This beautifully produced and edited volume, under a delightful and multiply alliterative title, presents the contents of a now famous symposium that took place over 20–21 March 2014 at St Hugh's College, Oxford. The topic at hand was a single manuscript (Montpellier, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Bibliothèque universitaire de Médecine, H.196), perhaps the most important witness to the flowering of the motet during the long thirteenth century, and – what is more – the single fascicle (the eighth) of less than 100 pages that concludes this massive codex. Given the admittedly specialised focus of the conference, along with the likelihood that the reading audience might likewise be somewhat narrow, it is especially appreciated that Boydell and Brewer have had the pluck to offer the fruits of this gathering to all in such an attractive package. The results are intriguing, stimulating and extraordinarily satisfying, even if important questions that surround this manuscript remain – as it is likely they always will – tantalisingly elusive.

Why devote such energy and attention to this single fascicle? As co-editors Catherine Bradley and Karen Desmond relate in their informative introduction, Mo-8 (as I will call it from hereon in) stands both together and apart from the remainder of the manuscript. As with certain other portions of the codex (such as the supplements to fascicle seven), it was appended subsequent to the compilation of the greater part of the manuscript. Its elaborate illuminated opening initial also invites its consideration as an independent liber motetorum; and this initial, along with the piece that it heads (a three-voice troped version of the versicle Deus in adiutorium) also draws on the iconography and strategic placement of the opening page of Mo, which offers a different musical rendition of the same text with a similarly fashioned illuminated letter D. Alternatively, the forty-three works within this final fascicle can be seen as notably eclectic when compared to Mo as a whole; they additionally include twelve items found earlier in the codex, and outside concordances overall are notably few. Also significant is that Mo-8 apparently hails from the earlier decades of the fourteenth century, and thus straddles the boundaries of the noteworthy stylistic changes between the so-called ars antiqua and ars nova. Quite helpfully, the editors have placed a synoptic table in the front matter of the book that lists all the pieces in Mo-8, with useful complementary information. This comes in extremely handy for consultation during the course of reading this book.

The three ‘C's of the book's subtitle – Contents, Contexts, Chronologies – serve to embrace the sixteen chapters by the individual authors that follow, each of which has been presaged in the introduction. Within the volume itself, divisions are signalled by three alternative headings: ‘The Material Object’, ‘Innovation and Tradition’ and ‘Analytical Case Studies’. Together, these organisational criteria allow the articles to transcend their various boundaries, and the contributors and editors throughout have endeavoured to speak across chapters, noting how different levels of agreement, discrepancy and expansion of points may be found among certain articles.

The stage is set in Mark Everist's opening chapter, which dissects Mo-8’s eclectic repertory, interrogating principally its works with ‘Petronian’ semibreves (multiple shorter notes dividing longer ones) that connect it to the previous fascicle, a curious layer of works with English features promoting cross-Channel aesthetic appreciation, a series of motets that catalogue the exploits of friends in Paris that appear more redolent of formal confraternity associations well documented to the north and west of the capital, and the presence of secular songs that undergird several pieces in Mo-8. The latter point helps posit the impact of the thirteenth-century motet upon the later fourteenth-century polyphonic secular repertory.

Similar attempts to decode the presentation of material in Mo-8 inform Anna Grau's investigation, which seeks to uncover conceivable organisational strategies within the fascicle by identifying a cluster of six consecutive works that form a chiastically symmetrical group given over to themes of the Epiphany and Mary's role as mother. Grau proposes that a devotional programme may underlie this series of pieces, and could conceivably point to the exemplar from which they were compiled. Presentational strategies also inform Eva Maschke's study of Mo-8’s kickoff piece, Deus in adiutorium meum intende. Investigating the various settings of this text and its antecedents, she highlights an increasingly discernible use of this conductus and its attendant iconography of singing clerics as an opener for other musical collections. The course of development of these artefacts and their accompanying or related images goes hand in hand with the progressive sophistication of polyphonic music books or analogous collections. These display increasingly clearer organisation and navigability by their creators.

Turning to issues directly related to the chronology of Mo-8’s production – perhaps the issue generating the most contention among the contributions – the Deus in adiutorium initial emerges again, this time as the star witness in Alison Stones's succinct assessment of the illumination's iconography in terms of date and provenance. Drawing on her extensive experience with French Gothic manuscript decoration, the author proposes a date of 1315–25 for the execution of the ornamented letter. She regrets not yet being able to locate its artist, who she proposes is a northern painter working either in Paris or as part of the manuscript's production plan that may have migrated northward from the capital. Further investigation into the singers’ depiction may eventually help identify more closely the date and region of the artwork. Stones's proposals are given a different nuance in Rebecca Baltzer's examination of the fascicle's decoration overall. Here it is placed within the second decade of the fourteenth century, but more likely on the earlier side (hence c.1310–15, as I take it). She allows for the possibility that her discrepancies with Stones may be solvable by looking northward for such specific features as the modelling of heads and faces of the singing clerics in the opening initial. For a suggestion of even earlier spans, Sean Curran's detailed scribal analysis of the verbal text by itself implies that some elements propose a limit between the 1260s and 1290s, while others suggest 1290–1305. He suggests that his proposal of c.1290–1310 for the inscription of Mo-8 may be brought into alignment with the other chronologies suggested herein by proposing a non-Parisian origin for this facet of the collection.

