This is the first full-length study of the vernacular motet in thirteenth-century France. The motet was the most prestigious type of music of that period, filling a gap between the music of the so-called Notre-Dame School and the Ars Nova of the early fourteenth century. This book takes the music and the poetry of the motet as its starting-point and attempts to come to grips with the ways in which musicians and poets treated pre-existing material, creating new artefacts. The book reviews the processes of texting and retexting, and the procedures for imparting structure to the works; it considers the way we conceive genre in the thirteenth-century motet, and supplements these with principles derived from twentieth-century genre theory. The motet is viewed as the interaction of literary and musical modes whose relationships give meaning to individual musical compositions.

This book focuses on the literary artistry of the texts of Old French and bilingual motets, notably the special feature of motets that distinguished them from other medieval lyric forms: the phenomenon of polytextuality.

Questions of authorship are central to the late thirteenth-century motet repertoire represented by the seventh section or fascicle of the Montpellier Codex (Montpellier, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Section de médecine, H. 196, hereafter Mo). Mo does not explicitly attribute any of its compositions, but theoretical sources name Petrus de Cruce as the composer of the two motets that open fascicle 7, and three later motets in this fascicle are elsewhere ascribed to Adam de la Halle. This monograph reveals a musical and textual quotation of Adam’s Aucun se sont loe incipit at the outset of Petrus’s Aucun ont trouve triplum, and it explores various invocations of Adam and Petrus – their works and techniques – within further anonymous compositions. Authorship is additionally considered from the perspective of two new types of motets especially prevalent in fascicle 7: motets that name musicians, as well as those based on vernacular song or instrumental melodies, some of which are identified by the names of their creators. This book offers new insights into the musical, poetic, and curatorial reception of thirteenth-century composers’ works in their own time. It uncovers, beneath the surface of an anonymous motet book, unsuspected interactions between authors and traces of compositional identities.