Guillaume de Machaut: Scribe, Poet, Composer

The focus of the project _Guillaume de Machaut: Scribe, Poet, Composer_ is an extremely important late-medieval figure whose artistic output is fundamentally interdisciplinary. His works include narrative poetry, lyrics, songs, motets, and a musical setting of the mass ordinary, all recorded in sumptuously illustrated manuscripts whose compilation and mise-en-page were probably also the result of the author's artistic vision. In this way, Guillaume Machaut (c.1300-1377) functions as an exceptional test site for the development of a multi-dimensional interpretative method that brings together several modern scholarly disciplines. Such a project profits from previous excellent specialist scholarship, but its bringing together of different disciplines illuminates Machaut's work in a distinctively interdisciplinary light. The resulting monograph will interest musicologists, literary scholars (in medieval French and English particularly), historians of the book, and social and cultural historians of the later Middle Ages. The project offers insights into the way in which Machaut's attention to book-making was symptomatic of, and further influential on, the increasing textuality of the later Middle Ages. It combines literary, linguistic, music-theoretical, music-analytical, material, and bibliographic perspectives to create a more complete picture of this central figure of fourteenth-century cultural life. It relates Machaut's work to other aspects of court culture, including ethics, as a way of understanding its meanings and function for his contemporaries. It offers a new mode of reading medieval songs that takes a fuller account of their musical and poetic structures, as well as paying due attention to their context within broader literary and musical cultures that are both written/textual and oral/performative. It also presents a critique of the modern rediscovery of Machaut's work in order to improve our understanding of his medieval importance, stripped of the obfuscations of later reception history. The monograph will be the first full-length study to consider Machaut in his proper interdisciplinary context.