The art of interpolation in the Roman de Fauvel
The music of Paris, BN fonds fr. 146 has long held a special place in medieval musicology as one of the most abundant records of musical taste and style in the early decades of the 14th century, particularly
 so in its famous version of the Old French satire of the Roman de Fauvel , interpolated with no less than 169 musical items. In the last decade, however, perspective on the manuscript has radically
 altered in a new climate of interdisciplinary research. If there was once a tendency for scholars to extrapolate information from the manuscript, to allow its abundant visual, musical, literary and political
 texts to speak of cultures exterior to the book9s bindings, recent collaborative approaches have focused attention on how those different media work together within the boundaries of the parchment. One
 consequence of such an approach is to raise new questions about music9s role in the book, most particularly about its relationship to the narrative into which it is cast. This study explores perhaps the
 most startling and perplexing aspect of music9s position in Fauvel: the numerous occasions where music is uncued and unprepared in the narrative. I focus on the most famous moment of narrative disjunction
 brought about by the presence of song: the interpolated bifolio, 28 bis and ter, containing the lai Pour recouvrer alegiance . Long viewed by musicologists as an ill-conceived afterthought, it is
 suggested that the song9s intrusion (narrative and bibliographic) may be interpreted poetically, as a moment of lyric suspension engineered by its singer, Fauvel, in der to defer his lady9s final, deadly
 refusal of his marriage suit. That deferral occurs not just in an abstract moment of lyrical time, but in the real, unfurling space of the parchment: As time passes (the reader turning the folios), Fortuna9s
 impatience finally becomes palpable as she dramatically enters the landscape of the song in its closing moments. Song may thus be understood to occupy not only time but also space; the manuscript, it is
 argued, is witness to a new form of music-making in France at the turn of the 14th century, music-making that is material as well as sonic.
The Key of Ordering: Reading Musical Manuscripts of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
This is a study of a complex attitude toward manuscript production and an associated reading practice in musical manuscripts from thirteenthand fourteenth-century France. The practice is based on the idea that music was not only defined as a sonic phenomenon received through hearing but it could also be received through the intellectual perception of the order of things. Some manuscripts were designed based on the idea of musica mundana, or the harmony of the spheres, and reading such books was seen as a way to exercise this type of hearing, which enacted the mystical ascent of the reader to beatific vision. The three manuscripts examined exhibit this practice in their ordering and content: Roman de la Poire (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 2186), Roman de Fauvel (Paris, BnF, MS fr. 146), and Guillaume de Machaut’s MS A (Paris, BnF, MS fr.
Commentary: Scholarship as a Way of Life—Character and Virtue in the Age of Big Humanities
From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, most European scholars considered moral cultivation as the primary purpose of the humanities. The humanities were human not just because they concerned the products of the human mind but also because they transformed scholars and students into better human beings. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rise of Big Humanities questioned this moral purpose. However, Big Humanities also reemphasized the importance of epistemic virtues for scholarship. The language of epistemic virtues helped scholars create new communities of learning and scholarship. Within these communities, the language of virtues established common standards of collaboration and granted scholars a sense of purpose. Many of these scholars also continued to associate epistemic virtues with moral virtues.