Facsimiles of Fourteenth-Century English Polyphony

Abstract

With the proliferation of comprehensive commercial microfilming of major music collections, careful consideration needs to be given to the production of hard-cover books of facsimiles that traverse the same ground. Of course, a book is still a convenient way of storing and handling certain kinds of material. In compensation for its bulk it is tangible, accessible and portable, not to mention the fact that it can be annotated. And certain kinds of facsimile volume are obviously still going to be desirable: those reproducing single sources of great importance; those containing the contents of smaller libraries and obscure or less accessible collections; and those that comprise within a single volume an important cross-section of some scattered repertory or corpus of sources. In the light of those considerations, the publication of these two volumes of facsimiles of late-medieval English polyphony is most welcome. They make widely available at reasonable quality and price a vast amount of buried treasure found up to now only in the file drawers of a few specialists. The hoard consists of a large proportion of the surviving English polyphony from the era between the Worcester fragments and the Old Hall manuscript. This is an important and little-known repertory, spanning the entire fourteenth century but dispersed among numerous fragmentary sources. Both volumes will be necessary and welcome additions to public collections as well as to the private libraries of specialists in medieval music. They are also an essential complement to the four-volume edition of this same repertory recently published by Editions de L'Oiseau Lyre in the series Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, and they will surely prove invaluable for the teaching of surveys and seminars on early English polyphony.