Anyone who listened to BBC radio broadcasts from the 1950s to the 1980s should remember the popular game show My Word. The last segment of the show featured the two team captains, Denis Norden and Frank Muir, competing to tell the best story that would explain, and end with, a famous phrase or quotation supplied by the game show host. Listeners delighted in the anticipation of the catchphrase, for as the clock ran down, it seemed that the phrase became more and more incompatible with the story unfolding. Norden and Muir endeavoured to outdo each other's displays of erudition, constrained by the generic requirements of the show's format, the imposed time limit on their story's length, and the need for the story to end with the supplied quotation. Such competitive composition, or ‘poetic jousting’ as Yolanda Plumley terms it, between medieval poets and composers, is at the centre of her new book on fourteenth-century song, The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut. In it, through a virtuosic display that traverses almost a century of song, and considers almost 350 works (as listed in the ‘Index of Lyric Compositions’ at the end of the book), Plumley examines the circumstances in which, and the processes by which, fourteenth-century faiseurs plucked material from other contexts and ‘grafted’ it – to use Plumley's horticultural metaphor, derived from the French verb enter (p. 10) – into new works.

In the introduction, Plumley outlines her terms of engagement. While she acknowledges that differentiating ‘between accidental or inevitable echoes – such as those arising from common parlance or from particular linguistic or stylistic conventions – and those consciously introduced by the author with an interpretive intent can be especially challenging’, she affirms that her book is concerned with the ‘more deliberate kind of relationship’ (p. 5). She proposes that ‘charting the varying kinds of borrowings and appropriations found in the fourteenth-century lyric with and without music – including quotations, citations, allusions, and imitative modeling – proves a powerful investigative tool with which to refine our understanding of Ars nova song’ (p. 11). While citations in the fourteenth-century motet have been the focus of several studies, Plumley claims that the extent of their use in fourteenth-century song ‘has yet to be clearly elucidated’ (p. 9). Examining what Plumley terms the ‘citational principle’ in this repertory also opens questions regarding the compositional process, attitudes to authorship and the shared cultural knowledge of the various northern French musical milieux under consideration here. Importantly, Plumley does not restrict her investigation to sources containing music, but provides an analysis of several text-only sources for lyric compositions. Crucially, she considers these songs within particular performative contexts, focusing on the evidence of specific manuscript witnesses, including some originating outside fourteenth-century court culture.

Plumley's book is organised along chronological lines in three parts. Part I (‘Citation, Genre, and Experiments in Song in the Early Fourteenth Century’) considers song repertories that incorporate refrains from the first two decades of the fourteenth century. Chapter 1 (‘Cantilena entata: Etymologies and the Grafted Song ca. 1300’) concentrates on citational practice in the corpus of ballettes copied in the Douce chansonnier (Douce 308), a songbook that ‘illustrates varying contexts for citational practice within song in the years around 1300’ (p. 25). Plumley's frequent use of the phrase ‘turn of the thirteenth century’ to indicate the end of that century, that is, c.1300, is somewhat confusing (e.g. ‘Johannes de Grocheio, writing at the turn of the thirteenth century’ on p. 7; also see pp. 11, 21, 38, 54), as is her use of the singular ‘cantilena entata’ to describe songs in the plural. Plumley traces shared refrains found within the Douce 308 ballettes and across other sources including the Montpellier Codex (Mo).

The central dilemma here (and one that persists through the book) is how to assess the significance and directionality of the shared material Plumley identifies; in other words, are these actually citations; if so, are they meaningful; and, can we know who is borrowing from whom? Plumley's assessment that the shared material found in some Mo motets and the Douce 308 ballettes ‘encourages us to reflect on whether the ballettes were also known in Parisian circles soon after their composition, perhaps even before they were copied into Douce 308’ (p. 42) is not unproblematic. As Plumley notes, Doss-Quinby et al. (who had identified eleven of the fifteen refrain citations included by Plumley in Table 1.1; see pp. 40–1) believed the instances of shared refrains to be ‘too scarce as to allow any inferences to be drawn’ (p. 34), yet Plumley presents the evidence of just two further examples (the shared first lines between Ballette 22 and Mo 277 identified by Friedrich Ludwig, and the similarities in sentiment between the first lines of Ballette 65 and Mo 254; see pp. 37–9) to support her inference of the Parisian circulation of the Douce ballettes prior to the copying of Mo. Is it instead possible – as is true of the series of examples she had just outlined on the pages immediately preceding (pp. 35–6) – that in her two examples the composers of the Douce ballettes and the Mo motets both drew on well-known trouvère songs, instead of on each other? Plumley's analysis of the intra-connections between the Douce ballettes is more compelling, such as the ‘set’ of ballettes she identifies comprising nos. 86, 87 and 88.

