In a recent review article on Gretchen Peters's The Musical Sounds of Medieval French Cities: Players, Patrons, and Politics (Cambridge, 2012), Keith Polk noted that among the studies of urban musical cultures in pre-modern Europe, few have focused on cities in France, let alone the country as a whole.Footnote ¹ This will surprise no one. While studies of several cities demand attention, a wide-angle view of musical life can meet with many dead ends and does not always tether to larger issues in the field. Yet the surgical nature of urban studies is nothing for which we need apologise, for there are great riches to be found in municipal and church archives that can uncover the dynamics of musical life and allow us to piece together micro-histories of important cities to inform other narratives. The city of Tours in the Middle Ages emerges as a substantial case study in which a figure tied to a locale – St Martin of Tours (d. 397) – drives the investigation out of its provinciality, shedding light on more areas of enquiry than one might expect from a survey of local musical culture.

Yossi Maurey's monograph explores the vibrant and multifaceted cult dedicated to the illustrious bishop of Tours, St Martin, whose legend propelled the city to a lofty status both in France and across the continent. Tours was already a major stopping point on the medieval pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela, but the saint's legacy in particular was a magnet for local tourism. It did not hurt that Martin was also a protector of monarchs dating back to the time of Clovis. Then, for eight centuries beginning with the Capetian dynasty, all kings carried the honorary title ‘Abbot of Saint-Martin’ in recognition of France's most popular saint. Periodic royal visits brought great wealth to Tours. The city's ecclesiastical institutions shared in the glory of their patron saint. The cathedral was the seat of Martin's episcopate, and the bishop also founded the monastery of Marmoutier (just outside the city) and served there as abbot. But it was the collegiate church of Saint-Martin of Tours that housed the saint's remains and thus became the epicentre of devotion to the city's third bishop. Martin was easily the most venerated saint in Tours (and, by some accounts, in France as a whole), and his principal feast day on 11 November commanded an especially ornate liturgy, but cities all over Europe revered Martin and commemorated his feast with great fervour. The subtitle of Maurey's study (‘The Local Foundations of a Universal Saint’) perfectly captures the project at hand. He provides thorough background on the city of Tours, the saint and the flagship church before embarking on some particular cases (most intra-city, some beyond Tours) that can be unlocked with knowledge of these contexts. An extension of Maurey's dissertation, the book is the first to treat comprehensively the musical culture of Tours via its celebrated bishop, following general and dated studies of the city or the saint, such as Sharon Farmer's Communities of Saint Martin (Ithaca, 1991).

Following a brief introductory chapter on Martin's biography, his impact on Tours, and reception beyond the city, Maurey's first chapter (‘The Focal Point of the Cult: St Martin's Church in Tours’) recounts in more detail the fascinating history of the city and the peculiarities of Martin's resting place, the church of Saint-Martin of Tours. The personnel of the institution offer an especially colourful history. Changing its complexion from a monastery to a collegiate church in the ninth century, the church quickly came to possess one of the largest collegiate chapters in all of France, with some 150 beneficed canons on its roll. This group guarded the legacy of the bishop-saint. Not unlike other collegiate chapters in late medieval Europe, the canons of Saint-Martin were cited for their absenteeism and, when present, their lax behaviour in the execution of the Divine Office. The canons’ mischief aside, Maurey uncovers the responsibilities of the canons – as well as those of the vicars – and the ritual actions they performed as they celebrated the feasts of the year, the most important being the day of St Martin's death (11 November). Liturgical books drive the investigation on the whole, and, in particular, the church's only extant customary, dating from the second quarter of the thirteenth century, illuminates ritual life at Saint-Martin.Footnote ² Even if only in a snapshot, the customary reveals the establishment of feasts at Saint-Martin, in addition to the church's interaction with neighbouring institutions in Tours, which forms a backdrop for the book's fourth chapter.

