This collection groups its fifteen essays into three themes reflecting its dedicatee Craig Wright’s interests in sources, ceremonies, and symbolism. The editor’s introductory chapter frames the volume, but also provides a useful literature review within these fields and of Craig Wright’s distinctive contributions. Thomas Forrest Kelly pieces together the fragments of the almost-vanished liturgy of Capua in Southern Italy, a settlement that experienced waves of upheaval, most recently in 1943, and whose once-abundant manuscripts are now mostly gone. Barbara Haggh-Huglo posits a pioneering role for Hucbald’s late ninth-century numerical office for Saint Peter’s Chair, De plateis; the distinctive melodic and cadential gestures found in De plateis would later characterize the model antiphon series Primum quaerite. From the other end of the Middle Ages, Marica Tacconi places the Florentine office of Saint Zenobius within the worldly context of the Medici rehabilitation in 1512. Brand’s study on Tuscan pulpita, focusing on Pisa’s surviving pulpitum (moved to Sardinia in 1312), further amplifies our knowledge of ecclesiastical upper spaces as visible sites for musical performance—a reminder that screens need not constitute barriers.

Bridging liturgy and source studies, Rebecca Baltzer’s study of Notre Dame’s sanctorale provides a chronological framework for the festal polyphony being sung there; Mark Everist, meanwhile, makes the case for the monophonic motet, a form widely circulated but generally overlooked. Three studies take us forward to the Quattrocento. Margaret Bent amplifies her previous identification of “prepositus brixiensis” and his links with the manuscript Bologna Q15, while Planchart considers why northeast French dioceses, and Cambrai in particular, proved such fertile recruiting ground for the papal choir; Jane Bernstein considers Ulrich Han’s Missale Romanum of 1476, the first printed edition with musical notation, as a legacy of Sixtus IV and his fellow Franciscans—a move toward ritual uniformity prefiguring the Council of Trent by several decades.

David Rothenberg perhaps best exemplifies the interdisciplinary aims of this collection in a fine-grained examination of the motet Porta Preminentie / Porta Penitentie / Portas as a trope of Mary-as-haven/gate, also instantiated in the three-dimensional shrine Madonna (illustrated with a German exemplar of ca. 1300 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Tracing the cantus firmus of Servant Regem / O Philippe / Rex Regum to the use of arras, Anne Walters Robertson considers Philippe de Vitry’s authorship of this late Capetian court motet. Jennifer Bloxam considers Jacob Obrecht’s dedication motet, Laudemus nunc Dominum, as a sequel to Du Fay’s more famous Nuper Rosarum Flores, and as a counterpart to new epideictic preaching styles around 1500: hence the call to praise with which Obrecht’s motet begins (one might add that the musical declamation quoted on page 280 evokes the call to prayer, “Oremus”). The remaining three essays are outliers: Lorenzo Candelaria takes us beyond Europe to the Spanish conquest of Mexico, while Andrew Tomasello analyzes popular music videos. Within a wide-ranging overview of documentary sources on instrumental music, Keith Polk shows how fourteenth-century musicians might transform a vocal composition (Machaut’s De toutes fleurs) into an instrumental piece (the Faenza Codex’s Bel fiore dança).

Do we need books of this type? The fifteen essays’ thematic alignment is a testament to Craig Wright’s breadth and vision, and the editors’ syncretizing ingenuity. But why should these essays appear together in one volume, rather than in peer-reviewed journals or, indeed, online? The economics of print necessitate invidious choices: illustrations have been well produced here, but is hard-copy monochrome really preferable to online color? And do page margins need to be so generous when some of the music examples are reduced to near illegibility? Book-format publication quickens hopes of coherence and comprehensiveness that aren’t fully met when the topographical focus is so selective. Spain is represented only through its colonial endeavors (Candelaria); Germany as a source of printing know-how (Bernstein), and through the provenance of a shrine Madonna (Rothenberg); and England provides a dateable witness for Vitry’s Servant Regem / O Philippe / Rex Regum (Robertson). Some quite significant cultural spaces extend beyond the title’s “beyond.”