Elizabeth Eva Leach, Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011. xv+367 pp.

Elizabeth Eva Leach’s new book was not out yet when I was planning a Spring 2011 seminar on Machaut, so I let its title guide me. Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician was obviously the monograph that finally brought Machaut’s life and works into accord – one that explained the importance of his time as a court official to his music and poetry. I therefore put it on the syllabus for ‘Life and Works’ day under the provocative (I hoped) question ‘Does biography matter?’ It was a rookie mistake. Leach’s new book is not a ‘life and works’ study at all. Though it concerns itself with both Machaut’s life and his musico-poetic output, it does so sequentially, placing much more emphasis on the latter. After the first chapter, which brings together all the surviving evidence of the historical Machaut that does not come from his own poetry, the ‘real’ Machaut is treated as much as a symbol as an actuality. His body serves as a metaphor for his oeuvre, the dismemberment of which by modern disciplinarity is the focus of chapter 2. After this the core section of the book explores a series of multivalent themes – ‘Creation’, ‘Hope’, ‘Fortune’ and ‘Death’ – with regard to their manifestation in Machaut’s output, both musical and poetic. The result is that Machaut is ‘re-membered’ even as he is ‘remembered’. In the lucid chapter 1 (‘Life: Guillaume de Machaut’s Living’) Leach brings together the surviving information about Machaut that hails from sources external to his poetic works. Such an undertaking is necessitated by the shaky hold of truth in his dits (long narrative poems). The famous ‘Voir dit’ (‘True Story’ or ‘True Fiction’) is a case in point: the poem often refers to real persons and places, teems with scintillating details about Machaut’s habits of book-making, and records impressive statements about the worth of his musical compositions. The narrator is even named Guillaume. But Guillaume also meets Hope in a field while walking, and