The phrase ‘the language of music’, made famous by Deryck Cooke's book of that name, is much repeated in modern music criticism. Is it possible to use this phrase in a medieval context? In what ways is the relationship between music and language in the medieval period best described? The importance of this question is clear when one considers both how high a proportion of medieval music was texted, and conversely, the extent to which the performance of much medieval poetry (even narrative poetry) involved music. We are fortunate that this very large issue has received detailed attention in John Stevens's magisterial account of medieval monophony. My attempt here is to extend the argument into the area of polyphony, concentrating on the nature of compositional activity in thirteenthcentury France. This will include discussion of how far the compositional processes of music and poetry are comparable in this period, and indeed whether they are in any way collaborative. Do the two structural systems – languages, perhaps – of music and words have any effect on each other's system of meaning?

It has long been recognized that Johannes de Grocheio's De musicta is an outstanding source of information about Parisian musical practice c. 1300. However, the critical text of the treatise published by Rohloff in 1972 can be improved by returning to the manuscripts, and the pioneering English translation, by Albert Seay, can now be corrected in some important particulars. The purpose of this article is therefore to present a corrected text and a new (annotated) translation of Johannes de Grocheio's remarks about secular music, both monophonic and polyphonic, generally regarded as the most important part of his treatise.

Le Voir Dit is one of the most fascinating of the works left by the celebrated poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377), and at the same time, as John Stevens has said, ‘one of the most curious documents of the [fourteenth] century’. Through 9000 lines of narrative, sixty-two lyrics in all the main forms (nine of them set to music), and forty-six letters which include comments on the character of the songs and on the business of producing poetry, music and manuscripts, we seem to take a guided tour of Machaut's emotional and professional life over three years of his old age. For more than a century it has proved a rich source of revealing quotations, sustaining many varied arguments. The story it tells of Machaut's literary and emotional affair with a young girl, Peronne, has been read at times as autobiography, at times as fiction; and the incidental comments on composition, performance and copying have been interpreted in studies ranging far beyond Le Voir Dit as evidence of fourteenth-century professional practice. None the less, the constituent parts of the text as they survive in manuscripts from Machaut's circle are disordered, the poem lacks an adequate published edition, and even its music – in size, at least, the most manageable of its components – has yet to be considered as a whole.

The revival of the poetic art of the troubadours in eastern Spain from the latter part of the fourteenth century has been well documented. At this time, and through most of the fifteenth century, poet-courtiers at the royal courts of Aragon and Castile drew inspiration from the troubadours of the earlier centuries, many of whom had been active in the Spanish kingdoms. The historiographical tradition for this literary phenomenon begins with Gerónimo Zurita, the great chronicler of the Aragonese kings. In his Annies de la Corona de Aragón (1562–8), he discusses this renewed interest in the ‘Gay Science’ at the Aragonese royal court of Joan I (1387–96), and relates how letters came to prevail over arms at that time as the primary concern of the courtier: