Discarding Images : Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France

For many centuries, the Western imagination has pictured the medieval period as a kind of odyssey. This text explores this false image, examining medieval reflection on the "numerical" explanation of musical beauty, and the relation between 14th-century innovations and contemporary science.

For many centuries, the Western imagination has picture the medieval period as a kind of odyssey: a journey that took Mankind to a strange country and ended in the Renaissance with his homecoming and the restoration of his inheritance. In this stimulating and provocative book, Christopher Page explores the kinds of generalization that we habitually make about `the Middle Ages'' and which, whether we know it or not, sustain the false image of medieval odyssey. In chapters that proceed chronologically from the thirteenth century to the fifteenth, he examines what we suppose to be the serenity of medieval reflection on such matters as the `numerical'' explanation of musical beauty, and he questions the modern tendency to regard Ars antiqua motets as music for `an intellectual elite''. Turning to the Ars nova and beyond, he discusses the relation between fourteenth-century innovations and contemporary science. A final chapter explores the powerful influence on Joan Juizinga''s classic The Waning of the Middle Ages, upon musicology. Page''s lively prose if full of ideas, is based upon first-hand learning, and is enriched by an uncommonly deep experience of medieval music.