Guillaume de Machaut

At once a royal secretary, a poet, and a composer, Guillaume de Machaut was one of the most protean and creative figures of the late Middle Ages.

Elizabeth Eva Leach is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages, also from Cornell.

This book is truly an interdisciplinary endeavor and has much to offer scholars of both music and literature.... The book's greatest accomplishment is that it presents Machaut in a complete context that is, as Leach observes, as someone whose influence among contemporaries can be compared only to an imaginary 19th-century amalgamation of 'Schubert and Goethe... [and] one of Napoleon s closest counselors.' Accessible to well-educated but less experienced readers, the book exhibits enough scholarly rigor to satisfy musicologists and literary critics alike.... Highly recommended.

Winthrop Wetherbee, Cornell University:

This must be the best, and is surely the first really complete treatment of Machaut, the first to treat him as poet and musician and courtier, and show why it's important to do so. I have never read anything that did nearly so good a job of showing how musical and poetic language interact.

Ardis Butterfield, author of Poetry and Music in Medieval France:

The first book-length account of Machaut's life and works to include the perspective of musicology as well as of history and literature, Elizabeth Eva Leach s book provides an excellent synthesis of current scholarship and will be an important reference point for readers in several disciplines.

Lawrence Earp, University of Wisconsin–Madison:

In her impressive book on Guillaume de Machaut, Elizabeth Eva Leach synthesizes a wide body of new scholarship, including historical, literary, musicological, and art historical materials. Leach takes musical works seriously as integral parts of Machaut's artistic program.