The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music. Ed. by Mark Everist.

Abstract

Well before the emergence of musicology as a discipline, scholars had grappled with the Middle Ages. As the ever-growing number of participants at gatherings such as the annual Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference (Med-Ren) demonstrates, interest in the music of the Middle Ages continues. Two significant shifts, however, separate twenty-first-century medievalists from their ancestors: first, the study of medieval music has moved beyond the national competitions waged mainly between scholars of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany and France. The Med-Ren’s rotating locations that alternate annually between Continental and British venues are evidence of this. Anglophone scholarship has entered the scene of medieval music scholarship for good, and former battlegrounds along international boundaries are almost completely deserted today. Second, present-day research struggles with the broad-penned approaches to history writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To the children of a ‘post-modern’ Zeitgeist, constructing a coherent, single-perspective historical narrative of medieval music seems deeply problematic.