The question of what precisely is a composer (or indeed the act of composing) in the Middle Ages remains an enduring methodological issue in today’s historical musicology. Inheriting a post-Enlightenment paradigm forged within nineteenth-century nationalism, the cult of genius, and the work concept, musicologists have long struggled to reconcile models of individual authorship with the collaborative realities of medieval musical creation. In Composers in the Middle Ages, editors Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne and Gaël Saint-Cricq assemble a collection of essays that seek to subvert these teleologies. They ask how the medieval composer might be restored to the center stage without succumbing to the modernist myth of the solitary genius. Furthermore, by supplanting the concept of the masterwork with the paradigm of the “composing workshop,” the volume presents a collective reappraisal of musical agency in the medieval period. Rather than reciting the volume’s contents chapter by chapter, this review will examine the collection through three thematic pillars: the historiographical dismantling of authorial autonomy; the fluid demarcations among singers, poets, and composers; and the methodological tensions surrounding network analysis and chronology.
The volume commences with a historiographical critique. In their introduction, the editors map an extensive lexicographical terrain. They demonstrate that modern terms are unsuited to a period where creators were designated as compositor, modulator, faiseur, editor, and so on. It is notable that while they reference recent chant studies to build this framework, their discussion exposes a vacuum within the book itself, which largely neglects composers of chant. This disruption of authorial singularity is pursued by Henry Parkes, who traces the myth of Saint Gregory as the creator of Gregorian chant. Parkes argues that Gregory serves less as a singular author and more as a synecdoche for chant itself, positioned as one among several musical inventors mobilized within the writings of the early to late Middle Ages. Charles Brewer extends this critique to the attribution of the Planctus ante nescia, warning against the tendency to succumb to the historiography of the composer. Brewer advocates for a recognition of inspirational sources, independent of an authorial name.
Questions of attribution are addressed when the contributors turn to the anonymous transmission of music before the turn of the fifteenth century. Margaret Bent provides an interrogation of manuscript ascription, noting that apart from the troubadour and trouvère manuscripts, compositions circulated prior to ca. 1400 primarily without named authors. One must add that this situation is heavily predicated upon the sparse survival of sources, and the proposed advent date of 1400 remains slightly contested given outliers, such as Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Panciatichiano 26, and the Reina Codex. Bent notes the scholarly propensity to “find their man” within archives often excludes other musical agents and their broader community, arguing that the functions of singer and composer were blurred during this period. The overlapping nature of these creative processes finds a corollary in Alison Stones’s examination of late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century book decorators. Stones demonstrates how the uncertainties of manuscript painting stylistics and penwork collaborations mirror the challenges of musical attribution. Her array of art-historical examples would have benefited from direct references to high-resolution color digital counterparts, such as those available via the Gallica website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
As the volume progresses from attribution to authorial identity, Catherine Bradley revisits the thirteenth-century motet to demonstrate that the quotation of older material by a younger generation—specifically the incorporation of Adam de la Halle’s motets into motets likely emanating from the circle of Petrus de Cruce--functions as competitive one-upmanship rather than deferential homage. Such interactions underscore the contemporary social and performative contests (puys) inherent to centers like Arras and Amiens. Manon Louvoit provides evidence of authorial self-representation in her reappraisal of the 1373 motet Ferre solet, whose composer, Johannes Vavassoris, encodes his identity and his prayer using acrostics and telestichs in a text of his own authoring. Drawing on the prevalence of similar textual devices in fourteenth-century literary sources, Louvoit demonstrates that Vavassoris participated in a widespread cultural milieu, while carefully delineating the exceptional characteristics of his text. Providing an interdisciplinary extension to the previous chapter, Louvoit links these practices to illuminators who provided signatures and self-portraits as forms of devotional expression. This framework allows Louvoit to contrast Ferre solet with another well-known acrostic-bearing motet, Ave regina / Mater innocencie / Ite missa est. Where the latter prays for intercession for its subject, placing MARCUM PADANUM firmly in the accusative case, Vavassoris places his name in the nominative, operating as an appeal to learnedness. Furthermore, Louvoit addresses the issue of hidden authorial and dedicatee names, offering an oblique comparison to names inscribed on bells as silent yet sonorous objects, all while remaining appropriately circumspect, in contrast to other contributors to the volume, regarding Vavassoris’s exact archival identity.
