⁸ ‘Le caractère de l’oeuvre qui, comme telle, avant l’âge du livre, ressort d’une quasi-abstraction, les textes concrets qui la réalisent présentant, par le jeu des variants et remaniements, comme une incessante vibration et une instabilité fondamentale’. Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), 610; see also ibid., 84–96. For an application of the concept to music, see Elizabeth Aubrey, The Music of the Troubadours (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 26–34.

⁹ Brownlee, Kevin, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984)Google Scholar; de Looze, Laurence, ‘“Mon nom trouveras”: A New Look at the Anagrams of Guillaume de Machaut – the Enigmas, Responses, and Solutions’, Romanic Review, 79 (1988), 537–57Google Scholar; de Looze, Pseudo-Autobiography in the Fourteenth Century: Juan Ruiz, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997), 66–101 Google Scholar.

¹⁰ See Letter XXXIII of Le voir dit. A similar reference to the Book is made in Letter X, Guillaume de Machaut, Le livre dou voir dit (The Book of the True Poem), ed. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and R. Barton Palmer (New York and London: Garland, 1998), 430–1 and 124–5. The concept of pseudo-autobiography is expounded in de Looze, Pseudo-Autobiography in the Fourteenth Century.

¹¹ Williams, Sarah Jane, ‘An Author’s Role in Fourteenth Century Book Production: Guillaume de Machaut’s “Livre ou je met toutes mes choses”’, Romania, 90 (1969), 433–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² The Machaut music manuscripts – those manuscripts devoted to Machaut’s works that include the music notation – will be referred to here as MachA (F-Pn 1584), MachB (F-Pn 1585), MachC (F-Pn 1586), MachE (F-Pn 9221), MachF–G (F-Pn 22545–6) and MachVg (US-KCferrell MS 1). For full descriptions of these, see Earp, Lawrence, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (New York and London: Garland, 1995), 77–9Google Scholar and 84–94.

¹³ The index indicates that it gives the order of works as Machaut wanted it, though its authority as a source for that information is unknown. Leach, Elizabeth Eva, Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 83–103 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 53–69.

¹⁵ Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 8–9; the citation from La prise d’Alexandre (line 785) is given on p. 7.

¹⁶ The basic documentary evidence of this part of Machaut’s biography is set out ibid., 14–20. There is disagreement among scholars as to the interpretation of it. Anne Walters Robertson has maintained that Machaut took up residence in Reims in the late 1330s, following the collation of his canonry in 1338 (Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in his Musical Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 22, 33–5, 52); whereas Roger Bowers has argued for Machaut’s remaining in aristocratic service until c.1358 (‘Guillaume de Machaut and his Canonry of Reims, 1338–1377’, Early Music History, 23 (2004), 1–48). My own view – that Machaut took up residency soon after the death of John of Luxembourg – will be argued in a forthcoming article.

¹⁷ Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 28–33.

¹⁸ See ibid., 11–14, 25–8, 33–8, 40–8.

¹⁹ The role of such influence as a form of patronage for poetry of the fourteenth century and the guises in which patrons are cast are discussed in Kelly, Douglas, ‘The Genius of the Patron: The Prince, the Poet, and Fourteenth-Century Invention’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 20 (1987), 77–97 Google Scholar.

²⁰ Scholars differ on this point. A convincing case can be made for identifying Toute Belle with Peronne (or Peronnelle) d’Unchair (often referred to as d’Armentières); but even if Machaut did intend to pay homage to this woman by making her a protagonist in his story, it is not certain that she would actually have participated in any of the events of the narrative, and indeed rather unlikely that she would have. Some of the poems ascribed to her composition in Le voir dit are known from their previous occurrence in Machaut’s oeuvre to have been his work. de Looze, Laurence, ‘Guillaume de Machaut and the Writerly Process’, French Forum, 9 (1984), 145–61Google Scholar (p. 146); Imbs, Paul, Le voir-dit de Guillaume de Machaut: Étude littéraire (Paris: Klincksieck, 2001), 251–5Google Scholar.

²¹ Kelly, ‘The Genius of the Patron’, 93.

²² Anne Walters Robertson notes that the texts of Bone pastor (motet 18) tend towards the generic in their sentiments, a facet of craft that might have enabled them to serve a variety of contexts beyond their initial function. Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, 60–1.

²³ Kelly, ‘The Genius of the Patron’, 94.

