An absorbing survey... He is an expert on the French song of the period, consequently his wider view of Chaucer's musical background is well worth reading ... and he has much to say about Italy and England. The music is first-rate, and early music performers will find these songs a welcome addition to their repertory. EARLY MUSIC Although Chaucer himself was never described as a musician, a number of his poems are based on French models which belong to a well-established musical tradition, and there are also many references to musical activities in his larger works. This is the starting point...

French lyric poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries continued many of the traditions of the earlier Provencal troubadours and northern trouveres and they inherited and developed the fixed forms - the ballade, the rondeau and the virelai. Dr Wilkins's anthology includes many of the finest poems of this period, showing the diversity of themes and structure and their richness and vitality. In his introduction, Dr Wilkins explains the structure and derivation of the fixed forms and gives an exposition of the characteristic themes. A biographical note introduces each poet or school of...

The celebrated Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, contains over sixty manuscripts of importance for medieval French studies, including chronicles and genealogies, royal statutes, religious works, sermons, prayers, meditations, commentaries and glosses, romances, songs and lyrics, letters, treatises on medicine, law, morality, language, spelling, alchemy, astrology and geography. Some of these are well known, but others are obscure, unedited, or new discoveries. This important new reference work, a Catalogueof the French manuscripts in the library, makes available detailed...

This wide-ranging volume contains Philippe Menard's study of the Proverbs in MS 450 - Elspeth Kennedy's contribution on the prose Lancelot in MS 45 -concentrating on how the manuscript gives evidence of a medieval tendency to improve a romance text in terms of narrative consistency; Danielle Queruel's essay on the Chronique d'un Menestrel de Reims in MS 435 - Francoise Ferrand's discussion of the magnificent Apocalypse in MS 20, which she suggests maywell have been produced to commemorate the coronation of Edward III; Rene Stuip's brief survey of the mid-fifteenth-century Histoire des...