In July 1933, music scholars from across the world met in Cambridge for the second congress of the International Society for Musical Research (later to become known as the International Musicological Society). Founded in Basel in the previous decade – and partly picking up the threads of the earlier International Musical Society, which had lapsed during World War I – the new society proved more enduring, and continued to publish its journal, Acta musicologica, throughout World War II. The scholars assembled in Cambridge in 1933 were treated to a wealth of musical and dramatic performances, including historical pageants and a concert series, to which admission could be had for two shillings and sixpence.Footnote ¹ On 1 August 1933, the Cambridge Daily News ran a review of a concert of ‘Mediaeval Sacred Music’ held the previous evening, noting that

Many things might surprise us about this episode. That English thirteenth-century polyphony was being performed in a ‘mainstream’ concert series – and reviewed in the local press – at such an early date in the twentieth century seems extraordinary. That a college choir, whose repertory of early music at that time must surely have been limited, could prepare and present a performance from Hughes's edition of the Worcester fragments, published only a few years earlier, is equally striking (although the Cambridge Daily News reporter failed to record whether the choir on that occasion consisted only of the adult voices, or if the boys also performed). The reaction of the reviewer is perhaps less surprising: both his tepid enthusiasm for the works themselves and his simultaneous determination to slot them into a predetermined narrative of musical progress are typical and understandable in the climate of the time. Least surprising of all is that we should find Dom Anselm Hughes as the instigator of this conspicuous musical event: few did as much, from the 1920s to the 1970s, to ‘resurrect’ English medieval music, not just for scholars, but crucially also for audiences.Footnote ³ This was clearly a point of honour for Hughes: in 1940 he wrote that

It was under the auspices of the Plainsong & Mediæval Music Society that Anselm Hughes published his Worcester Mediæval Harmony of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries in 1928, only a few years after the discovery of leaves in the Bodleian Library and Magdalen College, Oxford that corresponded to those that had been removed from bindings at Worcester Cathedral before the war and placed under a new shelfmark, WOc Additional 68. The significance and contents of the fragments extracted in Worcester was not immediately recognised, for – according to Hughes – Walter Frere, who was initially called in to assess them, was ‘too busy at the time to give them the attention which he saw they deserved’, and the circumstances of the war and its aftermath meant that it was the early 1920s before Hughes himself had the opportunity to examine the fragments more thoroughly.Footnote ⁵ Worcester Mediæval Harmony (WMH), part-facsimile and part-edition, contained only a selection of the available material, concentrating on those pieces that might be reconstructed fully (or as nearly as possible).Footnote ⁶ But it was not the only volume to be produced as a result of Hughes's efforts in the 1920s: the other, a curious composite volume now shelved as Bodleian manuscript Ob Lat.liturg.d.20, was begun as a collaboration between Hughes and H.H.E. Craster, then sub-librarian at the Bodleian, and paired individual leaves from Oxford manuscripts with photographs of leaves elsewhere, interleaved according to what was considered to be their proper medieval order. The creation of this volume, which saw Hughes writing to librarians to urge them to remove leaves from their bindings (and, in the case of fragments from Magdalen College, to return them to Worcester), was to lay the foundations for study of the Worcester fragments for most of the twentieth century, though its value now is surely more as a document of early twentieth-century attitudes towards medieval books, when discovery of and access to medieval repertories was of higher priority than conservation.

