Among the many challenges that confront those of us who study music in the medieval West, some of the most vexing concern questions about individual creators of music, or those whom today we would term ‘composers’. Most polyphony before the fifteenth century is copied in manuscripts without attribution. Likewise, in the case of plainchant, the origins are in most cases shrouded in mystery and myth. The situation is more favourable for vernacular song, though Latin song is generally unattributed. And even when we do have attributions for music of this period, either in music manuscripts themselves or in music theory and archival sources, significant questions remain. Does an attribution refer to the creator of the text, the musical setting, or both? For works that exist in multiple versions with different numbers of voice parts or significant quotation of external material, what part of the process was the named person responsible for? How did musicians work together to compose music, and to whom and why did medieval men and women attribute authorship? Surviving sources are often frustratingly silent on these issues.

Composers in the Middle Ages is an important new collection of essays that addresses the subject of medieval composers head-on. As the editors of the volume, Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne and Gaël Saint-Cricq, note in their introduction, recent scholarly work on medieval music has tended to ‘bypass … the question of the composer, approaching the creative act in alternative ways, especially by focussing on compositional process’ (p. 9). There are good reasons for this state of the field, as Rillon-Marne and Saint-Cricq suggest: a high proportion of medieval music cannot be tied to named individuals; the New Musicology of the 1990s has shown a certain scepticism towards the emphasis on life-and-works studies of composers throughout much twentieth-century musical scholarship; and modern definitions of a composer are ill-suited to the variety of acts of musical creation in the Middle Ages and the period’s very different attitudes towards authorship and the ‘work’ of art. After tracing traditional ideas about composers in earlier scholarship on medieval music, Rillon-Marne and Saint-Cricq offer the following provocation: ‘to conceive of the medieval composer in the plural and to rethink the medieval creative act in its collective, collaborative and interdisciplinary dimensions’ (p. 18). Some of the collection’s essays embody this pluralistic approach more than others that hew more closely to traditional ideas about who a composer was and what he or she did. Nevertheless, the impression given by the volume overall is of a rich, complex and varied picture of what it meant to be a composer in medieval Europe.

The volume’s editors usefully group the essays into five sections. In the first, ‘Historiographic critique’, three essays consider established narratives around particular medieval composers. Henry Parkes asks whether churchmen and music theorists of the Middle Ages really believed the myth that Pope Gregory composed the repertory of Gregorian chant. By surveying a range of texts from the seventh to the fifteenth century, Parkes shows that Gregory was recognised as just one of the figures responsible for the creation of plainchant, and that the relative importance attached to Gregory shifted over time. In an examination of the popular twelfth-century Latin song Planctus ante nescia, Charles E. Brewer argues that questions of authorship were less pressing for medieval audiences than they are to modern scholars. A. Zayaruznaya questions the way that certain composers have been made to represent periods of music history in modern scholarship. Through a reconsideration of when Petrus de Cruce and Phillipe de Vitry might have been active as composers, Zayaruznaya argues for a more gradual transition between the Ars Antiqua and the Ars Nova.

Margaret Bent opens the second section, ‘Ascriptions, attributions, signatures’, with a comprehensive summary of composer attributions for polyphony before 1400, including attributions in music manuscripts, ascriptions in treatises, indexes, archival sources and literature, and names within musical works such as musician motets or acrostics. Alison Stones compares three manuscript artists between 1280 and 1350 whose names are found in books on which they had worked. Matching these names to particular images or styles proves complex, however, and Stones cautions that generalisations about authorial identity for artists remain difficult even beyond the fourteenth century.

The third section of the volume addresses ‘Medieval constructions of authority and of the authorial persona’. Manon Louviot discusses the complex authorial acrostics and supplicative telestich (a motto or sentence spread across the final syllable of several lines of poetry) in the fourteenth-century motet Ferre solet, contextualising these features in fourteenth-century music and literature. Catherine A. Bradley explores two motets from the seventh and eighth fascicles of the Montpellier codex that are composed in a modern style and that criticise, through quotation, the approach to composing motets taken by a predecessor, Adam de la Halle. For the works discussed in both essays, the construction of authorial identity depends on a knowing audience who are alert to the works’ intra- and intertextual complexity.

‘In the writing workshop’, the volume’s fourth section, borrows the concept of the ‘writing workshop’ from Bernard Cerquiglini. Estelle Doudet offers a fascinating study of medieval play texts that were created in collaboration with actors and amended by later craftsmen to suit new performance contexts and patrons’ demands. Doudet argues that surviving theatrical texts represent ‘a cumulative auctoralité’ (p. 163), something that might equally be said to apply to the network of compositions examined by Mark Everist. The conductus Naturas Deus regulis derives part of its text from the Historia ecclesie Abbendonensis (sometimes termed the Abingdon Chronicle), shares a ‘Benedicamus Domino’ cauda (itself an elaboration of the gradual verse Virgo Dei genitrix) with the conductus Leniter ex merito, and is quoted in the later conductus Hac in die rege nato. Everist argues that different composers added to this compositional network between the 1190s and 1210s, with conducti further reworked by the scribes of the sources, who engaged creatively with the musical substance and its notation. Doudet’s chapter on theatre (like Stones’s art-historical chapter earlier, which would have worked equally well in this section of the book) might at first seem to sit uncomfortably with the volume’s otherwise tight focus on musical composition, but when compared with the musical evidence analysed by Everist, Doudet’s and Stones’s discussions provide important detail. Because of the anonymity of most polyphonic compositions of the thirteenth century, it is impossible for Everist to do more than hypothesise the number of compositional actors responsible for the works that he discusses. By contrast, the more plentiful evidence for collaborative compositional processes and responsibilities analysed by Stones and Doudet reveal dynamics of artistic creation in the Middle Ages on which musical sources are silent.

