Jennifer Saltzstein's absorbing and informative book examining ‘the relationship between intertextual refrain quotation, hermeneutics, and the increasing prestige of the vernacular in France during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’ (p. 4) significantly advances arguments about the refrain's meaning and function and should become vital reading for everyone working on medieval motets, songs or poetry. The refrain is a locus of the complexity of genre, notation and transmission in the thirteenth century and since it requires dual competence in poetry and music, it has until now had no monograph dedicated to it in English. Saltzstein has astutely chosen to publish her book in the Gallica series, under the general editorship of Sarah Kay, whose insights from her co-authored book Knowing Poetry (2011), about the significance of clerics in legitimising vernacular poetry, provide an important and persuasive frame to Saltzstein's work.Footnote ¹ Her musical situation of the refrain within literary, social and intellectual contexts should excite any scholars for whom quoted refrain material is even tangentially related to their own generic pursuits.

Saltzstein's treatment of the refrain differs from earlier approaches. While she uses Nico van den Boogaard's standard bibliographical tool for the refrain repertoire (refrains in what follows here are abbreviated to vdB numbers), she is acutely aware of its limitations.Footnote ² Van den Boogaard lists many ‘unique’ refrains, asserted as quoted material but occurring only in a single source and assessed as quoted purely using criteria of versificatory disruption, stanzaic position or of being direct speech. Sensibly, given the book's emphasis on the functions of quotation, Saltzstein limits her own investigation to what she terms ‘the intertextual refrain’, that is, those refrains that appear in more than one ‘context’ (by which she means musical piece/item/work) of which at least one is thus clearly a quotation. Saltzstein also avoids the previous focus on the role of The Song in the Story, that is, the place of the refrain in romance, to privilege instead motets and songs.Footnote ³ The previous scholarly focus on romance led to an emphasis on formal issues relevant to that literary genre, that is, ‘the formal evolution of romance over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, distinctions between lyric and narrative poetics, the development of written literature, and the emergence of the author, culminating in the figure of Guillaume de Machaut’ (p. 151). Saltzstein's alternative dual focus on song and (especially) the motet allows her to reflect the ‘emerging scholarly discussion about the literary status of the vernacular and the ways in which medieval authors legitimized vernacular expression in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in particular’ (p. 150) as well as to ‘emphasize the role of academic traditions in the rise of French as a literary language’ (p. 150). She cites thirty-seven refrains that are found only (but on multiple occasions) in motets, suggesting that origination in the song repertory was optional for the refrain.

The first chapter of the book, ‘Relocating the Refrain’, is revisionist, seeking to rid the refrain of its links to orality and dance, links made by earlier scholars under the influence of a romantic wish to see this quotational practice as incorporating popular songs or folk music within the written traditions of song and motet. Saltzstein does a swift and economical job of debunking this idea, exposing the historiographical preoccupations that led to it, showing its gradual ossification in musicology from van den Boogaard to Richard Taruskin, and then presenting statistics that fatally undermine it. The refrain, she argues, is at base a writerly practice of quotation and glossing, bound up, despite the anonymity of the motet repertoire, with auctoritas.

Given her alacrity in revising the questionable generic heritage of the refrain, it is a little disappointing that Saltzstein accepts another equally questionable set of generic genealogies – the chronological progression from clausula to motet. The universal applicability of the priority of the clausula is now being seriously (and, to my mind, persuasively) questioned in individual cases, and especially in those cases of a motet which has refrains appearing to come from a clausula.Footnote ⁴ While her work must have pre-dated the most recent work on this question by Catherine A. Bradley, Saltzstein omits to adduce earlier questioning of the relation between clausula and motet by Yvonne Rokseth, William Waite, Wolf Frobenius and, most pertinently, Fred Büttner, despite this being work that would have assisted her arguments.Footnote ⁵

