‘Polytextual’ may be an ugly word, but its redolent ugliness ensures an invitation to the more lavish methodological discourses currently on the scene in both musicology and – with an oblique reference to Edward Said, who emerges in the Epilogue of this book – the Humanities. For the polytextual nature of the motet in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries ineluctably raises questions about the organisation of sound through time, on the one hand, and about the possible meanings of those sounds, on the other. ‘Sound’ and ‘sense’, therefore, form the kernel of this highly intelligent and engaging account of the early motet in medieval France.

The first chapter, ‘Listening to the Past, Listening in the Past’, comprises an exposition of the book's main purpose, especially the repeated call to listen to the medieval texts themselves: their interiority in terms of the affective statements of their lyric personae; their plotting of space through urban or rustic scene-setting; their staging of performance through the integration of direct speech as well as verbs of speaking and singing (described as the unfolding of ‘real-time’ performance); and their integration of other texts and sounds from external sources. Indeed, if Emma Dillon encourages the reader to listen to these texts it is because, quite simply, the texts themselves often embrace a direct or indirect appeal to the auditory. Dillon, thus, deliberately begins her enterprise with a refreshingly literalist reading of these texts since only this can place listening at the centre of her methodological approach. There is no capitulation before the complexity of the polytextual motet; neither is there a simplistic attempt to reconstitute the sonic panorama – or soundscape – of an urban environment. There is a sensitive appreciation of the performative allure of the early motet to modern scholarship as subverting meaning; but there is equally space afforded recent hermeneutic investigations of the genre. Dillon steers a middle course and having established her aural perspective, she introduces the central concept of the ‘supermusical’: ‘a sense of sound apart from semantic resolution – a musical sound that is imbued with a range of meanings perhaps at odds with, or supplemental to, the meaning of the words’ (p. 35). This is demonstrated in an ingenious analysis of the motet Le premier jor de mai/Par un matin/Je ne puis plus durer/Iustus which is, at first, presented as a series of discrete monophonic songs. Only after the text and music of each has been analysed are the four voices presented together. This composite, blending personae and genre, allows sound itself to ebb and flow and in this luxuriousness the lyrical first person's compulsion to sing because of love arguably finds fuller expression. The chapter continues with brief disquisitions on Augustine's duality between the sense and sensuality of sound and on the dialogic in Mikhail Bakhtin's writing on the Middle Ages (that is, the almost dialectic relationship between rites and parodic versions of those rites, coexisting in different societal contexts). It ends with a challenge to musicologists to risk a sounding of sounds – clamour, murmur, hubbub, babble and tumult are words that reoccur throughout the book – in order to tune into their possible cultural meanings and concomitant relevance for the cultivation of the polytextual motet.

Chapter 2, ‘Sound and the City’, ends with an analysis of the famous medieval motet with the tenor purveying fresh strawberries, ‘Frese nouvele’. However, it arrives there by a literally less well-trodden path. Dillon sifts through a series of medieval literary texts which describe the city of Paris in order to locate and circumscribe their portrayal of sound: these include the Dit des rues de Paris by Guillot de Paris, the Tractatus de laudibus Parisius by Jean de Jandun and the Crieries de Paris by Guillaume de Villeneuve. In all cases, Dillon is interested in how the texts amplify the splendour of the urban environment they describe, both in terms of a real-time perambulation but also hermeneutically as sign and symbol. This she terms ‘magnificence’ from the Latin, magnum facere. Part of the glory of the city was its abundance and excess, which also, naturally, reflected economic prosperity: a wealth of goods, almost too many to count, were available. There was thus an element of quantification to describing the city, including the snippets and snatches of sound which came at the flâneur from different directions. This leads to three prime reflections relating to the polytextual motet. First, the presence of vernacular tenors where liturgical tenors from an officially sanctioned rite previously held sway increases, from the perspective of the ‘commodification of song’ (p. 86), the value of the former. Second, the sheer number of voices in a polytextual motet could be considered a parallel to the material excess on display in the streets and markets of Paris. Third and finally, it could actually be rather the inaudibility of sounds in the famous motet On parole a battre/A Paris soir et matin/Frese nouvelle that captures the inexhaustible bounty of the city and its magnificence rather than the supposition of a direct transplantation of an urban cry into another compositional context. This fresh interpretation allows for listening to the oft-performed and oft-recorded motet in a new way.

