It is a curiosity of British cultural history that the surviving Anglo-Norman (AN) songs of medieval England have attracted so little interest amongst musicologists English or French. Such knowledge as we have of them is mostly garnered from two pioneering facsimile volumes: Early English Harmony, edited in 1897 for the Plainsong and Mediaeval Music Society by Harry E. Wooldridge; and Early Bodleian Music (1901), an even finer collection, edited by Sir John Stainer, his son and his daughter, with exemplary studies of many of the manuscripts by Bodley's Librarian, Edward B. Nicholson. These two volumes contain about half of the songs listed here. Their French equivalent, Pierre Aubry's Les plus anciens monuments de la musique française (1905), contains two AN songs in facsimile. Others were published at around the same time (‘buried’ might be a better word) in isolated facsimile: El tens d'iver (Baker), Quaunt le russinol (Petersen). Yet others have only recently emerged, or re-emerged, into scholarly consciousness: Volez oyer le castoy (Wilkins), Si tost c'amis (Page, 1988)

A badly trimmed ascription can be more a matter for relish than regret: if enough of the composer's name survives to permit informed speculation, the musicologist's sense of pleasure is likely to outweigh his sense of loss. Most musical manuscripts from the late Middle Ages have visibly suffered at the hands of the binder's knife, but perhaps none more so than the famous ‘Aosta Manuscript’ (I-AO15), one of the central sources of early fifteenth-century sacred polyphony. In his inventory of the manuscript Guillaume de Van reported no fewer than twenty names as surviving in varying states of incompleteness. In fifteen instances he was able to decipher the composer's name or supply it from the manuscript's index or a concordant source, while the other five apparently defeated him. Two of the names have since been deciphered, and a third has been identified from another source, but the remaining two have attracted no further comment.

There is much interest at present in the way medieval motets generate meaning, both with their texts and their music. In two articles from a recent issue of Early Music History, for example, a remarkable density of meaning and symbolism, both textual and musical, has been proposed for Machaut's motet 15. Studies of this kind are intended to demonstrate what can be achieved by placing the poems of motets in a literary context and by considering the structure of words and music. Such research also no doubt serves to reinforce the idea that many motets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries demand a wealth of erudite knowledge to be understood and is thus congenial to the current belief that many motets were intended for an intellectual elite. Whilst there can be no doubt that medieval motets often cultivate a literary style of considerable – indeed intense – obscurity, what I wish to suggest here is that one, very ambitious, motet can be interpreted using some of the most basic tools of the medieval cleric.

After listening to reports from two observers sent to Vietnam, Kennedy responded with a question. ‘Did you two both go to the same country?’ The reader may ask the same of the two editions to be reviewed here. Each consists of two volumes, all of the same trim size and thickness; but one set is red, the other blue, and the differences go on from there. It is necessary to reassure the reader that both concern the same four documents said to contain ‘Aquitanian polyphony’, and in addition one document known as the ‘Codex Calixtinus’ – more precisely the Liber Sancti Iacobi (of Compostela). The contents include a determinate number of musical compositions, in an indeterminate number of variant versions, all dated to the twelfth century, in France.