The first chapter's assertion of the written and auctoritas-producing nature of refrain usage, particularly in those refrains that occur only within motets and show no sign of having originated in the song repertory, is furthered in the second chapter, ‘Clerical and Monastic Contexts for the Intertextual Refrain’, which explores the link between refrain citation and clerical and monastic glossing through two contrasting case studies. The first of these examines motets whose refrains are shared with a French translation of Ovid's Ars amatoria, tracing an entire complex of works whose clerical purpose is to re-gloss Ovid's work to lessen its misogyny so as to re-fit it for a new context outside the all-male school-room – the mixed-sex environment of the court. For example, ‘Vous le lerez’ (vdB 1858) appears in the Ovid translation as an example of the songs ladies sing while dancing. Saltzstein argues that it is drawn there from its prior use in the chanson avec des refrains, ‘Quant mars comence’ (RS 391), since the musical and verse structure of that song seem to be built around this refrain, contrary to the generic norms of such a song (pp. 47–8). While such argumentation is not watertight (basing the structure on the refrain, contrary to genre norms, could be done even if the refrain were a cantus prius factus), Saltzstein's conclusion seems likely. Saltzstein's analysis of the refrain complex here shows the Ovidian citation of the refrain elevating vernacular song by making it an object of commentary. When the same refrain appears in the motetus voice La pire roe du char (M 242), it is incorporated into a text that begins with the vernacular auctoritas of a proverb and then proceeds to gloss the proverb ‘by drawing an analogy between the proverb and vernacular song performance’ (p. 55). The effect, Saltzstein notes, is to situate the refrain within the context of the conventionalised gender patterns of trouvère poems voiced by the motet.

The second set of case studies in Chapter 2 treats a monastic use of the refrain, with a focus on a set of refrains interpolated (without musical notation) into a set of vernacular proverbs in a manuscript now in Hereford Cathedral Library (MS P.3.3). Saltzstein not only finds refrain citation unrecorded in van den Boogaard's catalogue, but also offers a limpid explanation of the practice of absorbing vernacular musical materials into the contemplative educational model of the cloister, which for her resonates with Gautier de Coinci's Miracles (another monastic text quoting refrains and vernacular song). Whereas the first case study was about literally translating a school text for a courtly audience, the monastic use of refrains in the Hereford proverbs is, like Gautier's, about a more metaphorical translation: ‘whereas the clerical authors tended to elevate vernacular material through scholastic techniques, the monastic glossator reinterpreted vernacular refrains as echoes of divine love emanating from the Scriptures’ (p. 79). Vernacular song is thereby recuperated through spiritual allegoresis involving both devotion and humour.

Chapter 3, ‘Vernacular Wisdom and Thirteenth-Century Arrageois Song’, traces a regional intertextual network among Arras-based authors as a way of showing the ability of refrain quotation to create community and a transgenerational canon of authorship. This chapter is significant for probing the issue of how refrains can be about authorship when they and the motets in which they occur (but not the songs on which they draw) are predominantly anonymous. In looking at a collection of songs by Jehan de Neuville and Colart le Boutellier, Saltzstein notes ‘the only instance I have found in which a refrain is both quoted and cited as the product of a specific author’ (p. 103), although frustratingly she does not name the song by RS number or incipit (it is ‘L'autrier par un matinet / Erroie’ (RS 962), which is ascribed to Jehan in TrouvM and TrouvT and wrongly given to Colart in TrouvK, TrouvN, TrouvX and TrouvP). This comment exemplifies the distinction that Saltzstein, drawing on Kay, makes between quotation (the anonymous use of text) and citation (mentioning the cited author by name). In the example of the chanson avec des refrains, ‘Main se leva la bele faite Aelis’ (RS 1509) by Baude de la Kakerie, the narrator ‘admonishes listeners to learn from the nightingale’ (p. 97), whose songs feature in the poem as intertextual refrains voiced by the nightingale at the end of each stanza. These refrains also all appear in motets, where they similarly function as advice, in some instances also associated with the nightingale.

After offering a reading of these motet uses, Saltzstein links the nightingale's advice to the Lai de l'oiselet, the story of a rich peasant, tricked into setting a captured nightingale free in exchange for special knowledge, only to be treated to three proverbial pieces of advice that he has ignored in letting the nightingale go. In my view, Saltzstein misreads this passage, despite citing Huot's clear analysis of it as a critique of commercial exchange and private ownership of song, knowledge and literature. Saltzstein's conclusion that ‘the bird's recitation of clichés, rather than, for example, a wise explanation of courtly virtues, underscores that the peasant would not have been capable of understanding such an explanation in any case’ (p. 101) denies the very point that the lai – and the motets that also use the nightingale – make. This is a point that ironically would have amplified Saltzstein's argument further: the language of song is clichéd; it is the on-dit, the common property of everyone, not subject to authorial ownership, and yet can form subjectivity. Again citing Kay, Saltzstein had earlier noted that ‘it is possible for medieval literary subjectivity to function in a way that is generalizing rather than individualizing’ (p. 37), and that seems precisely what the proverbial wisdom (or, pace Saltzstein, ‘cliché’) of the nightingale – that is, of song and its quotation – shows. The lack of understanding of the peasant is not shown in him being sold short (given cliché rather than ‘a wise explanation of courtly virtues’ (p. 101)) but in his having let the nightingale go and thereby having lost the thing which following the recommendations of the bird's own proverbial wisdom would have allowed him to keep. The bird's wisdom may be highly general, proverbial, or even cliché, but that is both courtly song and the true knowledge that the peasant lacks (because he wants to own or author song as private property).Footnote ⁶