The focus of chapter 3, ‘Charivari’, revolves around the depiction of the charivaric scene in the Roman de Fauvel. These boisterous affairs revelled in loud music, in the sense of utilising loud instruments from trumpets, horns and bagpipes to pots and pans. The acting-out of a transgressive version of a liturgical procession nevertheless reflected a collective practice; and this ritualistic aspect is then taken up in Fauv in a multimedia presentation for a cultural elite. Sound has a vital role to play in this transformation. The fatras, according to Dillon, are crucial in this respect for a variety of reasons. As spliced refrains with new texts, they witness to the atomisation of sound which is driven even further by playing phonetically with words; as the semantic slips into nonsense, the sonic comes to the fore. They challenge standard conceptions of the lyrical and are even possibly miscategorised in the Roman de Fauvel as ‘sotes chançons’ in a deliberate manner. Devoid of harmony yet related to compositional devices found in the motet such as splicing and grafting (enté), they represent an ‘anti-polyphony’ (p. 127) that brilliantly exposes the supermusical.

Shifting approximately forty years back in time to 1276, chapter 4, ‘Madness and the Eloquence of Nonsense’, first examines the representation of madness in Adam de la Halle's Jeu de la Feuillé before moving on to an analysis of two of his motets. In short, Dillon notes how the figure of the nameless madman in the play displays a remarkable linguistic inventiveness, playing with sound and language. This reveals itself in the way he often mishears and takes up words or rhyming syllables from other protagonists which he then spins into nonsensical utterance. Except, of course, his nonsense is not without meaning; at the margins of civic society and its conventions, he can also reveal the truth which gives him a voice of authority. Dillon also claims that this authority may also ‘resound’ in the homophonic manipulation of rhyming syllables which formed part of the ars memorativa. The ensuing analysis of Entre Adan/Chief bien seantz/A ptatur and Aucun se sont/A Dieu quemant/S uper te demonstrates two different possibilities of organising within a motet texture the vocalic alignment of sound; this can be coordinated vertically, staggered or emphasised through the regular interjection of rests. Further uses of these devices from other motets round off the chapter.

Chapter 5, ‘Sound in Prayer’, and chapter 6, ‘Sound in Prayer Books’, move away from decidedly urban pursuits towards the more devotional world of prayer. More specifically, this subject matter allows Dillon to open up for a musicological readership a less well-known reservoir of primary sources about sound: the illustrations and layout of medieval prayer books. A preliminary distillation of current thinking on prayer underlines its somatic quality, drawing upon the experience of its ductus as well as processes of association and reimagining triggered by the act of reading. For reimagining, it is possible to substitute rehearing, and the affective response to this cognitive reaction is termed a sonic ‘aftershock’ by Dillon (as a musical corollary to the idea of an ‘afterglow’ described by Beth Williamson). Reading a prayer book could bring forth a recollection of sound and this is at its most pertinent in the vast array of depictions of musical performance – often instrumental – found in the margins of a range of prayer books discussed by Dillon. This apparent dichotomy between the music of the margins and the prayer texts themselves is explained in terms guarding oneself against the curiositas aroused by seductive sounds. In this case, external references to the sounding world beyond are to be spurned. There are other ways that sound makes itself felt on the parchment of prayer books. Dillon notes that illustrations sometimes depict acts of listening – the cupped hand to the ear – which attract the attentiveness of the reader. A quotation of a liturgical text such as the Christmas Introit may have brought the sound of previous performance to mind, just as the repeated rubrics of the incipit Ave Maria may have aroused associations with refrains. Most obviously, the rare occurrence of musical notation in prayer books could have engendered sonorous remembrance. Towards the end of the chapter, Dillon returns to the ways in which semantic and phonetic information can, in certain circumstances, sheer away from each other. In the case of the prayer books, three points are made. First, there were different types of literacy which had to be catered for in the production of these books, which sometimes entails a mixture of languages being used, such as the vernacular for rubrics. This led, second, to different ways of reading the text, either syntactically or phonetically. Of course, this allowed, third, for certain liberties as in the ludic illuminations which furnish a pictorial representation of a Latin syllable read in the vernacular. This is termed the ‘extragrammatical experience of Latin’ (p. 240).

