This chapter and the next probe genres and subgenres whose formal schemes, whether fully codified or not, afford powerful energetic templates. Chapter 9 focuses on the polyphonic mass, laying out some of the genre’s conventions while wrestling with recent discourses about the idea of musical unity in five-movement mass cycles. A concluding section explores the limitations of a holistic, genre-based approach through the example of the five-voice tenor motet.

Chapter 6 considers the two earliest motets known to have been composed for Venetian ceremony: Ave corpus sanctum gloriosi Stefani (1329–39) and Marce, Marcum imitaris (ca. 1365), both anonymous. Situating these works within Andrea Dandolo’s midcentury chancery, this chapter argues for music’s embeddedness in the chancery’s most significant historiographical enterprises. I show how the same chancellors and scribes who copied and organized legal and diplomatic texts oversaw the production of historiographic, literary, and musical works as well. As readings of these motets bear out, the collapsing of chancery functions had aesthetic consequences; the rhetoric on display in both works straddles the humanist–conservatist divide for which the chancery—the engine of Venetian historiography—was known. My readings of Ave corpus sanctum and Marce, Marcum imitaris reveal them working in tandem with the chancery’s most significant historiographical enterprises. Not only do they bear strong thematic links to the topics most heavily elaborated within the midcentury chancery, but they exemplify an approach to history that matched the explicit charge of the chancery: to make the state sensible through the organization of its sundry items and documents.

The poetry and music of the trouvères in Northern France is the focus of Chapter 5. We explore the lives and music of Chrétien de Troyes, Adam de la Halle, Gautier de Coinci, Rutebeuf, and the female trouvère Gertrude of Dagsburg. We chart the ways in which the trouvères modelled themselves on the Occitan troubadours, translating their concept of courtly love, along with their song forms and genres, into an Old French linguistic context. We also consider some of the key differences between the two spheres, especially the increasingly urban - rather than courtly - environment in which the thirteenth-century trouvères worked, and their greater involvement in literary and musical production beyond songs, such as romances (romans) and other narrative poetry, and the French motet. The emergence of distinctive poetic-musical structures, known as the formes fixes, was another key feature of thirteenth-century French song, as was the phenomenon of refrains, or snippets of song, that were borrowed and quoted across a wide range of musical and literary genres.

Zooming in on a single city, Chapter 4 focuses on Paris in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As a prime example of the social changes brought about by urbanization, Paris was a commercial hub, the seat of royal administration, and a centre for advanced learning and education through its new university. We explore how this environment fed into the cultivation of polyphonic music at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, looking into the genres of organum, conductus, and motet, and examining the system of rhythmic modes that was developed to notate this music for posterity. Music theorists, writing a generation or more later, provide us with the names of some of those musicians responsible for the musical innovations at Notre-Dame, and thus we can identify the composers of liturgical polyphony for the first time. We learn how Léonin compiled his Magnus Liber Organi, and his successor Pérotin edited and supplemented it, giving us a unique insight into the ways in which medieval musicians preserved and reinvented the music of earlier generations.

Chapter 6 begins in the same geographical area as chapter 5, examining the changes in music and especially in musical notation in the fourteenth century that are termed the Ars Nova. The careers of the musicians Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut - both encompassing roles in royal or noble administration, and ecclesiastical positions - contrast markedly with the lives of the thirteenth-century trouvères. New approaches to musical notation both responded to and facilitated greater rhythmic complexity in both Latin polyphony and vernacular song, and these elements were elaborated even further at the end of the century by composers of the Ars Subtilior. The technique of isorhythm offered a way for polyphonic pieces to be structured along primarily musical lines, and composers made the most of the opportunities it provided to create subtle and sophisticated forms. Against a backdrop of climate emergency and a great pandemic (the Black Death), political and religious upheaval in the form of the Hundred Years’ War and the Avignon papacy, musicians used satire and allegory to shine a critical light on their society and its leaders.