t prepared for is quite how beautiful the book is: not only is there a lovely colour cover with a tournament scene from the Remede de Fortune, but the other illustrations inside the book (and there are lots of them!) are in colour too. Not only that, but the paper is heavy, and the whole thing has the sort of appearance (as a book) that makes it a fitting commentary on MS C (Paris, fr.1586), a luxury manuscript f ..read more

My article exploring what the jeux-partis and the prose Love Questions in the Bodleian manuscript Douce 308 can tell us about the historical relationship between these two types of courtly entertainment has been published. The jeu-parti is a lyric poem in which two individuals who usually name each other at the beginning of each stanza debate a ‘would you rather’-style question: would you rather see your lady naked from the waist up or from the waist down? would you rather have a husband who is great at jousting but is always away at tournaments or one who stays at home with you but is rubbis ..read more

My chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy has just appeared. BL, Harley 4335, French translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy This large book project is now out and my contribution forms chapter 7 and covers music and philosophy in the Middle Ages. OUP hasn’t given me any sort of access that I can post here, sadly, so I hope most of you have institutional access. In short, the chapter outlines some of the varied relationships between music and philosophy in the Middle Ages. As one of the disciplines of the mathematical quadrivium, musica concerns iss ..read more

My essay on the estampies of the Oxford manuscript Douce 308 has just been published in a collection entitled Music and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Christopher Page, Edited by Tess Knighton and David Skinner. The estampie is usually thought of as an instrumental genre, but the ones in Douce 308 survive as extensive (and complicated) poetic texts. My essay attempts to glean what we can about their musical form from these unnotated and unique traces (none of the Douce 308 estampies has any concordances). I argue, ultimately, that these vocal estampies are closer to the s ..read more