Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne and Gaël Saint-Cricq (eds.), Composers in the Middle Ages, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music 25. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2024. xxiv + 316pp. £95. ISBN 978 1 83765 035 4.

Composers in the Middle Ages is an important new collection of essays that addresses the subject of medieval composers head-on. As the editors of the volume, Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne and Gaël Saint-Cricq, note in their introduction, recent scholarly work on medieval music has tended to ‘bypass[] the question of the composer, approaching the creative act in alternative ways, especially by focussing on compositional process’ (p. 9). There are good reasons for this state of the field, as Rillon-Marne and Saint-Cricq suggest: a high proportion of medieval music cannot be tied to named individuals; the New Musicology of the 1990s has shown a certain scepticism towards the emphasis on life-and-works studies of composers throughout much twentieth-century musical scholarship; and modern definitions of a composer are ill-suited to the variety of acts of musical creation in the Middle Ages and the period’s very different attitudes towards authorship and the ‘work’ of art. After tracing traditional ideas about composers in earlier scholarship on medieval music, Rillon-Marne and Saint-Cricq offer the following provocation: ‘to conceive of the medieval composer in the plural and to rethink the medieval creative act in its collective, collaborative and interdisciplinary dimensions’.