²⁴ Strohm, Reinhard, ‘Looking Back at Ourselves: The Problem with the Musical Work-Concept’, The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, ed. Talbot, Michael (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 128–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 151).

²⁵ The comment is made in Letter XXXIII in relation to Dix et sept. Guillaume de Machaut, Le livre dou voir dit, ed. Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer, 430–1.

²⁶ He writes here in Letter X with regard to Nes qu’on porroit (ballade 33); ibid., 124–5.

²⁷ Motets 18–23 all seem to be occasional pieces, hence their detachment from the chronological sequence of the other motets (1–17), whose subject matter is more abstract. Other works may record occasions of a more informal kind, such as (in Plourez, dames, ballade 32) Machaut’s illness and fear of death. Machaut was not averse to creating a fictional occasion for a pre-existing work, as he did for the lai Qui bien aimme (‘Le lay de plour’) (lai 16), which subsequently became one of three pieces that he was sentenced to write at the end of Le jugement dou roy de Navarre (lines 4173–89), though the only one that he actually attached to the dit in fulfilment of it.

²⁸ The exhortatory tone identified in the texts by Robertson is commensurate with such an occasion. Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 9–10; Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, 53–5.

²⁹ Letter XXXV, Guillaume de Machaut, Le livre dou voir dit, ed. Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer, 438–9.

³⁰ The argument is summarized in Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 189–94 and 273–7. There are some undeniable exceptions to chronological order (the juxtaposition of the two Jugement poems, for example), but specific thematic cases can be made for these. As observed in n. 27 above, the motets are not as problematic as they first appear. There are two chronological orderings: one for the ordinary motets (1–17), the other for the occasional ones (18–23). There need be no contradiction between the sort of thematic ordering argued by Anne Walters Robertson and a (broadly) chronological sequence of composition. Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, 79–184.

³¹ Some of the examples mentioned here are discussed and illustrated in the supplementary material complementing this article, available at https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2022.7 by clicking on the supplementary materials tab. These consist of a Word file and 13 recordings with accompanying music notation.

³² No account is taken here of differences between manuscripts that seem likely to be failings or idiosyncrasies on the part of one of them (for example, the copying of just three voices of ballade 21, Se quanque, into MachA, whereas the others have all four).

³³ Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel, ‘ Le voir dit and La Messe de Nostre Dame: Aspects of Genre and Style in Late Works of Machaut’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 2 (1993), 43–73 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (pp. 48–50).

³⁴ Given the integrated changes of metre between the cantus and the triplum in rondeau 10, it is perhaps unlikely that the three-voice version in MachC was ever regarded as complete. The two-voice version of ballade 42 seems to work well in itself and makes sense as part of a scheme by Machaut to illustrate all four of his textures (from the monophony of the virelai to the four voices of the baladelle) in the new-style compositions of the Remede de Fortune. However, the later expansion of this piece to four voices seems puzzling in this connection, but may well result from the reinstatement of the song’s initial form. Virelai 29/26 is convincing in both versions.

³⁵ Maw, David, ‘“Trespasser mesure”: Meter in Machaut’s Polyphonic Songs’, Journal of Musicology, 21 (2004), 46–125 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (pp. 118–20).

³⁶ Arlt, Wulf, ‘Donnez signeurs: Zum Bruckenschlag zwischen Ästhetik und Analyse bei Guillaume de Machaut’, Tradition und Innovation in der Musik: Festschrift fur E. Lichtenhahn zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Ballmer, Christoph and Gartmann, Thomas (Winterthur: Amadeus, 1993), 39–64 Google Scholar.

³⁷ Carl Dahlhaus, ‘“Zentrale” und “periphere” Züge in der Dissonanztechnik Machauts’, Aktuelle Fragen der musikbezogenen Mittelalterforschung: Texte zu einem Basler Kolloquium des Jahres 1975, Forum Musicologicum, Basler Beiträge zur Musikgeschichte, 3 (Winterthur: Amadeus, 1982), 281–99 (p. 281). On the meaning of this moment, see Wulf Arlt, ‘Aspekte der Chronologie und des Stilwandels im Französischen Lied des 14. Jahrhunderts’, ibid., 193–280 (pp. 260–1).

³⁸ The cultural debate was, for example, played out in Vaillant’s Par maintes foy as ‘oral culture fighting against textual culture, practice-centred communality warring with author-based individuality’. Leach, Elizabeth Eva, Sung Birds: Music, Nature and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 140 Google Scholar.