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Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouveres: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music.

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Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouveres: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music. By John Haines. (Musical Performance and Reception.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. [xii, 347p. ISBN 0-521-82672-1. $85.] Music examples, index, bibliography, figures, tables.

As if on cue, musicologists have responded to the recent fin de siecle with a number of studies reflecting on the history, methods, assumptions, and subject matter of the discipline, including several books in the series in which this new volume appears (John Butt, Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], James Garratt, Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002]). Like these and other millennial interrogatories, John Haines' book tackles several large tasks: expounding the historiography of a musical repertoire (in this case, two discrete repertoires); delineating and contextualizing their reception; and illuminating the epistemological pitfalls for the current scholar who studies them.

The absence of a definite article in the book's title--"[THE] Troubadours and Trouveres"--suggests that its subject matter is not a particular group of composers located in a specific time and place, or their songs. Indeed, while the author begins his study with the twelfth- and thirteenth-century troubadours and trouveres, subsequent chapters move on to the Renaissance reception of their songs, the rediscovery and concomitant transformation of the repertoires during the Enlightenment, their subsumption into the new disciplines of...

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