Chapter 2 (‘Grafting Song in Paris: The Lyric Works of Jehannot de Lescurel’) adds the Refrain-songs of Lescurel to this mix, and examines material shared between his ballades and dits and with works transmitted in Douce 308 and Mo. Although there are only five instances of shared material within Lescurel's Refrain-songs (and three are within Lescurel's own output; see p. 61), Plumley presents eleven further instances of material shared between Lescurel's dits and external sources. Plumley's analysis of Lescurel's dits points to the innovative ways Lescurel manipulated the transitions between spoken stanzas and the interpolated refrains. Her assessment of the shared material's significance equivocates, however. She writes that ‘Lescurel's citations imply that he was familiar with song repertories from the northeast. The high incidence of matches with the Douce ballettes suggests that by the second decade of the fourteenth century, and presumably before, these songs – or at least, the stock of refrains on which they had drawn – were circulating in Parisian musical circles’ (p. 83). Well, these are two different scenarios. If Lescurel is ‘citing’ the Douce ballettes, then, yes, he was familiar with ‘song repertories of the northeast’. But if Lescurel and the Douce composers were drawing on a ‘stock of refrains’, then we are none the wiser about Lescurel's knowledge of northeastern song. Chapter 3 (‘Experimental Song-Writing in the Roman de Fauvel’) examines the often innovative citational practice employed in Fauvel's ballades, rondeaux, sottes chansons and motets. In this chapter, Plumley zips through many works, including an exploration of a fascinating set of interrelationships centring around the An Diex motetus (pp. 111–15).Footnote ¹

Part II (‘Performing Citation in Court and City: The Rise of the Fixed Forms’) moves to individuals who straddled ‘the generation of Fauvel and that of Machaut’ (p. 126): this period is little studied by musicologists since there are few extant sources with music. Chapter 4 (‘Performing Nonsense at Court: Watriquet de Couvin's Fastras’) examines the nonsense lyrics of the Hainaut poet who, according to Plumley, ‘enjoyed considerable favor within those same French royal court circles for which Chaillou's interpolated Fauvel was compiled’ (p. 126). Plumley identifies several new instances of shared material within Watriquet's fastras and works in BNF fr. 146, and with several later works by Machaut and Le Mote (p. 139). The subversions that Watriquet executed on the borrowed material ‘present a clever and humorous poem whose content traveled in entirely unexpected and fantastical directions away from the courtly material that provided its point of departure’ (p. 151). The role played by citational practices in competitive performance contexts is the subject of Chapter 5 (‘Citation and Ritual at the Puys of Valenciennes and Paris’). Literary contests linked to urban confraternities, such the Puy de Nostre Dame, and the puy of the Parisian goldsmiths, fostered the development of song forms centred on the ‘grafting principle’ (p. 154). The manuscript BNF fr. 24432 contains an anthology of the winning entries (in the categories of serventois, chanson amoureuse and sotte chanson) submitted to the Valenciennes puy, of which the serventois Plumley suggests may have been modelled on pre-existing secular material, although she does allow that some of these possible citations may be may be ‘illusory’ rather than actual citations (p. 167). The manuscript source relating to the Parisian goldsmiths, BNF fr. 819–20, contains examples of serventois and rondeaux (within the forty Miracle plays copied in this manuscript) that ‘seek to transform and transcend their models’ (p. 182): a result, Plumley contends, of ‘a sizeable community of authors who were closely affiliated through their professional and cultural activities’ (p. 184).