Although the musical text is not treated to a temporal/regional assessment, the various ways in which the pieces are arrayed on each folio occupies Oliver Huck's contribution. He identifies a specific mise-en-page within Mo-8 that governs half of the forty-two motets in the fascicle. Here the various voices are so organised that the end of the triplum extends to the right margin of the leaf, situated above a tenor occupying the entire bottom span and relegating the motetus to the north-west quadrant of the folio. He sees this layout as transitional from earlier presentations; these still privileged the tenor as a foundational borrowed voice via its location, before moving to a representation implying greater equality in the conception of the parts, something observable in the Roman de Fauvel manuscript of 1317.

As with issues of date and provenance, the five chapters that follow ‘Innovation and Tradition’ sometimes reveal divergent perspectives. Karen Desmond, for example, subjects the contents of Mo-8 to rigorous taxonomic analyses of the rhythmic busyness within each voice part of the Mo-8 motets. She identifies five different levels of activity that she connects to descriptions by the theorists Robertus de Handlo and Jacobus of Liège. Although she conceives these categories primarily as stylistic choices that composers could draw upon, in the end she does allow that intensified motion may point to younger examples within the corpus. Analogously, David Maw scrutinises those pieces in Mo-8 that exploit the multiple-semibreve groupings linked to Petrus de Cruce. His contribution seeks to draw out consequences for text setting, propose a compositional chronology and infer stylistic aesthetics for this corpus. In addition to proposing ways in which semibreve motion may depict a courtly lover's suffering, he suggests compositional priority for the works mentioned here by Jacobus, tendering that they were written in the very order the theorist mentions them, and offers the observation that the applicable pieces in Mo-8 demonstrate mastery over similar ones in the seventh fascicle.

Two other offerings underscore, in contrast, retrospective features of the fascicle. Mary Wolinski masterfully investigates resecatio, the splitting of both long and shorter values into smaller ones, especially manifest in the creation of hockets, and entitio, a hemiola-like grafting together of adjacent elements of a rhythmic modal foot. The latter technique, if practised serially, can result in chains of binary rhythmic values. Both procedures, sanctioned by earlier theorists including Anonymous IV, thus offer existing testimony for two supposedly later, pioneering ars nova innovations: the proliferation of increasingly shorter note values and the introduction of duple mensuration. In a related vein, Solomon Guhl-Miller associates the rhythmically free delivery of multiple Petronian semibreves with aesthetic principles connected to the delivery of florid passages in Notre Dame organa, particularly those in a penultimate pre-cadential location. He suggests that the later manifestation, like the earlier, initially invoked a suspension or elasticity of pulse, only later straitjacketed by encroaching rhythmic specificity.

Closing Section II, Anne Ibos-Augé investigates some fascinating instances of quotation in two Mo-8 motets that draw significant amounts of material from pieces earlier in the codex. The complex borrowing relationships she demonstrates, relying in each case on multiple compositions, show how the use of the source motets may enhance the meaning of the resulting works; for the composers’ part it also demonstrates a profound knowledge of the repertory provided in the earlier fascicles.

Similarly concentrated assessments of small groups of works or single pieces wind up the volume. Margaret Dobby focuses on two very differently styled motets from the final two fascicles of Mo written on the Solem tenor; she reveals how their simultaneously delivered poems are projected audibly and coherently within the framework of a polytextual environment. Her contribution extends to later reportorial layers the existing scholarship on these features from the old corpus of Mo. Likewise, Dolores Pesce adds to her ongoing consideration of motets surmounting the Portare / Sustinere tenor, arguing through detailed analyses of two Mo-8 motets and one from Mo-7 that the composers deliberately shaped their pieces in various ways to exploit certain prominent pitches within the chant melisma. She proposes that further study of pieces over this tenor from earlier reportorial layers could provide further ammunition to her conclusions.

The last two offerings, by Rachel Davies and Edward Breen respectively, scope out one motet each. In the former, Alma virgo / Benedictas es / [Tenor], the second work in Mo-8, is plumbed in an attempt to ascertain the unidentified tenor's derivation. A previously proposed candidate, the ‘et amara’ melisma from a Holy Saturday responsory, is posed as the most likely culprit, even though the upper texts seem ill-fitted to this darkly penitential chant with their brightly illuminated celebrations of the Virgin's Assumption. Nonetheless, the compelling investigations offered here of the liturgical, biblical and exegetical environments surrounding this chant invite the opportunity to unite these two apparently incongruous circumstances, just as Mary's grief during Passiontide eventually surrenders to the exultation of her Assumption. Breen's attention turns to one of the best-known works in all of Mo, the motet On parole / A Paris / Frese nouvele, with its provocative French tenor conjuring the cry of a medieval fruitmonger. Here, in an engrossing social history of four early recorded performances of this piece (from the 1950s to 1976),Footnote ¹ Breen elucidates the impact of the English musicologist Thurston Dart (1921–71) on each of these efforts, despite the very different approaches they embrace and results they convey.

In sum, notwithstanding its narrow focus, The Final Fascicle offers a rich and varied crop of compelling scholarship, admirably executed and skilfully assembled by some of the finest minds now working on the music of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It offers a harvest as appetising as the promise in that street vendor's cry. I found it to be quite an enjoyable repast.