The fourth chapter of the book, ‘Adam de la Halle as Magister Amoris’, offers a particular focus for the prominence of Arras in the story of ‘a vernacular musical culture infused with a clerical sensibility’ (p. 113) by focusing specifically on the figure of Adam, whom Saltzstein seeks to distinguish from his peers not just because he also writes polyphonic music, but also because his use of intertextual refrains is different. As well as sharing quotations with his peers, he also uses three refrains several times each, one of them occurring only within his own work (an ‘auto-intertextuality’, it should be noted, of a kind more closely associated with Guillaume de Machaut).Footnote ⁷ Multiple uses of any individual refrain within the works of a single author are, notes Saltzstein, rare.Footnote ⁸ Her discussion of these refrain networks is a little hampered by the presentation of the musical examples, which culminate in her Example 4.3, a full score of Aucun se sont loé (M834) / A dieu (M835) / SUPER TE across five pages which neither uses layout or any kind of mark-up to draw the reader's attention to pertinent features. Moreover, the barring of the example seems to have been changed at some point in the drafting of the book, but not all the references in the text are similarly altered, so that the analysis is difficult to link to the motet. Saltzstein's conclusion that ‘Adam emphasized his self-constructed authorial image pervasively throughout his musical and poetic works’, within which ‘self-quotation and self-commentary work to elevate his status as a vernacular author’ (p. 147), may be uncontroversial, but her following claim that his unusual quotation of the full polyphonic context of a refrain, rather than just the melody, ‘stresses his ties to compositional traditions emanating from the university’ (p. 147) seems to cut against the thorough ‘courtlification’ that earlier chapters argue so successfully for the motet.

Saltzstein's final chapter, ‘Cultivating an Authoritative Vernacular in the Music of Guillaume de Machaut’, reaches beyond the refrain repertoire's chronological boundaries as defined by van den Boogaard to consider a thirteenth-century refrain that was also used by Guillaume de Machaut as late as the 1360s. Saltzstein's book thus joins other recent work on thirteenth-century repertoires, such as Judith A. Peraino's Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut (New York, 2011), which also has a final chapter on Machaut. Again, Saltzstein's point is revisionist: Machaut is not separated from the tradition of refrain citation, but part of it; the ‘fundamentally different artistic priorities’ (p. 151) of the two centuries have been overstated. Instead the arch-author-figure, Machaut, extends and supplants Adam's take on the auctoritas of the refrain; authorial subjectivities may have subtly morphed, but the basic strategies of quotation and re-use of material show continuity. The last chapter opens with a succinct summary of the book to this point – a savvy strategy indeed, as Saltzstein thereby ensures that the who-knows-how-many students and Machaut scholars who will simply mine this book for this single chapter will nonetheless get some sense of her overall argument (and perhaps be inspired to read the entire book, as they should!).

The chapter's actual focus on the refrain vdB 633, ‘Puis qu'il li plait forment m'agree’, in three Machauldian contexts as well as in a song and the tenor parts of two motets in the eighth fascicle of Montpellier is an original confection, albeit perhaps one less well worked out than the analysis in earlier chapters. Its rather tentative interpretations of the ironic tone of Machaut's usage I would clearly recognise as a somewhat typically trenchant Machauldian irony, expressing a thoroughly masochistic devotion to the perverse object of the cruel lady.

The book is not without its problems, although one can feel some sympathy with, for example, difficulties caused by the problems of reference for the materials under study. The thirteenth century is complicated; the proliferation of sigla, manuscripts, terms and reference material makes clarity horribly difficult. On the whole, Saltzstein navigates this well, although if anything I would have liked more repetition (e.g., the Raynaud-Spanke number of a song accompanies the incipit at its first mention, but later just the incipit is given, or the prose has ‘this song’ or ‘the motet’, meaning the one under discussion, resulting in endless searching backwards to find out which one is being talked about). Part of the generic point is that refrain material is highly formulaic, and many incipits are similar or familiar-sounding, so personally I find the quantitative differentiation of a numerical designation vital. Where numbers are given, they are not always accurate: M89 on p. 158 should be M896; M780 should be M800 on both pp. 46 and 56 and probably elsewhere – this case looks like a cut-and-paste error as does the reference to ‘both refrains’ on p. 46, which confusingly refers to three previously listed.

