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 Emergence of ars nova
that title: the texts that used to be thought of as preserving an Ars nova declaration by Philippe de Vitry must now be seen as transmitting no more than distorted images of his teaching.1 Edward Roesner has argued that Vitry's association with Le Roman de Fauvel-previously thought to contain his early works-cannot be proved: however much we know about his political career, the most that we can say with any certainty about Vitry the composer is that he wrote five, or perhaps seven motets,2 one of which has lost its music. This leaves the emergence of ars nova in semi-darkness. We can see a new "manner of motets" in pieces from around 1320,3 and we can see motets that seem to be approaching it in Fauvel, but exactly how was it developed and by whom? Since the Ars nova texts now offer us so little, and the biography of Philippe de Vitry nothing, the only sensible way to attempt to answer this question is to go back to Le Roman de Fauvel to see what we can learn from its music.
Nietzsche's Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil
When Nictzsche published Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, he told a friend that it was a book that would not be read properly until "around the year 2000". Now Laurence Lampert sets out to fulfill this prophecy by providing a section by section interpretation of this philosophical masterpiece that emphasises its unity and depth as a comprehensive new doctrine on nature and humanity. According to Lampert, Nietzsche begins with a critique of philosophy that is ultimately affirmative, because it shows how philosophy can arrive at a defensible ontological account of the way of all beings. Nietzsche next argues that a new post-Christian religion can arise out of the affirmation of the world disclosed to philosophy. Then, turning to the implications of the new ontology for morality and politics, Nietzsche argues that these can be reconstituted on the fundamental insights of the new philosophy. Nietzsche's comprehensive depiction of this anti-Platonic philosophy ends with a chapter on nobility, in which he contends that what can now be publicly celebrated as noble in our species are its highest achievements of mind and spirit.