When Johannes de Grocheio comes to present his somewhat idiosyncratic taxonomy of music and song at the end of the thirteenth century, he admits to encountering some difficulties:

For Johannes, the classification of music, which for him includes secular songs in the vernacular, is a daunting project; with a vast plurality of languages and local cultural traditions spanning medieval Europe, it is impossible to establish universal generic criteria. Johannes's trepidation reveals him to be a rather sensitive genre theorist. He does not display what Gerard Genette diagnosed as symptomatic of the history of genre theory, the tendency to present essentialized literary genres as universal or ‘natural’ categories. Indeed, the very fact that Johannes is happy to include literary genres as diverse as the narrative chanson de geste or the lyric rondeau under the heading of musica suggests, perhaps, how artificial our own modern taxonomies might be. But it is not only the explicit theorization of genre in the Middle Ages that asks surprising questions about modern critical categories; the same issues can be explored implicitly through literature itself, through experiments in writing that challenge an essentializing perspective on literary or indeed musical genre. Ultimately this essay will be an investigation into how both modern and medieval expectations of lyric and narrative genres are put under pressure by an important and rarely examined work of the last decades of the fourteenth century: the Cent Ballades attributed to Jean le Seneschal d'Eu (amongst others). The Cent Ballades is what I will call a ‘narrativized lyric sequence’, and by blurring or overriding the boundaries between lyric and narrative this work forces us to interrogate how these two categories interact, and how this interaction is played out across a variety of social and material contexts.