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St Hugh’s Fellow awarded British Academy Senior Research Fellowship

Congratulations to St Hugh’s Tutorial Fellow in Music, Professor Elizabeth Leach FBA, who has been awarded a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship. The British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship is for established scholars wanting relief from their teaching and administration duties to be able to bring to completion a significant piece of research. The Fellowship, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Thank Offering to Britain Fund, provides award-holders with a sustained period of research leave for one year.

Below are the details of the research project Professor Leach will undertake during her research leave:

‘Understanding lost exemplars: Medieval song transmission before the large French songbooks’

In the second half of the thirteenth century, over two dozen large vernacular songbooks were produced in various locations in Western Europe. Makers of these monumental manuscripts must have relied on other, no-longer-extant sources, which had preserved the repertoire for over a century, from the time of its creation to its copying into the surviving large written compilations. But although a tiny number of earlier individual pieces have come down to us in writing, no substantial body of source material exists. This project deduces the nature of the now-lost exemplars for large songbooks through close examination of scribal processes in two philologically related but materially different examples of surviving manuscripts. The resulting monograph will not only change the way we understand the practices of music scribes but will importantly also give insight into the circulation and preservation of individual songs in the living musical culture of the thirteenth century.

For more information please click here.