This is the first complete edition and the first English translation of one of the most fascinating poems of the late Middle Ages. Machaut's narrative tells "the true story" of the aged poet's romance with a young admirer, constructed around the letters and lyric poems they exchanged, and offers unique insights into the making of poetry, music and manuscripts. Introductory essays survey Machaut's biography, reevaluate the autobiographical content of the poem, explore the literary context, and discuss the miniatures, which are reproduced within the text. Also included is a full listing of variant readings, a commentary on references to contemporary events and the writing of the poem, an outline chronology, indices of lyrics, and a table to convert line numbers between this edition and the incomplete 1875 edition of P. Paris.

Polyphony and the Modern asks one fundamental question: what does it mean to be modern in one’s own time? To answer that question, this volume focuses on polyphony as an index of modernity. In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch showed that each moment in time is potentially fractured: people living in the same country can effectively live in different centuries – some making their alliances with the past and others betting on the future – but all of them, at least technically, enclosed in the temporal moment. But can a claim of modernity also mean something more ambitious? Can an artist, by accident or design, escape the limits of his or her own time, and somehow precociously embody the outlook of a subsequent age? This book sees polyphony as a bridge providing a terminology and a stylistic practice by which the period barrier between Medieval and Early Modern can be breached. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003129837

Guillaume de Machaut was the foremost poet-composer of his time. Studies look at all aspects of his prodigious output.

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book, first published in 2003, examines the relationship between poetry and music in medieval France.

Thirty-five years ago Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the Author. For medievalists no death has been more timely. The essays in this volume create a prism through which to understand medieval authorship as a process and the medieval author as an agency in the making.

The lyrics of medieval "courtly love" songs are characteristically self-conscious. Giving Voice to Love investigates similar self-consciousness in the musical settings. Moments and examples where voice, melody, rhythm, form, and genre seem to comment on music itself tell us about musical responses to the courtly chanson tradition, and musical reflections on the complexity of self-expression.