The volume’s final three essays concern ‘Composers as communities’, contextualising the work of composers within their lives more broadly. Karen Desmond argues that several anonymous polyphonic alleluia settings should be attributed to W. de Wiccumbe, the precentor at Reading Abbey in the mid-thirteenth century, on the basis of their use of rondellus technique and freely composed polyphony. Desmond speculates that these alleluias may have been copied by W. de Wiccumbe onto a rotulus as he explored different ways to set polyphonic alleluias, and that he may then have embarked on a project to copy polyphonic works from Reading in a more systematic manner (but never completed this task). Brianne Dolce interrogates the term ‘trouvère’, arguing that our use of the term today ‘obscures the breadth of activities and cultural practices in which the so-called trouvères took part’ (p. 223). Drawing on the names listed in the register of the Confrerie des Ardents in Arras, Dolce highlights two practices – money-lending and religious life – with which trouvères from Arras were deeply intertwined. Like Dolce, Yolanda Plumley also draws on archival evidence to flesh out the lives of medieval composers. Plumley focuses on Jaquet de Noyon, a minstrel employed at the royal courts of Aragon in the late fourteenth century. Jaquet is named, alongside Jehan Hasprois, in an ascription in the Chantilly codex, suggesting interaction between minstrels such as Jaquet and singers in the papal court such as Jehan. Plumley’s account traces Jaquet’s career through archival documents, identifying how and when such interactions might have taken place.

Composers in the Middle Ages is a varied and thought-provoking read, and individual chapters are doubtless important contributions to the field in their own right. The volume covers a lot of ground, spanning the ninth to fifteenth centuries and considering composers from the British Isles, France and the Low Countries, Spain and Italy. With essays derived from papers given at a conference in 2019, Rillon-Marne and Saint-Cricq do an excellent job of drawing together common themes throughout the volume, both in their introduction and with many cross-references between chapters in the footnotes. While no book on such a wide-ranging topic will ever be comprehensive, I note two imbalances that could have merited further coverage in this volume. The first is the absence of female composers. There is no dearth of scholarship on Hildegard or vernacular female poet-composers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and two recent collections of essays, one edited by Lisa Colton and Anna Kathryn Grau, the other edited by Rachel May Golden and Katherine Kong, address women in medieval music directly. In light of this, it is striking that the only female composer mentioned in Composers in the Middle Ages is in Dolce’s chapter, though Bent does also note that female names in polyphonic songs are usually presumed to refer to patrons rather than composers, perhaps the result of gender bias. Without wishing to draw too strong a conclusion from a volume whose chapter themes were chosen by the individual contributors, this may be indicative of wider trends in the treatment of gender in the study of medieval music; namely, female composers only tend to be discussed in writings with a specifically feminist bent, without being folded into other kinds of music-historical study. Indeed, if future scholarship embraces Saint-Cricq’s and Rillon-Marne’s pluralist definition of the medieval composer, it is more likely to integrate female musicians more fully and synthetically into histories of medieval music.

The second topic that may have warranted more direct discussion is improvisation, specifically, an interrogation of the grey areas between composition and improvisation, and between oral and literate modes of musical creation. Several references are made to improvisation by various contributors to the volume. Everist speculates that the conducti he examines are too complex to have been improvised and must have been composed in writing (pp. 188–9). Bent notes the difficulty in distinguishing between singers and composers in lists of musicians in musician motets of the fourteenth century and that ‘boundaries between singing and invention were fluid’ (p. 77). When actors changed playtexts, as Doudet discusses, should these actions be properly considered improvisation or composition? And might ideas of composition and improvisation be fruitfully transposed into the realm of manuscript decoration that Stones addresses, with the painting of miniatures more like composition and the decoration of coloured initials closer to improvisation? Drawing a clear line between composition and improvisation is rarely easy, and a consideration of how medieval people tried (or did not try) to do so may yield interesting results.

Overall, Composers in the Middle Ages is a much-needed intervention in the study of medieval music, posing some fascinating questions and offering many interesting answers. The volume is amply indexed for works, composers and other terms, and incorporates several helpful music examples and manuscript images. I congratulate the editors and contributors on having put together – or rather ‘composed’ – such a rich and stimulating collection.