The facsimile volume under review here, edited by William J. Summers and Peter M. Lefferts, marks both the culmination of a century of scholarship on English medieval music and the beginning of a new era, in which physical handling of its manuscript remains (as well as the precarious artefact that is Ob Lat.liturg.d.20) can be thankfully obviated by the extensive coverage and very high quality of their photographic reproductions. The volume includes 349 individual plates drawn from manuscripts with some sixty different shelfmarks (though some of these – like WOc Additional 68 – are large sets of fragments from a range of sources, not always related to one another).Footnote ⁷ Assessing the total number of thirteenth-century manuscripts to which the photographs here correspond is therefore not a straightforward matter, and careful consideration of the notes in Summers and Lefferts's Catalogue (pp. 13–43) brings to light several cases in which they revise the assessments of earlier scholars, both in associating fragments not previously thought to belong together, and in disassociating others that are preserved together, but have distinct origins. The quality of the manuscripts – both in terms of their state of preservation and their original degree of elegance – is highly variable, ranging from such as Ob Wood 591, ‘one of the most beautiful English sources’ (p. 29), and Cul Ff.2.29, which adorns the front cover of the facsimile volume, to casually written items of music in miscellanies such as Ob Douce 139 and Lbl Harley 5393. A fascinating table of manuscript dimensions (p. 7) brings home what is also apparent from flicking through the photographs (all but one of which are reproduced at life size):Footnote ⁸ there is a striking diversity of sizes, from Lwa 33327 – larger than Old Hall, though not quite as big as Eton – down to WOc Q.19, with a written space of just 80 x 120 mm and a stave-gauge of only 9 mm (though some larger manuscripts have even narrower gauges, down to just 6–7 mm). The repertory preserved in the manuscripts is – as far as its state of incompletion allows – relatively well known, especially through the editing efforts of Ernest Sanders, Frank Harrison and Peter Lefferts in volumes XIV–XVII of Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century. Little more is added in the introduction here to assess the repertory as a whole, though an index of text incipits (pp. 44–8) provides a very helpful reference point for the location of particular pieces in manuscripts, and for their concordances. Cogent reasons for the exclusion of some sources and the inclusion of others are given, and the catalogue supplies listings for some of the excluded sources. The quality of both the photographic reproduction and the digital preparation behind it is excellent, with mutilated but adjacent fragments digitally reassembled to restore them as closely as possible to their original state: Cjc QB 1, fo. A (plates 17–18), for example, is put together from photographs of four strips (each of which bears signs of having been folded lengthways), so meticulously aligned that nearly every original note on the page is now easily visible in its correct position. At the same time, however, no digital manipulation in terms of retouching or colour-adjustment has been used, and since the clarity of nearly all the colour images is so high, the decision to preserve this aspect of the manuscripts’ current states (reflecting, as EECM's general editor, Magnus Williamson, writes in the Foreword, ‘divergent curatorial histories of different manuscripts’) is to be welcomed. The typography as a whole warrants particular commendation, with the catalogue listings carefully signalling discontinuities between items within a single current source, as well as continuities both within and between sources, in the case of the Worcester reconstructions, discussed further below.

It is customary to say of monumental publications such as this facsimile volume that they have been long and eagerly awaited, but though the phrase is well worn, it is nonetheless apt in this case. Several decades have passed since its publication was first announced, and those of us who have worked on English thirteenth-century music in the meantime have looked forward to its arrival with keen anticipation.Footnote ⁹ It would be right to acknowledge, nonetheless, that the landscape of scholarship has changed dramatically over the time-span during which this project has been in contemplation. The publication of printed facsimiles has itself gone through several phases, with two articles (published fifteen years apart, but both during the gestation of the present volume) talking of a ‘revival’ of the facsimile (in 1999) and its ‘reimagining’ (in 2014).Footnote ¹⁰ For Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, the closing years of the last millennium witnessed ‘a renaissance of the “facsimile edition”’, spurred on by a range of impulses, not all of them complementary. At one extreme, sheer bibliophilia led to the publication of several highly luxurious, full-colour, ‘coffee-table’ facsimiles, some of which retailed then at $2000–3000, and catered to a kind of conspicuous consumption that may – perhaps – bear comparison with the motivations of some medieval manuscripts’ original owners and makers. From a scholarly perspective, the publication of facsimiles was prompted by the spread of the sense that all transcriptions into modern notation entail the loss of information, and thus that ‘facsimiles [were] increasingly being promoted as the only adequate representations of medieval compositions of all sorts’.Footnote ¹¹ Most importantly to the libraries that held the manuscripts, the conservation argument weighed strongly: access to a good-quality facsimile could reduce handling of the artefacts themselves, and thereby safeguard their long-term preservation. That twentieth-century interest in the material remains of medieval music has taken its toll upon the objects themselves is sadly brought home by an observation of Summers and Lefferts that ‘some late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century publications have better plates of individual leaves than we are able to reproduce here’, on account of the sources being ‘seriously degraded’ through their handling by recent readers (p. 3).

This heyday of the printed facsimile (in fact a second flowering, following the pioneering photographic reproductions produced around the turn of the twentieth century in such series as Paléographie musicale) coincided with the beginnings of the movement towards digitisation of manuscripts, a trend founded on some of the same scholarly impulses. In the sphere of medieval music, the most prominent project in this emerging domain was the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM; www.diamm.ac.uk), founded in 1998 with the concerns of preservation and scholarly access at its core. As services such as DIAMM, and increasingly individual libraries with significant manuscript collections, increased their digital coverage and expanded their functionality, it seemed for a time as though the era of the printed facsimile were coming to an end. For Rebecca Fiebrink and Anna Zayaruznaya, writing in 2014:

At the same time, however, printed facsimiles continued to retain certain advantages, primarily centring around their materiality: they ‘had the advantage of being tangible objects with pages that turned – they could be annotated, carried from place to place, and even owned, at a range of prices’.Footnote ¹³ A strong argument in favour of many printed facsimiles has been that they simulate (more or less faithfully) the physical entity of the manuscript they reproduce, and thus facilitate a very direct experience of the medieval book and its corpus as a whole.Footnote ¹⁴

