The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle; Contents, Contexts, Chronologies ed. by Catherine A. Bradley and Karen Desmond

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle; Contents, Contexts, Chronologies ed. by Catherine A. Bradley and Karen Desmond Karen M. Cook The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle; Contents, Contexts, Chronologies. Edited by Catherine A. Bradley and Karen Desmond. (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music.) Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2018. [xviii, 333 p. ISBN 9781783272723 (hardback), $99; ISBN 9781787441828 (ebook), $24.99.] Music examples, inventories, illustrations, bibliographies, index. In 2014, a two-day conference was held at St. Hugh's College, University of Oxford. Organized by Catherine A. Bradley, Karen Desmond, and Elizabeth Eva Leach, the event was dedicated to the eighth and last fascicle of the manuscript known commonly as the Montpellier Codex (Montpellier, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire, Section Médecine, H. 196; hereafter Mo). This beautifully decorated manuscript is also the largest surviving collection of medieval motets and is of significant interest to musicologists, performers, and other medieval historians. The bulk of Mo is believed to have been copied in Paris, likely around the 1270s. Yet its eighth fascicle (hereafter Mo8) is not so clear-cut. With all the benefits and casualties of hindsight, scholars often regard the fascicle as a transitional document, on one hand recalling the ars antiqua repertories in the rest of Mo, on the other hand looking toward ars nova styles found in later, fourteenth-century sources. The conference, therefore, revisited lingering questions about Mo8's dating, provenance, paleography, notation, and illumination; its diversity of repertory; and its possible connections to other musical sources. So too do these questions arise in this new volume, the subtitle of which makes clear its central concerns. From its first pages, coeditors Bradley and Desmond construct this collection as a continuation of the conversations held at, and since, the conference. The sixteen essays, plus the editorial introduction, form a rich, developed, and interrelated microhistory of Mo8, investigating it through "paleographical, art historical, codicological, and notational" lenses as well as "musical and hermeneutic close-readings" (p. 8). Three main categories delineate the essays. The first seven chapters ("The Material Object") investigate the fascicle's physical aspects; the next five ("Innovation and Tradition") address genre, notation, quotation, and thematic connections; the last four ("Analytical Case Studies") focus on select works in Mo. Almost every individual contribution, however, speaks to all of these categories and, unlike typical conference proceedings, engages highly with the other authors in the volume. This interaction not only strengthens the points on which they agree but highlights areas of dispute as fruitful for future study, which is a boon to any of its readers looking for potential research projects. Mark Everist reprises his role as the conference keynote speaker in the first [End Page 250] essay. Following the thorough introduction by coeditors Bradley and Desmond, Everist provides a detailed overview of the historiography of work on Mo, neatly summarizing a century of scholarship from the entwined perspectives of dating, genre, and notation. He then lays out various questions that persist about Mo8, noting again the fascicle's transitional and somewhat inscrutable nature. Focusing on different elements within Mo8—certain song tenors, for example, or "Petronian" (p. 5) notational developments—he finds that each has its own narrative, answering some old questions while simultaneously frustrating others and raising new ones in the process. The rest of the authors proceed to tackle many of these elements. Sean Curran's chapter is one of several that center on questions of Mo8's dating. Noting that arguments about the fascicle's dates have been based on its illuminations, he focuses instead on the hand of the scribe writing the text. In comparing the letter forms and decorations in Mo8 to other datable French-Parisian sources, he proposes a copying period of 1290–1310. Based on the fascicle's artwork, Rebecca A. Baltzer and Alison Stones also propose datings for Mo8, although different from Curran's and each other's. Stones looks at the illuminated initial D on the opening folio 350r, examining its color, contents, and possible connections to similar illuminations elsewhere and also to the one that occurs on the first folio of Mo itself. She suggests the likeliest window of 1315–25 but warns that "a certain stylistic ambiguity" persists with...