The sigla Saltzstein chooses are a non-overlapping mixture of trouvère and motet sigla, so her MS R is actually MotetR (BNF fr. 844, that is, TrouvM, aka the ‘Chansonnier du Roi’, not TrouvR) whereas her MS T (BNF fr. 12615, i.e. MotetN and the ‘Chansonnier de Noailles’) is actually TrouvT, because N is needed for her citation of TrouvN (BNF fr. 845). In my view, Judith Peraino's book, which faced similar difficulties, had a better way of doing this, which I have basically adopted here, by noting which sigla system is being invoked as part of each siglum (see my footnote 2 above). While Saltzstein's list on p. xii gives the old descriptive tags (‘Chansonnier du Roi’, and so on), it does not fix the manuscript as also a motet manuscript, or also a trouvère source, which may frustrate those who more generally use one or other run of sigla; MS X (TrouvX) also appears there oddly out of alphabetical order.

Saltzstein is a model in the precise and useful way she defines some of her terms; her introduction differentiates intertextual refrain from structural refrain, and sets up working definitions for poem, lyric, music and song. I wished for more precision only in the way she talks about how many places a refrain quotation manifests itself. She variously notes a given refrain occurring in a number of different works, sources or contexts, but all of these terms overlap and are quite ambiguous. When a refrain might have two ‘contexts’ (i.e. host works: a motet voice and a song, for example), one of those might have a different number of manuscript contexts, or even musical contexts, since occurrence in a motet voice could be in two-, three- or four-voice versions, combined with different texts in different cases, sometimes in different languages. This problem is epitomised in her discussion in Chapter 1 of the relative melodic stability of intertextual refrains. For example, of ‘Vous le me defendez l'amer, / Mais, par Dieu! je l'amerai’ (vdB 1859) she says it has ‘three different contexts’ with music (p. 20), since it opens one of the later additions, a ‘monophonic motet’ (M1074), in MotetR, is an internal part of the French-texted tenor of a motet (which is copied in four different sources), and is interpolated as a refrain into the poem Renart le nouvel. But her Example 1.2 (p. 21) compares the refrain in five contexts: the music of M1074 from MotetR, although with the text silently emended to accord with the erroneous caption (‘Vous me le’ should be ‘Vous le me’ and MotetR omits ‘me’ in any case); the tenor from the motet in the version in Montpellier, given with no text (even though it is fully texted not only in Montpellier, but in two other surviving sources); and three of the four Renart sources, also given without text, despite all sources (including a fourth one, which has staves but no music notation) having text.

Example 1.2 is indicative of the weakest element of what is otherwise a strong and compelling book – the musical examples. These almost entirely fail to exploit the analytic power of strong visual presentation (something which is also missing in the almost complete absence of tables), as well as often having errors or hiding slightly deceptive mediation of the evidence.Footnote ⁹ The absence of tables will be lamented by readers seeking a ready visual handle on the attributes of groups of sources, contexts and works related by refrain, but that the presence of music examples is so problematic is even more of a shame, as it is clear that the musical aspects of refrain quotation are vital to Saltzstein's argument and could have been laid out far better for the edification of readers. The examples would have benefited greatly from being properly aligned for visual comparison; even simply marking them up with boxes to draw attention to the similarities and differences discussed would have been enough. The one example that is aligned, Example 1.4, shows what could have been achieved, although even here working out what each staff shows still involves decoding a list (given as a running prose caption) at the bottom of all the staves and working out which of multiple voices listed for a motet is the one being shown on the staff (which requires looking up independently when it is not the very start of the motet being given, which is in nearly all cases).