However, this conceptual unity as a physical object is not so straightforward when the material photographed is not a single manuscript, but rather a collection of mostly unrelated fragments or leaves from non-musical books, as in Summers and Lefferts's volume reviewed here. With the exception of a few fragments that can in fact be shown to come from the same original manuscripts, discussed further below, this assembly of (parts of) diverse manuscripts and their music inevitably confers upon the materials a sense of unity that they never had when they were made. Each photograph is clearly labelled with its library shelfmark and folio number, but – especially in the case of fragments that are now catalogued under the same shelfmark but have nonetheless distinct origins (such as Lbl Harley 5958) – careful reading and cross-reference to the catalogue at the front of the edition are required to remind the reader that photographs that appear adjacently or back-to-back here are not necessarily related. Conversely, in some cases, bringing the photographs together here has meant extracting them from their material contexts, for they are by no means all loose fragments: some are pages from perfectly intact medieval books, whose surrounding folios contain materials that – in some way or another – formed part of the medieval reader's experience of this music. Even adjacent music is sometimes not included here, because it is not polyphonic and therefore falls outside the volume's scope.Footnote ¹⁵ This is both regrettable and understandable. It is unfortunate to omit potentially illuminating contexts that do survive when, for so many survivals of English thirteenth-century polyphony, no such manuscript contexts are extant, and particularly disappointing that the monophonic companions to these polyphonic pieces are once again neglected, when the polyphonic material from these mixed manuscripts is usually already well known and has often been reproduced before. The decision is nevertheless understandable, as some practical limits clearly have to be placed on such a volume, which with 338 colour and eleven black-and-white photographs is already generous (and the sale price of £180 compares extremely favourably with similar-sized facsimiles from commercial publishers).

For the most part, then, the sources as reproduced here lack the tangible material context they once had, either because the ravages of time and the actions of earlier collectors and bookbinders have separated them permanently from their original contexts, or because they have here been photographically extracted from medieval homes that they still inhabit, in order to preserve the loose unity of this volume's musical focus. The leaves that form the Worcester Fragments are, however, an exception, and are presented out of the alphabetical order by library shelfmark adopted elsewhere in the facsimile volume, and instead as three reconstructions (labelled RECONs I, II and III), with leaves from WOc Additional 68 spliced together with those from Ob Lat.liturg.d.20, Ob Bodley 862 and Lbl Additional 25031.Footnote ¹⁶ Recognition of these three long-lost but partially reconstructible Worcester music books dates back – as we have seen – at least a century, but their presentation here easily surpasses earlier publications in its clarity. Moreover, it offers a number of revisions to the conclusions published in RISM and other earlier studies about the leaves’ ordering, and – in the case of RECON I – incorporates additional leaves discovered in the 1990s and thus not accounted for in previous discussions.Footnote ¹⁷ The complexity of the task of reconstruction is clearly and persuasively set out here, and it is interesting to see that – in some cases – the early conclusions of Anselm Hughes were – in Summers and Lefferts's view – wrongly rejected by Luther Dittmer and others (see the description of RECON II on p. 37). As the latest contribution to a century-long process of identifying and sorting the Worcester Fragments that was begun in the 1920s, and more broadly as a landmark publication in the study of medieval English polyphony, Summers and Lefferts's facsimile merits a place upon the library shelves of any institution that professes a serious interest in medieval music. It is my opinion that its full value will be realised, in due course, when it comes to be used in conjunction with digital images of its sources on library websites and on DIAMM. Through these online resources, authoritative published commentary can be presented alongside user annotations,Footnote ¹⁸ so that the scholarly community (and others) may collectively contribute to a finessed understanding of sources based on their visual inspection. Images from one manuscript can be trivially linked to – or compared side-by-side with – those from another, allowing the uniting on screen of sources that are separated by thousands of miles and centuries of history (or even – in a printed facsimile – merely by intervening pages, that nonetheless make direct juxtaposition impossible). Online, images can also be linked to modern transcriptions, translations and audio recordings in ways that cater to a wide and expanding range of readers and potential uses.

Medieval English music still lurks in the shadows of repertories from other countries that have been more extensively edited, studied and recorded, and high-quality, high-profile publications like this facsimile volume will do a great deal to draw it back into the light.Footnote ¹⁹ Despite the pioneering work of twentieth-century scholars (both those alluded to in this review, and others), scholarship has still found it difficult to assess English thirteenth-century music systematically, in terms of the questions of repertory, transmission and style that it raises. Its dispersal among so many isolated sources has been partly responsible for this, as is clear by contrast with the large, sometimes elegant, but most importantly surviving codices of continental music that have offered meaningful entities from which to make editions or devise concert or recording programmes. In presenting English thirteenth-century polyphony as a ‘virtual collection’, then, Summers and Lefferts may ultimately be responsible for breathing new life into a field with a long scholarly pedigree, but whose material remains and musical survivals have a great deal more to offer.