Earlier this year I was interviewed for the New Books Network by Dave O’Brien about my new book, Medieval Sex Lives. You can hear the result here ..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

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 ..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

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

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 rubbish at a tourney? And so on. Some of the questions are racy, some silly, some fairly courtly, but the jeu-parti stages a medieval precursor of the rap battle for two poet-composers to thrash it out, complete with insults, rib ..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

This lecture looks at the reception of monophonic medieval vernacular song, from the earliest manuscript copies to modern performances. Podlecture 6: Reception https://eeleach.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/vernacular-song-6.wav Information about manuscript images online Troubadour and trouvère sources Gautier de Coinci sources German song sources Cantigas General reading on reception Aubrey, Elizabeth. The Music of the Troubadours. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996. Aubrey, Elizabeth. ‘Vernacular Song I: Lyric’ in The Cambridge History of Medieval Music, ed. Mark Everist and Th ..read more