In this episode, Ieva Gudaitytė talks to James Tomlinson about Christmas music in late medieval England. The conversation involves aspects of medieval book production and the transmission of polyphony within England and abroad. It introduces music written for the Christmas period and contexts in which these elusive musical survivors might have been performed. They chat about the ephemerality of medieval polyphony, how popular musical settings were worked and reworked over time, and the challenges of working with the paucity of surviving sources.

References:

• Bowers, Roger. "Obligation, Agency, and Laissez-Faire: The Promotion of Polyphonic Composition for the Church in Fifteenth-Century England." In Iain Fenlon, ed. Music in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Patronage, Sources and Texts. Cambridge University Press, 1981: 1-19.
• Harris, Max. Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools. Cornell University Press, 2011.