On 6 Mar 2024 I had a party to celebrate the launch of Medieval Sex Lives, the first book launch party I’ve ever had, although it will not be the last! Nigel Bryant gave a lovely appreciation of my book and Joseph W. Mason and Matthew P. Thomson sang the third pastourelle from the subsection of pastourelles in Douce 308 to the tune of a song by Gautier de Coinci with which it shares its versification. I had provided an English singing translation and captured the performance on my phone. In the spirit of there being two women who perform both male and female parts in the robardel in The Tourna ..read more

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

My review of Female-Voice Song and Women’s Musical Agency in the Middle Ages, edited by Anna Kathryn Grau and Lisa Colton has just appeared in Advance Access for Early Music. This book is part of the series Brill’s Companions to the Musical Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Europe and was published by Brill (Leiden) in 2022 at the somewhat eye-watering price of €215. Although reviewing large edited collections is quite a lot of work, I think it’s important to do so, especially when they’re pricey, as a way of informing potential readers of their contents in the hope that they might get a se ..read more

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