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Margaret Bent is an emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a Fellow of several international societies and academies. Between 1975 and 1992 she taught at Brandeis and Princeton universities and served as President of the American Musicological Society. Her numerous publications range over English and continental music, repertories, notation, and theory of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Her editorial publications include critical editions of Dunstaple, Ciconia, English masses, and a Rossini opera. Her many honours include the C.B.E. and three honorary degrees. In 2018, she received the inaugural Adler prize of the International Musicological Society.
Bent's research on the motet has been fundamental to the fields of musicology and medieval studies, and it is a joy to see that work gathered into a single publication. The book is chronologically wide-ranging, covering the development of the genre from the fourteenth through the mid-fifteenth centuries, and geographically diverse, encompassing the motet in France and the Low Countries, England, Italy, with forays into eastern Europe and the Mediterranean region—an astonishing achievement. * Anne Walters Robertson, Claire Dux Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Music, University of Chicago * This extraordinary collection of essays by the reigning medieval musicologist of our time presents the fruits of Margaret Bent's intense engagement with different facets of late medieval motets over the course of more than fifty years. Almost half of the thirty-two chapters are new, and earlier essays are recast, taking measure of new scholarly work and then pushing it farther. One finds surprising discoveries at every turn. * Lawrence Earp, Emeritus Professor of Musicology, University of Wisconsin-Madison * In this impressive collection of essays, Margaret Bent assembles a lifetime of path-breaking research and engages with the rich scholarship it has engendered. Throughout, Bent thoughtfully reflects on her own contributions, and adds much previously unpublished material. As a study of the fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century motet in England, Italy, and France, it is a magisterial tour de force that will help map the field for decades to come. * Jessie Ann Owens, Distinguished Professor of Music Emeritus, University of California Davis * In this monumental study of the late medieval motet, Margaret Bent has brought together studies of a range of individual motets, English, French, and Italian, seeking through close reading to tease out the range of strategies employed to serve the uniqueness of these technically advanced, prestigious, compositions. These 32 essays—all now updated or offered for the first time—rest on a lifetime's study of compositional craft. Their richness cannot be overestimated. * Susan Rankin, Professor of Medieval Music, University of Cambridge * This book is a major achievement that assembles a significant portion of the life's work of a major scholar of medieval music and puts the author's classic studies in conversation with lesser-known essays, new material, and coverage of less-documented traditions. The audience for the book is primarily specialists and perhaps advanced graduate students; the analyses assume a high degree of existingknowledge of the motet in the later Middle Ages throughout France, England, and, to a lesser extent, Italy, including details of sources, theory, and notation. For any library that serves musicologists and for scholars of medieval music and poetry, The Motet in the Late Middle Ages will be an indispensable document of the contributions of a leading scholar. * Anna Grau Schmidt, Notes *
