In November 2005, Ad Fugam, a French non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation and study of cultural history in the province of Nord-Pas de Calais, embarked on an ambitious international project. Its focus was the rich musical culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance fostered in the area now comprising Belgium and the French provinces of Nord-Pas de Calais and Picardie. Those involved in the project included university researchers, musicians, curators, and members of other public and local institutions. This collaboration resulted in an exhibition on four simultaneous sites entitled ‘Mémoires du chant: le livre de musique d'Isidore de Séville à Edmond de Coussemaker’; an international colloquium in honour of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Coussemaker organised in conjunction with the Université de Paris IV Sorbonne; a commission for the composer Régis Campo to write a piece entitled Missa Amici, based on an incomplete work by Josquin Desprez; and a series of concerts featuring music of the Low Countries. The present review focuses on the exhibition catalogue and an edited volume containing selected essays written by participants in the colloquium.

The exhibition catalogue is divided into four parts corresponding to the four sites of the exhibition. Part 1, entitled ‘Rituels: Expressions de la Voix’, comprises fifty-five sources that were exhibited at the Bibliothèque municipale in Douai. The focus of this exhibition was on musical notation from the ninth to the fifteenth century. Many of the antiphoners, graduals, missals, processionals and other types of liturgical books in this section are from the Douai collection, while other sources were on loan from institutions in Valenciennes and Cambrai.

Part 2, ‘Voix des cathédrales’, consists of fifty-one sources that were on display at the Mediathèque municipale/Maison Falleur in Cambrai. This exhibition explored polyphony from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, and contained a variety of manuscript and printed sources of polyphony from Cambrai, as well as others on loan from institutions in Lille, Valenciennes, Bruges and Ghent. Documents relevant to Guillaume Dufay were included in addition to examples of his plainchant compositions (the Recollectio festorum beate Marie virginis).

Part 3, ‘Enluminures’, presents thirteen liturgical books (antiphoners, graduals and missals) decorated by Hubert Cailleau, an illuminator from the region of Douai who was active between 1544 and 1577. These manuscripts, all of which are held at the Bibliothèque municipale in Douai, were exhibited at the Musée de la Chartreuse in Douai. Part 4, ‘De l'archéologie musicale’, comprises thirty-four sources exhibited at the Musée Benoît-De-Puydt in Bailleul. This final section of the exhibition includes biographical material related to the life of Edmond de Coussemaker (portraits, birth certificate and other documents), together with some of his original writings in manuscript, and reunites several of the manuscripts and printed books from his personal collection that are now dispersed throughout libraries and archives in the region.

Each entry in the exhibition catalogue features a detailed codicological description and list of the contents of each source, followed by a musicological and historical commentary. The manuscripts, printed books and documents were chosen and grouped to illustrate particular points or concepts among the themes represented at the four sites, such as types of notation, illumination, historical significance, etc. The catalogue also contains more than seventy colour illustrations, an index of places, and an extensive bibliography. It is an incredibly useful research tool, and brings to the forefront collections in northern France and Belgium that have received little or no scholarly attention – such as the manuscripts from the Benedictine abbeys of Sainte-Rictrude (Marchiennes) and Saint-Sauveur (Anchin) that currently reside at the Bibliothèque municipale in Douai.

The second publication includes essays from the international colloquium, entitled Ars musica septentrionalis: de l'historiographie à la valorisation du patrimoine musical, which took place on 24–26 November 2005 at the four different exhibition sites. The introduction, by Frédéric Billiet, discusses the richness and importance of studying the artistic developments of this geographical area, as its archives preserve the remnants of important monastic libraries and other institutions. Billiet highlights some of the unique developments that make this region central to the study of early music: among them he lists developments in early music notation and theory, the trouvère tradition in the city of Arras, and the great cathedral schools in which composers such as Guillaume Dufay and Josquin Desprez were trained. He points out that while musicologists have long focused on different aspects of musical practice in this region, it has been difficult to investigate these developments due to changing frontiers, invasions, and fluctuating political and linguistic realities.

