Over the course of the last generation, Andrew Kirkman’s scholarship, particularly his important 2010 monograph The Cultural Life of the Early Polyphonic Mass, has deeply shaped our appreciation of fifteenth-century musical life. His latest offering, Music and Musicians at the Collegiate Church of St Omer, is the fruit of decades of painstaking labour in the archive of a single church in modern-day northern France, then part of disputed territory between the kingdom of France and territories of the Dukes of Burgundy. Kirkman’s care is manifest in the work’s attention to archival detail. It is richly documented – the transcriptions offered in the text, footnotes and appendices alone make it a significant contribution to our knowledge of this important site of music-making. And the work has implications for a wider appreciation of the networks of music and musicians in the Burgundian Netherlands and beyond.

After an introductory chapter outlining the history of St Omer, the book loosely follows the life cycle of a chorister, moving from the maîtrise and the duties of choirboys in liturgy and ritual, through the careers of famous choristers and musicians associated with the production of the church’s music books (most famously by Jean Mouton), through discussions of the polyphonic and chant repertoire of the church, its organs and bells, politicking in the college of canons, and finally traces of the death and endowments of several particularly important canons of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Several themes emerge as crucial to the musical life of the region and period. The first is the fiscal structure of the church’s benefices. Kirkman traces in detail how music was funded in the period, inter alia through detailed discussion of the suppression of benefices to fund the upkeep of St Omer’s choirboys. The second is St Omer’s position within a network of courtly and ecclesiastical institutions competing for talented musicians. From the papal chapel and Burgundian court to major institutions such as St Donatian in Bruges, singers and choir masters were in demand, and the archive of St Omer deepens our understanding of musicians’ mobility from the perspective of a major church just far enough from the centre to be fertile ground for chorister poaching. The third theme is the sustained role of ambition, dispute and conflict in making and shaping institutional life. Partly because disputes generate paper trails, we see in detail how key figures in St Omer’s life jockeyed for benefices, that the chapter was far from harmonious, and that legal processes continued for years, often beyond the deaths of key disputants. Kirkman is an excellent guide through this material and its situation within webs of papal bureaucracy, the power of magnates, and political contingencies. Finally, there is a welcome emphasis on the material life of the collegiate church: from the more obvious – organs or bells – through to the soiled sheets of choirboys, the planks installed above beds for books, or musical objects including keyboards and harps bequeathed in the surviving wills of the canons. Future scholars will find a rich source base here for reflecting on the kinds of materials which made musical life possible in the period.

It is worth singling out some of the wonderful details that Kirkman draws out from the archive. The section on the choirboys and ritual drama, for example, reveals the detail of repairs on the leather straps for wings on the choirboys who say the first responsory at Christmas Day matins. Provisions are made for choirboys to appear as the five wise virgins at the Feast of All Saints carrying lamps (which appear sometimes to have been broken in the process). The creation of an image of St Omer in flowers, gathered by unnamed local women, is a brief respite from the overwhelmingly male cast of the book (where women do appear, they do so briefly, as in the payment to a servant girl in the maîtrise). The refusal of a request from burghers of the town to allow the choirboys to sing during a play in honour of St James is a neat example of the protection of the canons’ rights (and the choirboys’ time). Later we encounter two disturbing examples of violence. In the first, the chapter intervenes to discipline a choir master for violently beating one of the church’s six choirboys. He later returns to the post. In the second example, an outraged canon and accomplice apparently entered the Dean’s dwelling armed with a knife, an assault culminating in an attempted suffocation. Questions of honour, discipline, legal rights and personal animosity play out here in dramatic fashion.

Beyond the detailed assemblage of events, people, places, politics and things offered in the work, there is little in the wider framing of the book that will radically change our understanding of music and music-making in the period. As Kirkman notes, his book sits in a rich lineage of studies of major musical institutions, reaching from nineteenth-century antiquarian histories through to Craig Wright’s work on Cambrai Cathedral and Notre Dame in Paris and Reinhard Strohm’s evocation of musical life in late medieval Bruges. Scholarship often works by slow accretion of material, broadening our source base. But I do want, for the remainder of this review, to think about why the approach taken in this book left me wondering about how to bring such strongly empirically-oriented histories of music into dialogue with current historical research across disciplines. It seems to me that alongside work like Kirkman’s, we must continue to search out a musicalised history which is also practised as a histoire problème.