Maurey spills some musical beans in the lengthy first chapter centred on the church of Saint-Martin, offering details about the way Martin's feast days were adorned in liturgical practice at the church. In addition to the variety of vestments worn by the clerics, the reader discovers how horizontal and vertical additions to music (as well as what Maurey calls ‘reworking’) enhanced ceremonies. These compositional methods amount not just to a host of troping and prosulatory possibilities but also to (less documented) polyphonic decoration of melodies. The 11 November feast involved the ‘triumphing’ of chants, a kind of redistribution of an antiphon's melody to prolong the psalmody or the Magnificat with which it was associated. The practice of neumatisation – the addition of wordless melodies to chants – also figured prominently on Martin's main feast, as it did for high feasts of the Temporale. These ecstatic musical gestures, placed by canons ‘wherever it pleased them’, highlight the exuberance surrounding the day (p. 52) and connect with Lori Kruckenberg's pathbreaking work on the genre.Footnote ³ Maurey delays his discussion of the responsory neumas – the only neumas to survive – until Chapter 3.

Chapter 2 (‘Universal and Local Foundations of Martin's Cult’) begins where the book probably should have begun, with an exposition of Martin's life and the propagation of his legend and feast, plus more details on the peculiarities of the church of Saint-Martin. Martin enlisted in the Roman army at a young age but soon renounced his military position, instead dedicating his life to that of a miles christi (soldier of Christ). The most famous episode in his short military stint involved an act of charity performed at the gateway to the city of Amiens, where Martin sliced his cape into two pieces with his sword to give half to a beggar in need. In a dream, he learned that the beggar was really Christ, the episode marking a turning point in Martin's life, now given to asceticism and the work of God. Besides a vita written by Sulpicius Severus (Martin's contemporary and disciple), Gregory of Tours, a sixth-century bishop of the city, produced a four-volume tribute to the saint (De virtutibus sancti Martini), which also reinforced his merits around Europe with fanciful stories of some 200 miracles.

The five appointed feast days celebrated at the church of Saint-Martin are extraordinary by any measure. Most prominent after the 11 November dies natalis is the feast of 4 July, which remembers the day when Martin took his seat as bishop. As Maurey explains, Martin ‘possessed his church in Tours, where he celebrated the office in person in the company of other saints’ (p. 102). Both feasts could be found in liturgical books in cities beyond Tours. However, the remaining three feast days (Subvention (12 May), Reversion (13 December) and Translation (1 December)) were each commemorated almost exclusively in Tours and were all related to the saint's relics. Maurey does well to emphasise that these local feast days in some ways regulated the rhythms of the calendrical year for the city. The sheer antiquity of the five Martinian celebrations is remarkable; all except the Translation were instituted by the tenth century. The late arriving Translation feast from 1324 recalls the moment when the head of St Martin was moved into a new reliquary by King Charles IV.

Of the five feasts, 11 November inspired the most creative output at Saint-Martin. The high point of this celebration of seven-candle rank was a threefold office of Matins, which was enacted with the aid of other religious communities in Tours and included liturgical accretions special to that day. The lengthy service itself reflected an early medieval tradition called the laus perennis, which featured groups of twenty canons perpetually singing psalmody at the tomb of the bishop-saint on the feast. Maurey convincingly demonstrates that the lessons, responsories and versicles of Matins for 11 November were modelled heavily on the vita written by Severus. Severus was a witness to Martin's death, and his testimony of the saint's final days became a central theme on the feast.

The musicological case studies of Maurey's book begin in earnest in Chapter 3 (‘The Musical Articulation of St Martin in Tours’) with a rich analysis of a set of five newly composed prosas sung at the church of Saint-Martin, part of the elaborate ritual layers one finds with the 11 November feast. (Four additional prosas were identified outside of the orbit of Tours.) Maurey shows that the Martinian prosas from Tours have a similar textual profile, complementing the texts of the Matins responsories with which they were joined. While the conventional office items speak of the earthly life of Martin and the events leading up to his death, the prosas take a different tack, trumpeting the joys of heaven that await Martin after his passing. The most extraordinary part of the complex of prosas, as Maurey uncovers, is that three of them are associated with a single responsory Martinus abrahe and can be performed as interpolations or as stand-alone units because of their pliable melodic and textual points of connection. Furthermore, the melody of the three prosas echoes the famous neuma triplex from Christmas day, a threefold melisma appended to the responsory Descendit de celis, known from as early as the ninth century. Maurey is particularly attentive to questions of performance practice, demonstrating the deployment of the prosulated interpolations within the parent responsory. But he also uses this example to show how Martin is associated with Christ in an exceptional way, the new prosa for Martin ‘living in’ the melody for Christ. The textual, musical, performative, and hermeneutical analyses of this set of Martinian prosas are a model for those engaged in the study of the Divine Office and its musical elaborations.

