Professor Elizabeth Eva Leach has been awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust for three years. The project supported by the Fellowship is entitled ‘Douce 308 and the contexts of vernacular song c.1300′.

The large manuscript book, Oxford, Bodleian Library Douce 308 contains diverse contents which have never before been studied as a whole in the context of a single-author study: French literary works in verse and prose on courtly and eschatological subjects, as well as 516 lyric texts in various genres. A fully contextualised consideration of them, and of the culture of musico-literary quotation within which they are embedded, will chart significant changes in the musico-literary practice of courts of north-eastern France c.1300. These insights will revise the currently understood history of late-medieval European music by synthesising perspectives from historical, literary, musical, and art-historical studies. In addition, the funding will allow the digitization of the manuscript, whose complete contents will become freely available online for the first time (selected page segments of the illuminations only are available here).

Article credit: Faculty of Music