This volume is divided into four sections, each of which addresses an important theme in the study of music from Nord-Pas de Calais, Picardie and Belgium. The first part, entitled ‘Le patrimoine musical du Nord de la France’, contains two articles, the first of which is by Barbara Haggh and Michel Huglo, ‘Musica Speculativa et Musica Practica dans le Nord avant Guillaume Du Fay: le témoignage des inventaires de bibliothèques’. This essay draws many examples from the manuscripts described in the exhibition catalogue, and focuses on the knowledge that can be gained through medieval inventories of the libraries of monastic communities, cathedrals, and collegiate churches – in particular regarding the correlation between works of musica speculativa and musica practica. After an analysis of the treatises in medieval collections, the authors conclude that the appearance of so many books focused on musica practica exercised an influence over the practice of music in northern France. To illustrate this, they point to the example of Dufay's use of the guidelines outlined in chapter fifteen of Guido d'Arezzo's Micrologus in his composition of the chants for the Recollectio.

Michel Huglo's article on ‘Les chants du processional de Cambrai’ follows. Cambrai is an exceptional institution in the area as it preserves more than fifteen processionals, all of which were produced by a team of copyists at the scriptorium of the Cathedral. Huglo shows that the fourteenth-century processionals in the collection represent both the early corpus of chant in use at the cathedral and the period of new Mass composition in the fifteenth century. The newly composed masses are linked to the foundations of the canons in the cathedral chapter from 1401 until the Revolution, and Huglo shows how processional responsories were chosen for the new feasts.

The second section of the proceedings, ‘L'héritage musical d'Edmond de Coussemaker’, comprises three articles that focus on Coussemaker's contributions to the study of music in Belgium and northern France. Michel Huglo's ‘Les manuscrits de la collection d'Edmond de Coussemaker dispersés en 1877’ explores the nineteenth-century rediscovery of early music, recounts Coussemaker's greatest achievements and writings, and explores the importance of his contact with François-Joseph Fétis at the Brussels conservatory in the 1830s. The most important aspect of this essay is the detailed summary of Coussemaker's personal collection. The contents of his library, which contained over 1,600 sources, were recorded in an inventory in 1877 after his death, at the time it was acquired by the Belgian state and joined with the collection of Fétis. These sources were then dispersed throughout various libraries in France, Belgium and beyond. The article ends with a very useful table of manuscripts from the collection of Coussemaker and their current library shelf numbers in Brussels, Paris and Douai.

Nils Holger Petersen's article on ‘The Concept of Liturgical Drama: Coussemaker and Modern Scholarship’ explores changing considerations of musical historiography from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Petersen shows how Coussemaker's work has shaped the study of certain genres, and in particular liturgical drama. Coussemaker's rigorous descriptions and positivist methodology make his work in this field still essential today. Petersen also shows how Coussemaker was ahead of his time, as he was one of the first to recognise that the study of liturgical drama stood at the intersection of several different disciplines.

Shin Nishimagi's account of ‘A Manuscript of the Dialogus de Musica and Epistola by Guido of Arezzo Bequeathed by Edmond de Coussemaker: F-Pn Rés. 359 (12th Century)’ focuses on a composite volume containing three music treatises bound together in Coussemaker's collection. This tome was transferred in 1964 to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and its date and origins have remained in question. The author embarks on a thorough codicological study of the manuscript, and compares the texts and music examples to other sources of the works in order to determine their date and origin. From several idiosyncrasies representative of the textual tradition of the Dialogus de musica in the Low Countries, Nishimagi concludes that the contents of the volume were copied in northern France or southern Belgium.

The third section, ‘Polyphonies et polyphonistes’, contains three articles, the first of which is by Lisa Urkevich, ‘Anne Boleyn's French Motet Book, A Childhood Gift: The Question of the Original Owner of MS. 1070 of the Royal College of Music, London, Revisited’. Through a detailed codicological study of the manuscript, an evaluation of its repertory, and a comparison with another French source (Pepys 1760), Urkevich very convincingly argues that this manuscript was produced in France between c.1505 and 1509, thereby refuting Edward Lowinsky's earlier claim that it had been copied in England. Urkevich demonstrates that the nature of the song texts indicates that it was likely to have been prepared for a female patron as a wedding gift, and that it has strong Angoulême connections. She hypothesises that the manuscript was originally given to either Louise of Savoy or her daughter Marguerite d'Alençon for one of the two women's proposed unions with the English Tudors in c.1502–05. Both women had extensive contact with Anne while she resided at the French court, and knew of her musical talent. The essay concludes that the motet book was given to Anne at some point before her 1521 return to England, possibly upon her betrothal in 1520 to James Butler.