Maurey's fourth chapter (‘Competing with Success: Sharing the Aura of St Martin in Tours’) explores intra-city connections between Saint-Martin and other institutions in Tours, focusing on the strained relations between the collegiate church and the city's cathedral in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The tensions can be viewed in light of similar jurisdictional power struggles between bishops and monasteries around Europe before the eleventh century. The church of Saint-Martin asserted its autonomy from episcopal authority by excluding the cathedral from its ritual activities, the liturgy in particular, which was wielded, in Maurey's words, as an ‘instrument of power’ (p. 174) and a ‘weapon of choice’ (p. 180). In this chapter, Maurey's militant language projects a sense of intentionality that is difficult to prove. But the evidence from the liturgical sources suggests, for example, that citywide processions originating at either the collegiate church of Saint-Martin or the cathedral routinely omitted a stop at the adversary's house of worship. The archbishop of Tours was also not permitted to say mass at either Saint-Martin or the abbey of Marmoutier, which further raised tensions with the cathedral.

The institutional quarrelling reached its apex in the cathedral's development of a liturgy for St Gatien, the first bishop of Tours and a virtually unknown figure in the history of the city. That Gatien historically preceded Martin (the third bishop of the diocese) was the trump card of the cathedral canons. In an apparent effort to revive the reputation of the cathedral vis-à-vis the collegiate church of Saint-Martin, the new liturgy reinvented Gatien, transporting his biography from the third century to apostolic times. While this controversial backdating of the saint was known to scholars, Maurey shows that the cathedral's efforts to boost the standing of this obscure saint occasioned the composition of a new set of chants for Matins, resisting the temptation to pattern Gatien's liturgy after a common one. The flurry of new music, possibly requested by Archbishop Mathefelon (the cult's major champion), presents an even more exaggerated view of Gatien than was known from accounts before the thirteenth century. Most egregious is the claim that the saint was present at the Last Supper and at the Washing of the Feet. Maurey encourages the reader not only to see how the cathedral tried to make the unknown Gatien into a local hero – to whom Martin would be indebted – but also to witness how the liturgy for Gatien could be deployed most powerfully to make the case for the historiographical priority of revived saint. In this chapter, Martin's ‘aura’ is understood to hover over the extended discussion of Gatien, but the reader may feel untethered at this point in the book, wanting to see Martin figure more prominently in the arc of the chapter.

The book's final chapter, ‘From Pacifist to Knight: Late Medieval Appropriations of St Martin’ (Chapter 5), examines the dichotomy between the earthly fighter and the miles christi in the reception history of the bishop-saint. While the Offices surveyed to this point in the study do not address (or have downplayed) the military aspect of Martin's vita, Maurey places this biographical detail in the context of the elevated status of the crusader knight after the eleventh century. The image of Martin as a chivalrous fighter was not prevalent in Tours, but his military background appears to have played well outside of the city and indeed beyond France. The chapter concerns two major case examples, presented in reverse chronological order. First, Maurey investigates the saint's possible connection to the Armed Man (L’Homme armé) tradition in music. This case hinges on a discovery made by Paula Higgins that the opening superius melody of the later fifteenth-century combinative chanson Il sera pour vous conbatu/L’Homme armé, the earliest polyphonic cast of the faux-militant tune L’Homme armé, almost perfectly matches the notes of an antiphon from St Martin's 11 November feast (Dixerunt discipuli).Footnote ⁴ The question from here is how to strengthen the connection between the Armed Man tradition and the saint. Maurey wisely dismisses Martin's relationship to the subsequent Mass Ordinary settings on the L’Homme armé tune; instead, the discussion centres on the issue of composer attribution of the combinative chanson. Although the song is thought to be connected with English composer Robert Morton, this attribution has been called into question. Scholars have proposed Du Fay and Busnoys as possible composers, but Maurey wonders whether a Burgundian composer with connections to the French royal court might have written the chanson. The French monarch, as Maurey showed in the earlier chapters, was particularly invested in St Martin.

