In many surviving thirteenth-century romances, short segments of lyric poetry, called ‘refrains’ by present-day scholars, interrupt the narrative with the implication of song. In the romance Renart le nouvel, attributed to Jacquemart Giélée (fl. 1290), refrains take their place among a wide variety of literary registers and forms. Renart le nouvel is a late derivative of a long and international tradition of adapting, elaborating and making reference to the stories from the Roman de Renart. The Roman de Renart refers to a collection of approximately fifteen Old French verse narratives, written between 1174 and 1205, that recount the exploits of the cunning fox Renart and various other anthropomorphized members of the animal kingdom.

PMM 4/2 contained a review by Susan Fast of Matthew Balensuela's new edition of the anonymous fourteenth-century treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis mensurata per modos iuris. Both Balensuela and Fast were struck by the theorist's use of extracts from pieces by Nicholas de Aversa, about whom nothing more is known. The theorist quotes from compositions of others that we do know from surviving sources, including Landini's Donna die d'antor senta and some well-known motets, and in these cases he seems, as Balensuela points out, to be quoting from a rough memory of how the music goes rather than from a copy; his examples never correspond precisely to the music as we know it, yet similar passages in these pieces do illustrate the notational devices he is discussing. Consequently we may not expect to learn much about de Aversa from these (probable mis-)quotations.

Again and again, one discovers two patterns of movement yielding innovations in the history of European music: regional styles that were previously distinct from one another merge together in synthesis, as do stylistic tendencies that were previously tied to different genres. Both patterns may be invoked in an attempt to historicize the use of accidentals in a handful of important motets by Guillaume Du Fay, including Nuper rosarum flores and the troped Ave regina celorum. Historians have hardly been unaware of the importance of the influence of English music on Du Fay, nor have they been unaware of Du Fay's interest in transferring stylistic features from one genre to another. But it is useful to bring these two perspectives together, especially given the advance of recent scholarship. Our analysis may proceed from the basis of two well-known statements from the period. The first, from a treatise (c. 1400) attributed to the composer Philipoctus de Caserta, states that:

The history of plainchant in the nineteenth century is dominated by the various attempts at scholarly restoration both in Britain and abroad. Up to the middle part of the century these efforts were concentrated in France, although demands for revival were being voiced in Italy by Pietro Alfieri, and in Germany by Franz Xaver Witt, amongst others. The first scholarly attempt at the restoration of plainchant was made in 1846 as a result of Jean-Louis-Félix Danjou's discovery of the eleventh-century tonary of St Bénigne de Dijon. Like the Rosetta stone, it enabled scholars to decipher the meaning of symbols which had previously eluded them. In this case the manuscript is notated with both neumes and alphabetic script, so that for the first time the melodic ductus of ancient neumes could be interpreted with certainty. This manuscript became the source for the Rheims-Cambrai Graduale Romanum complectens missas, printed in Paris in 1851, later to be published under the auspices of Cardinal Sterckx of Mechelen and edited by Duval and Bogaerts. Despite the quality of the Mechlin Graduale, it did not fail to cause immense controversy. Louis Vitet, for example, ‘was astonished that a group of four notes in the Paris gradual of 1826 should be replaced in the Rheims-Cambrai edition with a melisma of 48 notes’. Other efforts at revival were equally plagued by controversy. Lambillotte's facsimile edition of St Gall 359, published, in 1851, proved to be ‘completely unreliable’, and the 1857 Parisian Graduale romanum upon which it is based ‘contained truncated melodies’.