Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context

The manuscript sources of medieval song rarely fit the description of 'songbook' easily. Instead, they are very often mixed compilations that place songs alongside other diverse contents, and the songs themselves may be inscribed as texts alone or as verbal and musical notation. This book looks afresh at these manuscripts through ten case studies, representing key sources in Latin, French, German, and English from across Europe during the Middle Ages. Each chapter is authored by a leading expert and treats a case study in detail, including a listing of the manuscript's overall contents, a summary of its treatment in scholarship, and up-to-date bibliographical references. Drawing on recent scholarly methodologies, the contributors uncover what these books and the songs within them meant to their medieval audience and reveal a wealth of new information about the original contexts of songs both in performance and as committed to parchment.

Helen Deeming is Senior Lecturer in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has taught medieval music at Cambridge, King's College London, Southampton and Royal Holloway, University of London and won several teaching prizes. She is the editor of Songs in British Sources, c.1150–1300, Musica Britannica, Volume 95 (2013) - a scholarly edition that makes many songs available in print for the first time.

Elizabeth Eva Leach is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford. Her publications include Guillaume de Machaut: Poet, Secretary, Musician (2011), Sung Birds: Music, Nature and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (2007), Citation in Medieval and Renaissance Musical Culture (co-edited with Suzannah Clark, 2005) and Machaut's Music: New Interpretations (editor, 2003). In 2013 she was awarded the Dent medal of the Royal Musical Association; she was also winner of the 2012 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize of the Renaissance Society of America, and the 2007 Outstanding Publication Award of the Society for Music Theory.