Guillaume de Machaut was the foremost poet-composer of his time. Studies look at all aspects of his prodigious output.

At once a royal secretary, a poet, and a composer, Guillaume de Machaut was one of the most protean and creative figures of the late Middle Ages. Rather than focus on a single strand of his remarkable career, Elizabeth Eva Leach gives us a book that encompasses all aspects of his work, illuminating it in a distinctively interdisciplinary light. The author provides a comprehensive picture of Machaut's artistry, reviews the documentary evidence about his life, charts the different agendas pursued by modern scholarly disciplines in their rediscovery and use of specific parts of his output, and delineates Machaut's own poetic and material presentation of his authorial persona. Leach treats Machaut's central poetic themes of hope, fortune, and death, integrating the aspect of Machaut's multimedia art that differentiates him from his contemporaries' treatment of similar thematic issues: music. In restoring the centrality of music in Machaut's poetics, arguing that his words cannot be truly understood or appreciated without the additional layers of meaning created in their musicalization, Leach makes a compelling argument that musico-literary performance occupied a special place in the courts of fourteenth-century France.

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Around the middle of a career lasting over forty years, Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300-77) was afforded an outstanding opportunity to present his oeuvre in a book. The occasion arose in the late 1340s, when a special manuscript was commissioned, perhaps by Queen Jeanne de Bourgogne, for the first time collecting all of Machaut's works, including narrative poems, lyrical poems, musical settings of lyrics, and motets. The manuscript would celebrate Bonne of Luxembourg, the wife of a future king of France. Only the royal treasury could have funded the extraordinary team of craftsmen involved in its production - from the careful preparation of fine parchment, to the calligraphy and ornament of the text, to the carefully copied innovative ars nova musical notation, to the miniatures painted in a shop directed by one of the greatest illuminators in France. Then Bonne died of the Black Death in 1349, just before the manuscript was completed. It would be finished for her son, the future King Charles the Wise. Although Machaut would go on to supervise other manuscripts, none were so luxuriously executed as his first complete-works manuscript (Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, fr. 1586), known today as Machaut MS C. The present volume, the first dedicated entirely to MS C, offers a multidisciplinary collection of essays written by fourteen leading scholars, who provide innovative approaches to literary, musical, art-historical, and manuscript studies. It is replete with images, including over sixty colour reproductions from MS C itself.

This long overdue new edition of Guillaume de Machaut's twenty-three motets, the largest surviving collection of such works by a single composer in this period, is based on the most authoritative of the surviving manuscripts and is designed to meet the needs both of advanced scholars and musicians as well as students and performers. This user-friendly format indicates variants on the scores and has a layout that makes each work's structure clearly visible; the lyrics, with full English translation, are presented at the end of each work.

This volume is the second of the thirteen in preparation that will offer the first complete scholarly edition of the poetry and music of Guillaume de Machaut, the foremost practitioner of these related arts at the end of the Middle Ages in France. It provides a freshly prepared edition based on the most reliable manuscript of two of Machaut's best known dits, the Remede de Fortune (Remedy for Fortune) and the Confort d'ami (Consolation from a Friend), both of which adapt the central ideas of Boethian philosophy to the love poetry tradition. The French texts are accompanied by facing English translations, and the musical passages are presented in situ in a performance-accessible form.

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