In addition to being hard to glean meaning from, the examples often effect some sleight of hand by offering significant mediation of the manuscript trace being discussed. This is most worrisome in the first chapter, in the section that argues that the melodic transmission of intertextual refrains is predominantly stable. The examples seem to me to have been massaged to support the point being made without alerting the reader to the ways in which this has been done. One example will suffice to show all the problems that I would ideally like to have seen ironed out at a pre-publication stage. Example 1.3 (p. 24) discusses ‘Je sent les max d'amer por vos; / Sentéz les vos por moi’ (vdB 1127). The staves give the different contexts in the sense of ‘works’ in which the refrain appears: one song, and two different motets.Footnote ¹⁰ The song context (‘Chançon ferai’ (RS 1596) by Thibaut de Champagne) is given on a single staff, but this song occurs in three slightly variant forms in seven different manuscript sources; the variants are not shown on Saltzstein's example, but nor does she say that her example is from a particular single source.Footnote ¹¹ The original notation of the song does not give its rhythm, but it is presented in rhythmicised notation in Example 1.3. While some scholars, notably Hans Tischler, believe that modal rhythmic transcription should be applied to such sources, Saltzstein's rhythm accords not with Tischler's collected edition of 1997, but with precisely the same second-mode rhythm as is found in the two motets.Footnote ¹² Saltzstein's example is adduced to prove melodic identity between the same refrain in different contexts. Omitting some of the song's variant readings slightly hinders this purpose but her silent editorial rhythmicisation increases it. More problematic still is the complete omission of one of the contexts for the refrain. The alert reader might be aware of this, since the main text on page 22 says that ‘melodies survive in four different contexts’, whereas the example two pages later presents only three: the Thibaut song version RS 1596 and two motet versions. Saltzstein's example omits any staff for the music of the refrain as it occurs in the song ‘Amours est trop fiers chastelains’ (RS 146), which is found in a single source, with a slightly different tune for the refrain.Footnote ¹³ Instead, she has a footnote at the very end of her discussion (p. 25, note 63) which claims that the RS 146 version diverges ‘significantly in text and melody’. But this is not the case: textually it merely has ‘a vos por moi’ inserted between the refrain's two lines (a feature she allows subsequently in the case examined in her Example 1.4 (p. 26) without considering it a major divergence); musically it is clearly the same tune, but exhibits quite significant variants. Given that the overall point Saltzstein wants to make with this example is that the second half of the refrain, where the text is most stable, is also the most stable melodically, she has to omit RS 146, in which this quite simply is not true. The text is stable at that point, but the major variants in what is nonetheless clearly the same melody come precisely at the end section of the version in RS 146. While I do not disagree with the general shape of Saltzstein's arguments here, I think greater care with the music examples would have served her purposes better and made for an even stronger and more compelling book.

The complexity of the materials under study also make some of the detail rather unreliable. When discussing the thirty-seven intertextual refrains that are found only in the motet repertory, for example, Saltzstein notes that ‘interestingly, some of these intertextual motet refrains are also connected to clausula sources. In total six are from clausula motets’ (p. 15). Her footnote duly lists them, but over half the information in her short six-item list is incorrect, giving inaccurate numbers as well as including motets that have no relation to the refrain or clausula, while omitting ones that do. There are quite a few typos with letters and figures (e.g., the date 1410 for TrouvI on p. 156 note 29 should read 1310; matinee for matinet on p. 68), places where it is clear that footnote cross-references have been preserved when footnote numbering has changed (on p. 46 note 48 refers back to note 46 when it should be 47; on p. 86 note 32 does not seem to refer to the text, nor does note 54 on p. 94), spelling inconsistencies (Margivale/Margival; Angicourt/Angecourt), and factual errors (such as the reference to b-flat as a ficta on page 67 when it is part of system of musica recta). Certain claims made in passing are also questionable, such as the idea that only two manuscripts transmit trouvère songs and polyphonic motets (I can think of at least four, even without counting Machaut as a trouvère!), or the claim the Adam was the only trouvère to whom polyphony was attributed (again without counting Machaut, what about Gautier de Coinci?) and occasionally a term gets its gloss at a later mention, presumably because the chapter order of the book was once different; for example, the ‘motet enté’ is mentioned on p. 58 but its later mention on p. 106 is the one that has the terminologically explanatory footnote. None of these minor glitches detract from the usefulness of the book, but more care might have been taken.

The overall achievement of this slim volume is great. It ties the refrain into the latest literary thinking on vernacularity, subjectivity and auctoritas, noting the migration of hermeneutic modes of the commentary tradition from scholastic to overlapping courtly and urban vernacular spheres. In differentiating citation (of a named author) from quotation (of text), the refrain functions as auctoritas not for an individual, but for entire song genres or the idea of song itself, thereby creating community and canonicity among the producing and receiving communities of various kinds of literate music-making. While building effectively on earlier work, especially that of Sylvia Huot and Ardis Butterfield, Saltzstein's book effects revisions to ideas about the origins of refrains, their function and their chronological extent. While it might take someone not completely familiar with the repertoire discussed a little time to follow up and work through the examples, it is a volume that more than repays the effort.