Elizabeth Eva Leach has written what promises to be an essential tool for all future work on Guillaume de Machaut, a book that stands in close relationship with Lawrence Earp's magisterial Companion and Anne Robertson's illuminating study of Machaut's motets, hocket and mass, Guillaume de Machaut and Reims. The fact that Leach focuses mostly on the songs makes this book a particularly good companion to Robertson's, since between the two they broadly encompass Machaut's musical output. Leach therefore completes what can perhaps be seen as the Trinity of Machaut studies. Her ultimate goal, however, is not to provide a comprehensive study of the polyphonic secular song, but rather ‘to reflect the centrality of music within Machaut's poetry and poetics by integrating discussion of his songs into the overall thematic treatment of his works’ (p. 1). The result, by (re)integrating the areas of history, literature, music and manuscript studies, creates a rich unitary image of Machaut, one that has value not only for musicologists, but also for scholars of literature and medieval studies in general.
The book is divided into six broad thematic areas. The first, ‘Life: Guillaume de Machaut's Living’, summarises and evaluates what Leach calls the ‘skin trail’ that tells us about Machaut's life and career. She reminds us that much of what we think we know about Machaut comes from his own literary works, a particularly dangerous source of information given Machaut's tendency towards what Laurence de Looze has called ‘pseudo-autobiography’. Largely accepting Roger Bowers's revisionist view that Machaut did not actually enter into full-time residence as a canon of Rheims cathedral until about 1360, two decades later than most scholars have traditionally thought, she concludes that we actually can know surprisingly little for certain. Ultimately, Machaut exists for us through his works, and it is there that Leach turns for the rest of her study.
Chapter 2, ‘Resurrection: Dismembering Machaut’, examines the different paths by which Machaut's works were rediscovered by scholars of literature and music, working until fairly recently without knowledge of each other. Machaut's poetry was initially resurrected by eighteenth-century French antiquarians looking for information about French history, an approach that encouraged readers to accept Machaut's pseudo-autobiographical stance as providing real autobiographical information. As literature, however, Machaut's works were long considered of lesser quality than those of the previous century, not to mention those of Geoffrey Chaucer, whom he influenced. Machaut's music, however, became linked to modernist values, encouraging a focus on musical style apart from text. It is in the study of Machaut's manuscripts, which begins only in the 1970s, that scholars of literature, music and the history of the book come together, leading to the lowering of disciplinary boundaries in the work of writers such as Sylvia Huot and Lawrence Earp.
In the third chapter, ‘Creation: Machaut Making’, Leach introduces the authorial persona who both is and is not Guillaume de Machaut, a figure who resides at the centre of many of his works. This discussion is grounded in the index and prologue that begin MS A (BNF fr. 1584), the latest of the manuscripts over which Machaut apparently had some level of control. Here she links this authorial figure not only to his texts (including musical texts) but also to the act of bookmaking, an act that integrates poetry, music and image. Her reading of the well-known images of Nature and Love presenting their children to Machaut, drawing on the work of the art historian Dominic Leo, shows how they ‘invert social, natural and religious order to establish the reign of the artist’ (p. 95) by modifying the conventions of author portraiture and other forms of illustration. The index and prologue, Leach argues, also set up the centrality of music as the means by which ‘sacred and secular registers [can be brought] into counterpoint and thus harmony’ (p. 99). The chapter includes an extended discussion of De triste cuer / Quant vrais amans / Certes, je di (B29), a ballade that through music brings together three different simultaneous texts that present diverging approaches to thinking – and, of course, writing – about love. Through both visual and aural performance, Machaut makes interconnections between the various parts of his work, creating a unique and unified approach to the textual culture of fourteenth-century France.
With Chapters 4 and 5, Leach turns to a central theme in Machaut's works: the relationship of Fortune and Hope. Where Philosophy came to console Boethius in his time of trouble, it is Hope who appears as Machaut's answer to Fortune. ‘Hope: Loving’ begins with a pair of related ballades set to music, then carries the argument into the realm of narrative poetry, as well as other songs by Machaut and his contemporaries. The Remede is the natural focal point for this chapter, both because Hope is ‘Fortune's remedy’ and because this narrative poem includes a series of musical interpolations, as the narrator of this text must learn not only to love properly, sublimating desire into memory, but also to express that love through songs – poetry and music – in the new style. It is Hope who instructs the narrator in both tasks, and the interpolated songs serve to demonstrate his progress. Leach notes that song is an ideal medium for the kind of hopeful loving Machaut advocates, because written music exists both in the past of its composition and copying and in the present (and even future) of sounding performance.
Chapter 5, ‘Fortune: Suffering’ again begins with a pair of ballades and continues with both narrative poetry and song, and even a pair of motets. Fortune is an inherently unstable force, linked not only to her trademark wheel but also to images of storms at sea, desire, the changeability of women and gossip. Complaints against Fortune are among Machaut's most widely transmitted works, including two of the pieces Leach discusses here, the ballade De Fortune me doy pleindre et loer (B23) and the motet Qui es promesses / Ha! Fortune / Et non est qui adjuvet (M8). By considering Fortune separately from Hope, the discussion of the Remede may seem a bit confusing – after all, the problem comes after the solution – but it brings the later Livre dou voir dit into clearer focus as its narrator loses hope in his relationship with Toute-Belle. Leach argues that the memory that Hope advocated in the Remede is by the end of the Voir dit relocated in the act of writing, so Machaut's book becomes the true remedy for Fortune.
The final chapter, ‘Death: Remembering Machaut’, extends this idea of memory as most effectively embodied in the written word, alone or especially when set to music. Here Leach begins again with a song, Plourés, dames (B32), then considers other works, especially the Mass and the motets and their reception. Reflecting both on modern scholarship and on signs of influence and reputation following Machaut's death, she concludes that his works formed a ‘clear response to the needs of his readers’ (p. 324). As such, while the Machaut manuscripts have indeed effected how we see him and his works, in comparison to his largely anonymous contemporaries, they in fact ‘have not misrepresented or overrepresented his historical importance’. This importance, however, is not (or not only) because he is unique, but precisely because he so strongly represented his time.
The book is well produced and generally free of errors. Leach helpfully refers to musical works by title, with number in parentheses. Footnotes are properly placed at the foot of the page, where they can be easily used or ignored. Images (only black and white, but of high quality) and musical examples are well placed and clearly reproduced. A ten-page glossary is designed to help alleviate the anxiety that seems to attack non-musicians when confronted with close readings of music. The general index is supplemented by an index of Machaut's lyrics, subdivided by genre. All this makes the book easy to use.
Leach's study is marked by a fluid movement from song to narrative and back again that goes a long way towards demonstrating how Machaut's output can be seen with song at its centre. According to this perspective, the music is not simply an ornament to the words, but also an essential part of Machaut's thinking. Her lucid studies of individual songs and pairs of songs, underpinned by diagrams, texts, musical examples and manuscript images, should be accessible to a wide audience and will be useful in their own right. Her opening chapters can also be used separately as case studies in historiography, and I certainly plan to return again and again to her discussions of Hope and Fortune. This potential for flexible reading practices, like her movement between genres, between sound and writing, and between readers of different periods, can serve to collapse past, present and future just as she argues Machaut's songs do. As such, this book will surely serve as a seed from which future work can grow.