My first questions in this direction relate to the very final pages of the book, where a rich seam of evidence from inventories of goods is offered as a window into the living spaces of St Omer’s canons. Kirkman astutely notes that ‘such is the specificity of a well-prepared executor’s account that it could easily enable the drawing up of a detailed map (or indeed a three-dimensional computer model) of the house and its contents’ (p. 260). I wanted to know what that model would look like, and where – in relation to other spaces and objects – one might find the musical objects owned by the college of canons. How might these sources help us further understand practices of personal and public space, the shape and order of the home, and the meaning and use of objects across the period? Exploring these kinds of questions might have shed light on current questions from the history of material culture and space – questions pursued, for instance, in recent work on domestic objects and devotional practices, including important studies by Abigail Brundin, Mary Laven, and Deborah Howard on Italy and Suzanna Ivanic on Prague, and more broadly in Caroline Bynum’s and others’ work on materiality.

My second set of questions relates to the chapter on bells. The material presented here treads some well-worn paths – both in the history of local campanology and more recent mainstream scholarship. There are the mandatory references to Durandus on bells and Jacques Le Goff’s over-schematized division of church and merchant time. But how exactly do particular local struggles over the control of St Omer’s bancloque, housed in the tower of the collegiate church, support or problematise accounts such as Le Goff’s? Scholarship requires the critical evaluation of our received narratives, and, at least on the surface, this material might point more to negotiation and clarification of jurisdiction over the bell than any clear conflict between the temps du marchand and the temps de l’église. I make this observation in part because work time, in my reading of the period at least, is rarely encountered as a space purified of sacred temporalities. Sacred time, too, is encountered in relation to resistance which is not purely mercantile in origin (this last point is one made by John Arnold and Caroline Goodson through inquisitorial records in their important recent article, cited by Kirkman, ‘Resounding Community’).

Alongside the historiography of time, a parallel set of questions arose for me concerning the history of sound. At various points, Kirkman includes the important work of Carol Symes on sound, but there is a far wider scholarship here, and a far wider array of sounds that might have been investigated. Considering music alongside a repertoire of sounds, noises and silences helps us to appreciate the particularities of the musical, and to situate its interventions in the life of urban spaces (including churches) more precisely. In this regard, then, I wondered how this material might be enriched by bringing it into dialogue with scholars whose work engages most creatively with the sonic: Emma Dillon’s The Sense of Sound (2012), for example, with its conception of the supermusical, and impressive, imaginative use of multiple source types.

To ask these kinds of questions, however, is not to diminish the book’s particular achievements. It would be unjust to suggest that a new theorization or method was ever its intention. Rather I hope my questions might spur further reflection on why the presentation of archival material remains important now across historical disciplines. One of the reasons is that it helps us to broaden our horizons. A book of this type can do this in at least two ways. First, it reminds us that there is still fresh material to be found, and that local, empiricist methods are still vital tools of historical inquiry. Second, a carefully assembled account of such a rich archive as St Omer’s provides a secondary archive or repository of its own for future scholarship. In this way, Kirkman’s book will be able to be used in 500 years’ time in much the same way we use presentations of material from archives now destroyed that were recorded in, say, the seventeenth century. That is to say, this book is destined to appear in footnotes for years to come in the formulation ‘On St Omer, see Kirkman, Music and Musicians’, guaranteeing its posterity more than some other works whose worth, despite their fashionable interests, might more quickly fade.

Finally, I think the book can help us pose some questions about our enduring fascination with specialised and particular local histories. Put bluntly: why might anyone read a whole book about a community of long-deceased canons in a small European town? I’m not sure Kirkman has the most persuasive answers to offer here. For me the book gives a little too much weight in this regard to rhetorical gestures: seeing through windows to distant pasts (p. 3) or hearing distant echoes (p. 276), finding ‘patterns of interaction that are essentially timeless and … timelessly absorbing’ (p. 4), or, perhaps most difficult of all, his evocation of walking into the collegiate church as ‘com[ing] home’ (p. 21). Our desire for the past is something that is always time-full, located in our particular histories, and we do need to reflect in depth, moving beyond the antiquarian, if we are to understand the problems surrounding those desires (for home – but what is home?) and the possibilities for future action and engagement in the world that our scholarship promotes.