Maurey's second and final case study, concerning Machaut's four-voice motet no. 5 (Aucune gent/Qui plus aimme/T. Fiat voluntas), largely draws on an article that the author published in 2005.Footnote ⁵ Again, a Martinian antiphon anchors the analysis; here, the tenor of the Machaut's motet (Fiat voluntas) traces not to the Pater noster prayer, as one might hastily assume, but rather to a Lauds antiphon for the 11 November feast (Domine, si adhuc). In his analysis, Maurey draws the reader's attention to the last line of the triplum: ‘and it is quite clear that my lord Yvain won the love of a great wild lion through true service and not through his knightly valor’ (p. 238). The characters of the knight Yvain and the lion appear unexpectedly as an addendum in the upper voice, prompting Maurey to unveil the origin of these figures from Chrétien de Troyes's twelfth-century romance Yvain, ou le chevalier au lion. Yvain's rescue of the lion in the story is likened to a turn to Christianity, which may be compared with the life of St Martin, who put down his sword and elected to fight as a solider of Christ. Maurey impressively marshals musical evidence to support his reading of the motet. The tenor and contratenor of Machaut's motet have a special retrograde relationship in their rhythmic profiles, musically embodying the ‘conversions’ of the knight and of St Martin.

As musicological studies continue to move away from biographies and genre investigations towards city and institutional explorations and studies of patronage (or even of saints), there is a danger that the findings will remain insular and not dictate extensive revision of existing scholarship (whether musicological or general/historical). Maurey's study of the music for St Martin, however, is well anchored to both the historical and the scholarly mainstream, never letting a medievalist go too far without a connection to a major figure, event or concept. The heavy emphasis on Tours may, at first, seem too narrowly focused for the general medievalist, but the reader may be surprised to see, for instance, the role that Charlemagne's prized scholar Alcuin of York (c.735–804) played in the early history of Saint-Martin when it was a monastery. As abbot, Alcuin not only helped rescue the city and Saint-Martin from an invasion by soldiers from Orléans in 801, but he also enhanced the monastery's scriptorium, maintained ties between the monastery and the imperial court, and edited a life of St Martin. The saint's association with the French crown also makes this topic larger than a mere local study.

By studying St Martin, one is also put in touch with well-known composers and trends in music history. Of the three dozen sequences surviving for the 11 November feast of the saint, three are by major sequence composers in the central Middle Ages. Although Maurey offers mere mention of these sequences, he could have provided token analyses of Notker Balbulus's Sacerdotum Christi Martinum and Adam of St Victor's two sequences for the saint (Gaude Syon, quem diem recolis and Rex Christe, Martine decus). Brief investigations of these works would help rebalance the narrative on the ‘universal’ front. As seen in Chapter 5, full investigations of Machaut's Martinian motet and the origins of the L’Homme armé tradition as it relates to the saint also help stretch Martin's reception beyond Tours. The significant attention to the city of Utrecht and the promotion of Martin's cult by Bishop Radbod of Utrecht (c.850–917) further underscores the ubiquity of the saint.

As Maurey explains at the outset of his study, St Martin of Tours seems an unlikely candidate to rise to significant prominence and command our attention. He was, after all, the ‘third bishop of a third-rate provincial capital in the fourth century’ (p. 2). Not only was Martin not found in Scripture, he was not among the early martyrs, the Church Fathers or the popes of his time. Yet his legend had powerful appeal to numerous groups in Tours and outside of it, warranting the full treatment that Maurey provides. In this outstanding examination of musical production surrounding a warrior turned soldier of Christ, Maurey has helped us listen closely to the music that helped fashion France's most venerable saint.