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 (1300-1377) was the master poet of fourteenth-century France. He established models for much of the vernacular poetry written by subsequent generations, and he was instrumental in institutionalizing the lay reader. In particular, his longest and most important work, the Voir dit, calls attention to the coexistence of public and private reading practices through its intensely hybrid form: sixty-three poems and ten songs invite an oral performance, while forty-six private prose letters as well as elaborate illustration and references to it's own materiality promote a physical encounter with the book. In Controlling Readers, Deborah McGrady uses Machaut's corpus as a case study to explore the impact of lay literacy on the culture of late-medieval Europe. Arguing that Machaut and his bookmakers were responding to contemporary debates surrounding literacy, McGrady first accounts for the formal invention of the lay reader in medieval art and literature, then analyses Machaut and his bookmakers' innovative use of both narrative and bibliographical devices to try to control the responses of his readers and promote intimate and sensual reading practices in place of the more common public performances of court culture. McGrady's erudite and exhaustive study is key to understanding Machaut, his works, and his influence on the history of reading in the fourteenth-century and beyond.

This book provides an overview of the current state of research on Machaut, the major figure of 14th-century French music and poetry, giving fair representation to the many areas of Machaut research that are pursued in fields outside music.Coverage of the current state of knowledge on each of the manuscripts includes the newly discovered Aberystwyth manuscript, described in detail here for the first time. A section on the large narrative poems pulls together recent research of several scholars and offers new views. An up-to-date concordance of the miniatures in all of the illustrated Machaut manuscripts gives information on where published studies and facsimiles may be found. The discography is the most complete list of Machaut recordings yet compiled and provides critical evaluations of recordings most valuable for instruction, according to our latest conception of performance practice in the 14th-century.A biography section organizes the documentary material in a way that will facilitate further research. The bibliography of secondary works cites books, editions, articles, and dissertations (including forthcoming works) from 1740 to 1991, in French, English, the other western European languages, Polish, Russian, and Japanese. The volume is fully indexed.

In Lyric Tactics, Ingrid Nelson argues that the lyric poetry of later medieval England is a distinct genre defined not by its poetic features—rhyme, meter, and stanza forms—but by its modes of writing and performance, which are ad hoc, improvisatory, and situational.

Anyone who has strolled through the halls of a museum knows that portraits occupy a central place in the history of art. But did portraits, as such, exist in the medieval era? Stephen Perkinson's "The likeness of the king" challenges the canonical account of the invention of modern portrait practices, offering a case against the tendency of recent scholarship to identify likenesses of historical personages as "the first modern portraits". Focusing on the Valois court of France, he argues that local practice prompted shifts in the late medieval understanding of how images could represent individuals and prompted artists and patrons to deploy likeness in a variety of ways.

This collection provides a comprehensive reading of Machaut’s literary and musical corpus that privileges his engagement with contemporary political, ethical, and aesthetic concerns of late medieval culture as well as his reception by artists and thinkers, medieval and modern.