Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France

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List of Illustrations
List of Music Examples
Introduction
1 Cathedralism
2 The Rise of the Vernacular Motet
3 Johannes de Grocheio, the Litterati, and Verbal Subtilitas in the Ars Antiqua Motet
4 Ars Nova and Algorism
5 Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, and the Chanson
Afterword: Towards the Renaissance?
Bibliography
Index

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For many centuries, the Western imagination has picture the medieval period as a kind of odyssey: a journey that took Mankind to a strange country and ended in the Renaissance with his homecoming and the restoration of his inheritance. In this stimulating and provocative book, Christopher Page explores the kinds of generalization that we habitually make about `the Middle Ages' and which, whether we know it or not, sustain the false image of medieval odyssey. In chapters that proceed chronologically from the thirteenth century to the fifteenth, he examines what we suppose to be the serenity of medieval reflection on such matters as the `numerical' explanation of musical beauty, and he questions the modern tendency to regard Ars antiqua motets as music for `an intellectual elite'. Turning to the Ars nova and beyond, he discusses the relation between fourteenth-century innovations and contemporary science. A final chapter explores the powerful influence on Joan Juizinga's classic The Waning of the Middle Ages, upon musicology. Page's lively prose if full of ideas, is based upon first-hand learning, and is enriched by an uncommonly deep experience of medieval music.

Reviews

A valuable collection of essays ... Drawing on the wealth of recent research which has deepened our understanding of later chivalric orders and traditions. Page shows that writers on the fifteenth-century chansons have underestimated their quality of originality

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