The Hainaut composer Jehan de Le Mote, who served at the English court of Edward III and his wife Philippa of Hainaut, features in Chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 6 (‘Jehan de Le Mote and the Rise of the Ballade’) examines two of Le Mote's best-known works: Le Parfait du paon and Li Regret Guillaume. Plumley's description of the performance details contained in Le Parfait du paon – a work that includes a lengthy description of a fictional lyric contest – is absorbing. She analyses the significant role citation played in Le Mote's compositional process in the interpolated ballades of Li Regret di Guillaume (she traces shared material in earlier works, including Watriquet, and with Machaut), although, again, Plumley acknowledges that one ‘could, of course, question the direction of the citational play’ (p. 224). With respect to the question of Le Mote's activity as a composer, Plumley summons the evidence of the Ivrea motet Mon chant / Qui doloreus (pp. 231–9), which contains many hitherto overlooked citations from two ballades in Li Regret Guillaume (his Ballade de Mesure and the Ballade d’Entendement).Footnote ² The reference to the motet within the music theory treatise of Wrocław, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka rkp / IV Q 16 as ‘Monachant de morte wilhelmi’, Plumley writes, confirms that the author of the treatise knew of the links between the motet and the Li Regret Guillaume, composed in honour of Guillaume I, count of Hainaut (Philippa's father), who died in 1337. There are also links between the motet's triplum and an anonymous polyphonic ballade copied in the Cambrai fragments, which Plumley suggests may have been composed by Le Mote. Plumley overlooks that this motet is also cited in two of the central witnesses to Vitrian ars nova tradition: in BNF latin 14741, and in the Compendium totius artis motetorum.Footnote ³ Chapter 7 (‘Citing the Classics: Mythological Ballades by Le Mote, Vitry, and Campion’) builds on a theme prominent in these central chapters, namely, the importance of competitive composition in the development of fixed-form song. The ‘collaborative composition of sequences of interrelated lyrics’ (p. 253) is analysed within the series of six mythological ballades written by Le Mote, Philippe de Vitry, and Jehan Campion, compositions that Plumley suggests were ‘collegial and playful’ rather than ‘seriously vituperative and political’ (p. 253).

Part III (‘Machaut and the Art of Grafted Song’) investigates three different aspects of Machaut's use of citation in his lyrics. (That quotation was a key compositional principle in Machaut's motets has been established in several studies, including, for example, the work of Jacques Boogaart.) In Chapter 8 (‘Machaut's Heritage: Tracing Citations in his Lyrics and Songs’), Plumley proposes multiple examples of Machaut's textual quotation of older material, but finds, however, only ‘a few explicit quotations . . . among his chansons’ (p. 292). Machaut's self-citation in his works copied without music is the subject of Chapter 9 (‘Self-Citation and Lyric Process in La Loange des Dames’) where Plumley considers the ‘plethora of repeated lines and phrases that pepper the texts of his ballades, rondeaux, and virelais’ (p. 319), although simultaneously acknowledging her unease about ‘whether Machaut intended for these relationships to be noticed by the reader’ (p. 321). The final chapter (‘The Dynamics of Duplication: Staging Debate in Machaut's Voir Dit’) returns to one of the book's major themes of poetic jousting, and includes an analysis of the ‘competitive confrontation’ between Machaut and Thomas Paien around the composition of the ballade Quant Theseüs / Ne quier veoir (B34). Plumley discusses the possibility of a real-life encounter between Machaut and Paien (and Froissart) possibly in the presence of Jehan de Berry, either in October 1360 (as suggested by Elizabeth Eva Leach), or in early May 1363.

The breadth of the repertory considered in this monograph necessitates a rather narrow interpretation of ‘citation’ and ‘allusion’ that almost exclusively focuses on shared textual material between thirteenth- and fourteenth-century lyrics (and motets), sidelining ‘allusions’ in these lyrics to other popular works, such as the Ovide moralisé or the Roman de la Rose. As already mentioned, there are also few examples of musical quotation, and some of those highlighted by Plumley (such as those in Examples 10.1, 10.2 and 10.3) seem to have more to say about Machaut's melodic vocabulary at a particular point in time (i.e., a ‘lick’ he liked as a way of getting from A to B), rather than representing an explicit thematic link between the compositions that contain them. The big issues explored here, however – textual quotation as a structural constraint but also the central conceit around which lyrics were fashioned, the puys as a performance context for the fourteenth-century lyric, and the concept of competitive and collaborative composition – in tandem with this monograph's breadth of coverage, and its meticulous research (detailed in plentiful tables, examples, illustrations and indexes) make it required reading for anyone with an interest in medieval song.