This six-volume series has just been published by Bloomsbury and I am now thinking about how I might incorporate some of it into my teaching next year. As you’ll see from the publisher’s website, the idea here is that all six volumes have the same eight thematically titled chapters: Society, Philosophies, Politics, Exchange, Education, Popular Culture, Performance, and Technologies. The volumes themselves are chronological, with the ‘Middle Ages’ volume that I co-edited with Helen Deeming being no.2, since there is a volume on Antiquity. All the editors met at the Radcliffe Institute in Cambr ..read more

My second EM editorial is now on advance access on the OUP site. This one’s about my love of Sheppard, who is the subject of two of the articles in the issues that the editorial introduced (both also available in advance access too ..read more

This week, the Early Music Show on Radio 3 broadcast an hour-long programme about Guillaume de Machaut. David Gallagher devised the programme after reading my book and my colleague Dr Uri Smilansky joined me in fielding questions from Lucy Skeaping to give an introduction to Machaut and some of his music. The programme is available (in the UK at least): here (starts 2’2” into the track ..read more

The publishers, Cornell University Press, have sent me some marketing materials for my new book, including a code for 30% discount on orders (scroll down to the end of the post). This post just gives a summary, the cover image, and a few sections from the author questionnaire they sent, which should give a flavour of what’s in the book. Summary Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 308 preserves and re-copies the lyrics of over 500 songs, ranging from those written in the late twelfth century, to those composed only a few years before the manuscript was copied in the early fourteenth. Its lack of ..read more

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