Ronald Woodley's article on ‘Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, MS II 4147: The Cultivation of Johannes Tinctoris as Music Theorist in the Nineteenth Century’ is a fascinating study of the cultural appropriation of the work of Tinctoris in France and Belgium in the nineteenth century. The author takes as his point of departure a Brussels manuscript that served as the primary source in Coussemaker's 1864–76 edition of music treatises. Woodley charts the travels of this manuscript starting with its transfer from Naples to Paris in 1794, where it became central to the early nineteenth-century efforts of Alexandre-Étienne Choron and François Joseph Marie Fayolle to discover the true roots of French music. Both men felt that Tinctoris's birthplace in Nivelles helped to validate the historical primacy of France. The manuscript then passed hands several times before it was acquired in 1832 by Fétis, at which time Tinctoris became central to the historical legitimation of Belgium as a ‘Belgian’ theorist, and his birthplace and linguistic origin were questioned as he became embroiled in the divide between the francophones and the Flemish. This essay puts forth an excellent example of nineteenth-century historiography and nationalism. At the end of the article, there is an appendix with a very detailed description of the manuscript and its contents.

Johan Guiton's ‘Vincenzo Misonne: Clerico Cameriacensis Diocesis’ evaluates the life and influence of a minor musical figure. The great protector of the arts Pope Leo X first invited Misonne, a composer, singer and canon of Cambrai, to Rome in 1519. While at the papal chapel, he held rather prestigious positions, and became a recruiter for the papal choir under Pope Clement VII. Guiton does not focus on the compositions of Misonne, but does show how the life and activities of this composer illustrate the connections between the archdiocese of Cambrai and the Vatican – two of the most celebrated musical centres of the time.

The fourth section, ‘Le chansonnier: approche interdisciplinaire’, has three contributions, the first of which is by Alison Stones, on ‘Some Northern French Chansonniers and their Cultural Context’. This is a very detailed codicological study of five chansonniers, and it is done from the perspective of an art historian, with detailed discussions of the illuminations and scribal hands. Essentially, this study places these sources within the varied book-producing activities of Arras and Cambrai, which encompasses a large selection of different types of books made for lay patrons as well as religious communities throughout France and the Low Countries. Coussemaker also studied one of these sources, British Library, Egerton MS 274. This essay highlights the necessity of viewing these chansonniers in relation to other genres of book produced in the vicinity, such as liturgical books, books of hours, and collections of sermons, to name a few.

Helen Deeming's ‘Words and Music in a Thirteenth-Century Songbook’ assesses the cultural context and significance of Egerton 274, which was elegantly described by Alison Stones in the preceding entry. This manuscript contains both monophonic and polyphonic works with handwritten addenda throughout. Coussemaker studied this book only as a source of polyphony, but Deeming argues that all the genres represented are united, as they are all examples of musica cum littera through their use of texts. The author shows how all of these pieces are based on a musical process driven by textual stimuli. She remarks that the divide between scholars who study monophonic genres and those who study polyphony has marked music historiography since the nineteenth century, and has affected how modern scholars view Egerton 274. Deeming's work successfully refocuses this trend and approaches the contents of the source from the point of view that they are all representative of new musical styles of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries being cultivated in the north.

In ‘Les traditions d'interpretation de la monodie profane: l'exemple des Miracles de Nostre-Dame de Gautier de Coinci’, Claire Chamiyé Couderc focuses on vestiges of oral and written traditions in the music of Gautier de Coinci. The author establishes a theoretical framework that distinguishes between two types of traditions: vocal performance, which she calls the ‘classical tradition’; and vocal composition, marked by the creation and generation of a text from memory, which she calls the ‘active tradition’. The author gives a comparative analysis of the melodies in the manuscripts of Gautier de Coinci to pinpoint instances of the classical tradition and active tradition based on how the songs were recorded in the sources. In the end, she identifies points at cadences and within verses where musical variants occur in the classical tradition (by adding passing tones and anticipations), but leaves the reader wanting more examples of the active tradition, which would strengthen her argument.

Aside from several minor editorial mistakes, such as unformatted tables and the erroneous labelling of the fourth section as ‘Troisième partie’, this edited volume contains eleven essays of high quality, each of which addresses an aspect of musical culture in northern France and Belgium from a different perspective. Both this book and the exhibition catalogue are important contributions to the study of musical culture in the north, and highlight the many different directions that scholarship in this area will continue to take in years to come.