My free copy reached me in the post yesterday, which alerted me to the fact that this new volume on Machaut’s earliest collected works manuscript has just been published. What I wasn’t prepared for is quite how beautiful the book is: not only is there a lovely colour cover with a tournament scene from the Remede de Fortune, but the other illustrations inside the book (and there are lots of them!) are in colour too. Not only that, but the paper is heavy, and the whole thing has the sort of appearance (as a book) that makes it a fitting commentary on MS C (Paris, fr.1586), a luxury manuscript from the mid-fourteenth century.
My essay in here is Chapter 1 and is a revised version of something with the same title I published in a volume I co-edited with Helen Deeming in 2015. The revisions, though, have made it a much stronger chapter than before, aided by the unrivalled knowledge and eagle eye of Earp’s editing.
While I know the price will be prohibitive for many, at only 85 EUR, this is a bargain for such a richly illustrated volume. And, as you’ll see from the table of contents, there are some great essays in here by prominent Machaut scholars in various disciplines. I haven’t yet read all of them (but will!), but I did read Anne Stone’s when the book was in press (and heard her give it as an amazingly compelling paper in Novacella in the summer of 2017) and I think it’s a really keen piece of deduction and reading that will make medievalists think more more about the relationship between making literary works and making books.