A second thematic pillar within the collection is the communal workshop as a crucible for creativity. Estelle Doudet explores the terms designating creative agents in fifteenth-century French theater, articulating the collaborative complexities and ambiguous legal positions of the dramaturgical workshop. Within the realm of secular song, Brianna Dolce expands the marker of the trouvère through a remarkable prosopographical study of the Confraternity of Jongleurs and Bourgeois in Arras. Dolce reveals a network of actors--poet-composers, authors, and liturgical singers--whose interconnectedness dissolved strict boundaries between sacred and secular spheres. Familial and economic ties are also writ large in Dolce’s findings. Yolanda Plumley traverses similar networks in her examination of the ars subtilior, focusing on the curious double ascription attached to Puis que je sui fumeux. Confronting the ambiguous gemipunctuated abbreviation .Ja. (de Noyon), Plumley posits an arrangement wherein Hasprois adapted a song associated with Jaquet. Syntactically, medieval Latin primes “Jo. Simon de Haspre” as the nominative subject; contextually (at least for this reader), Hasprois, whose compositional activity is certainly more broadly demonstrated than Jaquet’s, likely took Jaquet’s lyric and set it to his own music (perhaps with smatterings of Jaquet’s), a ubiquitous practice in contemporaneous Italian polyphonic song. Plumley also illuminates the itinerant musical networks connecting Paris, Avignon, and the Aragonese court, refining current understandings of late fourteenth-century mobility through fresh archival discoveries.
The final dimensions of the collection coalesce around methodology and chronology. Anna Zayaruznaya delivers a recalibration of early fourteenth-century music history, demonstrating that the activities of Petrus de Cruce and Philippe de Vitry overlapped more than current historical accounts concede. By proposing that Petrus’s output stretched decades into the fourteenth century, Zayaruznaya challenges entrenched stylistic compartmentalization, prompting a reconfiguration of the relationship between Petrus’s Ars and Vitry's so-called Ars Vetus. Turning to insular sources, Karen Desmond interrogates the Oxford Rawlinson fragments for evidence of their underlying authorship by W. de Wicumbe or Hugo de Wicumbe. Erring on the side of caution, she concludes that specific prosulated Alleluias in the rondellus style exhibit distinctive features indicative of a localized compositional community. Alongside her valuable reconstructions of six fragmentary rondelli, the strength of Desmond’s essay lies in its robust assemblage of archival, contextual, and scribal evidence. This synthesis serves to underscore the central function of the singer-composer in the cultivation and creation of the repertoire.
Methodological tensions emerge in Mark Everist’s attempt to apply Latourian Actor-Network Theory to a small complex of conductus and related works. The execution relies upon a division between “compositional” and “performative” actors. Such a bifurcation seems to contradict the central thesis of the volume, which demonstrates that singers and composers were frequently the same. It also opposes historical treatises. While advantaged by hindsight, Anonymous IV employs terminology reserved for performers when identifying Master Leonin and Master Perotin as the architects of Parisian organum: optimus organista and optimus discantor. Everist’s construction of hypothetical stemmata filled with lost exemplars betrays a reliance on Lachmannian philology where writing, and no other process such as oral transmission, holds authority. A systematic application of Actor-Network Theory attempts to map all available agents and technologies as social actors/actants within the frame of cultural capital, from the patron and scriptor to the bookbinder and sacristan, wherein musical agents interact and fill the interstices thereof. In a clear case of attempted character assassination by footnote, Everist alleges that the documentation of biblical, patristic, and classical references in Gordon A. Anderson’s conductus editions may not have been Anderson’s own work. Everist cites Anderson’s acknowledgment of the philologist Alan Treloar--whose surname he misspells in the footnote--as evidence of this claim. To cast aspersions on the intellectual capabilities of a deceased colleague, while failing to spell the consultant’s name correctly, represents a failure of collegiality. As Treloar noted in his 1986 memorial lecture, Anderson possessed the ability to form his own opinions on Latin texts. His decision to consult a colleague highlights the collaborative integrity inherent to scholarly inquiry, rather than exposing an individual deficit.
Ultimately, Composers in the Middle Ages dismantles many historical assumptions inherited from modernity. By highlighting constructed identities and collective behaviors, it circumvents the constraints of nineteenth-century frameworks and their twentieth-century historiographical legacy. There remain significant lacunae. The editors do not define or justify the repertorial scope of the project, a decision that explains the absence of discussions surrounding the troubadours, the ocean of medieval chant, and the rich tradition of Trecento polyphonic song. Furthermore, the collection leaves the mechanics of compositional technique--how these musicians composed, conceptualized, and extemporized their polyphony prior to its commitment to parchment--substantially unanswered or substantial inroads already made therein by figures such as Anna Maria Busse Berger and Philippe Canguilhem largely unacknowledged. For a discipline continuing to distance itself from the historiographical legacy of late modernism, this volume serves as an invitation for further transcultural and transhistorical investigation into the nature of musical agency in acts and products of creativity.