Continuing in the devotional vein, chapter 7, ‘Praying with Sound: The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux and Walters Art Museum W 102’, focuses on the cognitive perception of simultaneity. After exploring the didactic and affective import of the exceptional programme of illuminations in the Jeanne d'Evreux hours, it turns to the perplexing appearance of a funeral cortège of animals, each playing a different instrument, spread over a series of openings in W 102. This coincides with the prayers for the Hours of the Passion, which, as in the rest of the book, include bilingual elements. Often an Old French rubric will set the scene for a Latin quotation. In fact, as Dillon points out, this use of different languages is vaguely reminiscent of the interpolated Romance. More significantly, the alternation of Old French and Latin with the corresponding oscillation of rubric and quotation brings the past of the Gospel narrative into the affective present. This does not, however, explain the procession of animals in the bottom margins. Dillon resists seeing these as a merely a moment of humour and, again, offers a thought-provoking explanation: although copied over several openings, the procession could actually be considered to represent a single moment, thereby reflecting through the depiction of sound the cognitive perception of simultaneity, or ‘polyphonic prayer’ (p. 262).

By means of exemplification of devotional practices – and drawing the book to a close – chapter 8, ‘Devotional Listening and the Montpellier Codex’, first looks at two motets which represent a ‘recycling’ of prayer texts: Salve, mater misericordie/Salve, regina misericordie/F los filius and Ave beatissima civitas/Ave, Maria, gratia plena/A ve maris stella. It is, therefore, possible to regard these motets as operating within the same devotional and affective sphere as presented in the preceding chapters. The motets are super-charged prayers, their polytextual nature bearing up a song of praise or a cry of intercession to the Virgin in the sense of what Dillon terms ‘hyperbole’ (p. 293). There follows a discussion of the Montpellier Codex and the ways in which it could be read – or, indeed, listened to – in terms of the ductus of prayer. The succession of motets provides a pathway from the secular declarations of love in the vernacular to the impassioned pleas to God offered by St William of Bourges, both of which were drenched in tears: ‘courtliness dissolves into religiosity’ (p. 312). These considerations come together in the final analysis of the motet Au doz mois de mai/Crux, forma penitentie/S ustinere, which combines a pastourelle in the triplum with a poetic adoration of the Cross in the motetus. Of interest is the existence of a Latin version of the triplum, again devoted to praise of the Cross. If Marion's grief in the pastourelle can, as Dillon suggests, be read across the Latin text and the description of the Crucifixion scene in the Gospels, the polytextual nature of this motet could be understood as an expression of the Virgin's agony watching her son die or her ‘wordless sob’ (p. 326). The commotion of voices here is, again, not to be reduced to a semantic meaning but is allowed to resound in indeterminate and unfocused grief.

In her book, Emma Dillon has successfully brought together a wealth of materials and approaches to interpreting the polytextual motet, uniting in one place a fresh range of explanations. The book is well structured with useful summaries of current trends in research leading to more in-depth critical analyses. It is well written, with memorable turns of phrase, including ‘aural obfuscation’ (p. 34), ‘an enté whose components fail to take’ (p. 127) and an ‘eternal upbeat’ (p. 285). Author and publisher are to be commended for illustrating the book so generously with reproductions of manuscript illustrations and music examples; digital colour images are offered on the companion website. This aids the hermeneutic work at a time when hermeneutics are not necessarily in favour. Encouraged to listen further for other sounds in France from 1260 to 1330, I would alight on the vielle, which is described as ‘sawing’ (p. 187) or scraping (p. 228): Grocheio, of course, ennobled the instrument as being capable of playing any song, large or small. Following on from this, I would strain my ears more towards textless music. Finally, there is one group of protagonists who could have been more readily integrated into the sense of sound: the performers of motets themselves, who undoubtedly comprised the most acute listeners and those most finely attuned to sound in all its forms.