Despite their intriguing testimony to the vagaries of musical life in late medieval England, relatively little attention has been given by musicologists and historians of religion to the wealth of commentary on liturgical and secular music penned by the followers of the Oxford heretic John Wyclif. In a brief mention of this material in The Premature Reformation, her magisterial study of Wyclif and the Lollards, Anne Hudson suggests that the Lollards’ suspicion of musical display reflected their more general hostility towards the decoration of churches.

The study of the medieval motet in France has recently been rejuvenated, in part by returning to the motet's point of origin – its tenor. Some scholars have focused on the tenor's pitch content, showing how it shapes the motet's harmonies, and how it is in turn shaped by local chant variants; others, by considering the tenor's text and the origin of that text in the liturgy and frequently in the Bible, have shown the motet to be perhaps the quintessential musical manifestation of medieval intertextuality. By bringing together sacred and secular, Latin and vernacular, the motet, better than any other musical genre, exemplifies both the Boethian ideal of music as something much larger than sound and the interconnectedness of all things in the medieval mind. The discovery of hitherto unknown chant sources for motet tenors is therefore an opportunity to reinterpret the texts of the motets they underpin.

Simon Mellet, scribe and vicar at the cathedral of Cambrai, is among the best-known music scribes of the fifteenth century. Jules Houdoy's classic study of Cambrai Cathedral (1880) documented numerous payments made to Mellet for copying, payments which have remained an important source of information for our understanding of the career of Guillaume Du Fay and the role of the Cambrai Cathedral as a vital musical centre in the fifteenth century. Simon Mellet's thirty-six-year career dominates the study of the production of music manuscripts at Cambrai. Payments made to Mellet are mentioned in most research on Du Fay and on sacred polyphony in the Franco-Burgundian regions. It is through these documents that we know of lost works by Du Fay, such as the Requiem, and of the existence of the composer Rasse de Lavenne. The payments even tell us of apparently wholly lost genres, such as the lamentations by Busnois, Ockeghem and Fremiet that were copied by Mellet in 1475–6.