Reviews 1037 interests extended beyond the traditional talmudic and halakic disciplines. Yet though his successors showed some signs of imitating his literary pursuits in biblical exegesis, linguistics, and poetry, their focus remained fixed in the legal realm, in the writing of responsa and halakic monographs, and it is in the area of halakhah that the Geonim made their deepest, most obvious, and most long-lasting contribution to future generations of Jewish intellectuals. And while it is true that Se'adyah and his successors did pioneer a new sort of legal writing, the halakic monographs, it is not altogether clear that these exerted a greater influence over the course of subsequent codification than did the more "classical" works such as Halakhot Gedolot and Halakhot Pesuqot. For all his brilliance, Se'adyah remains in many ways the great exception to the rule, no less among his successors than among his predecessors. At the same time, however, Brody makes a good case; and as always, his command of the historical and literary detail is comprehensive and deep. To summarize: The Geonim of Babylonia is the survey that we have long needed. It is, to repeat, indispensable, as a reference tool, as a guidebook to the scholarship, and as a narrative treatment of a critical period in medieval Jewish history. We are profoundly in Robert Brody's debt. MARK WASHOFSKY, Hebrew Union College Chromatic Beauty in the Late Medieval Chanson: An Interpretation of Manuscript Accidentals. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xiii, 226; tables and musical examples. $64.95. THOMAS BROTHERS, The chief purpose of this book is to investigate the "beautiful use of inflections" (p. vii) in late-medieval chansons as transmitted in the manuscript record. The concentration on manuscript notations is significant. A central premise for the author is that the manuscripts offer sufficient indications of chromatic inflections—sharps or flats that raise or lower a pitch in the diatonic gamut—and that their inscribed versions of chansons need not, indeed should not, be supplemented by additional inflections introduced by modern performers or editors under the banner of conventional medieval performance practices. Given prevailing views about supplying inflections or musica ficta at standard cadence progressions or to remedy augmented or diminished intervals (octaves, fifths, fourths in some circumstances) this position will appear unorthodox, although it is not without precedent. Leaving aside the complex arguments involved on either side of that issue, the premise of notational sufficiency here allows Thomas Brothers to isolate beautiful (notated) inflections and to claim discriminating pitch control on the part of medieval composers without having to contend with indefinite possibilities of unwritten performance practices. The notion of specifically chromatic beauty emanates from a remark by an anonymous theorist of the late thirteenth century that serves as epigraph to the introductory chapter: "Also, false music [musica falsa] has been invented for two reasons: namely, because of necessity and because of the beauty of the melody [cantus] itself" (p. 1). This is a somewhat slender thread on which to hang a study of chromatic beauty in the medieval chanson, and Brothers subtly acknowledges this at the very end of his book in referring to a "whispered, anecdotal aside that musica ficta is a source of beauty, particularly in chansons" (p. 209). The dichotomy between necessary and beautiful musica ficta is not a commonplace of fourteenth- or fifteenth-century music theory, nor did the anonymous theorist who made the distinction explain the usage causa pulchritudinis beyond a cryptic reference to the monophonic genre of the cantus coronatus. In describing various situations (such as allowance of parallel imperfect intervals or composition of a conductus tenor), some music theorists appear to employ "beauty" as a default qualitative category, a general positive that casts an aura of rectitude over any practice to which it is applied. Brothers does not 1038 Reviews explore in depth the full spectrum of references to the beautiful in medieval music theory, nor does he root his own enterprise in medieval aesthetics at large. Indeed, his bibliography lacks the classic general studies of Edgar de Bruyne and Umberto Eco. Instead he develops a notion of chromatic beauty based on variety and liberation from "the hegemony of uniform, theoretically codified rules" (p. 10), on pitch relations as a "key to musical expression" (pp. 11, 43), on logical "overall design" in individual chansons (pp. 108, 158), and on the notion of "discursive accidentals" that disrupt a stable pitch field (pp. 185, 209). These criteria are plausible enough from a late-twentieth-century listening perspective, but it must be acknowledged that such attention to large-scale pitch relations and design is missing from medieval writings on polyphony and that when a theorist such as the Parisian Anonymous of 1375 explicated the addition of raised and lowered pitches to the Guidonian gamut (under the rubric of conjuncturae) he mentioned neither expressive purpose nor (for that matter) contrapuntal progressions and illustrated his remarks not with secular chansons but with liturgical plainchants. Each of the four main chapters is directed toward a distinct target: a trouvere manuscript famous for its idiosyncratic inflections; polyphonic chansons composed by Guillaume de Machaut; chromatically inflected songs from two central anthology manuscripts of the early fifteenth century; and songs by Guillaume Dufay. Each also acquires a distinctive emphasis from its chosen material. The first focuses on individual redactions by a particular editor-scribe. The second directs special attention to hierarchical differentiation among cadences in the oeuvre of a single composer. The third identifies a category of "musica ficta essay" (p. 141) and wrestles with problems of determining the precise palette of inflections within specific songs. The fourth presents Dufay as the last major composer of the fifteenth century to exploit chromatic inflections for expressive purposes within his chansons. As a result of these varied emphases, the reader receives an impression not so much of an ideal (or ideals) of beauty pursued by song composers in the later Middle Ages but of the multifarious problems entailed in academic study of chromatic inflection within late-medieval song. As the book progresses, aesthetic appreciation of inflections within particular compositional contexts recedes somewhat from the foreground, displaced by historical observations on musical style and chronological phases in the deployment of chromatic inflections. The final section of chapter 3, for example, chronicles a turn from notated sharps to flats observed between earlier and later layers of the Oxford song anthology MS Canon. Misc. 213. This Brothers interprets as a shift toward a "new-found lyric sensitivity" on the part of Binchois and Dufay (p. 182), a conclusion consonant with Martin le Franc's oftencited observation (c. 1441) that new practices by those very composers produced songs of marvelous charm. From the start Brothers is frank about strategic decisions he has made to control his enterprise. To scrutinize these decisions is to become aware of the methodological complexities entailed in envisioning and reconstituting the actual sound of medieval song. Take, for example, Brothers's wish to take manuscript evidence "at face value" and his working hypothesis "that manuscript accidentals are complete and should be read literally" (pp. 23-24). He himself acknowledges that manuscript variants imply diversity of musica ficta practice (p. 23). He faithfully reports differing arrays of manuscript accidentals in "Medee fu" and "Fuions de ci" (pp. 146, 164) and allows that some accidentals are missing in the sole source of a Dufay motet (p. 185, n. 1). His account of overall compositional design in "Medee fu" depends on notated sharps culled from three sources, none of which transmits all the accidentals he endorses. Such inconsistencies within the notated record (along with the status of most extant manuscripts as archival, not performance, materials) suggest that more is involved in reconstituting accidental inflections in medieval chansons than literal reproduction of what some scribe(s) happened to record. Recent work on medieval performance practice—most prominently Timothy McGee's Sound of Medieval Song (Ox- Reviews 1039 ford, 1998), which appeared after the book at hand was published—musters evidence that at least some medieval singers commanded a range of vocal elaborations, including chromatic inflections, few of which would have been explicitly notated. Two fourteenth-century theorists who mentioned singers' propensity to alter whole to half steps in such melodic turns as sol-fa-sol or re-ut-re (rendering, for example, G-FH-G or D-Ct-D in lieu of G-F-G or D-C-D, respectively) undeniably witness an unwritten performance practice of their own time. One of them, the monk from Bristol who wrote the Quatuor principalia (1351), remarked that church singers appropriated this habit from singers employed in aristocratic chapels, a comment that seems suggestive for performance traditions in secular song. Even if one were to grant Brothers's hypothesis that scribes notated sufficient accidentals, there remains the vexed problem of how long a notated accidental is to remain in force. Brothers chooses to register no opinion on this in his transcriptions (p. xi), but as a result his editions sport what appear to be diminished or augmented octaves (p. 94, mm. 22, 34) or equivocate unduly about the quality of interval progressions (p. 162, mm. 4-5). At times, refusal to entertain the possibility of unnotated accidentals also results in augmented or diminished octaves (pp. 147-49, mm. 8, 45, G against G#; p. 201, m. 27, A against Ab). In such instances one cannot but wonder how the author construes the other category of inflections, those causa necessitatis. While this study cannot be said to have resolved the manifold complexities surrounding chromatic inflection in the medieval chanson repertory, its thoughtful challenge to standard teaching on unnotated conventions of inflection should encourage renewed investigation of the issues. Besides offering insights into the role of notated inflections in selected chansons, Brothers advances the case for flexible, unsystematic musical syntax in the repertory he surveys. In his strong final chapter he persuasively refutes Heinrich Besseler's (1950) view of Dufay as a consciously progressive "Renaissance" artist, placing Dufay rather within a continuum of late-medieval composers for whom chromatic inflection was one means to capture beauty in song. SARAH FULLER, State University of New York, Stony Brook FRANZ BRUNHOLZL, Histoire de la litterature latine du moyen age, 2: De la fin de I'epoque carolingienne au milieu du Xle siecle. Trans, (into French) Henri Rochais. Bibliographical supplements by Jean-Paul Bouhot. (Reference Works for the Study of Mediaeval Civilization/Ouvrages de Reference pour l'Etude de la Civilisation Medievale.) Turnhout: Brepols, 1996. Pp. 683. First published in 1992 under the title Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, 2. Franz Brunholzl will probably be the last scholar to attempt single-handedly to write a complete history of Medieval Latin literature. The amount of material—in manuscripts, printed editions, and modern scholarship—outstrips the capacity of any single person to read and synthesize. For that reason, efforts to produce sweeping coverage of Medieval Latin literature have tended more and more often to involve teams of contributors, as in the case of the imposing, ongoing Italian Lo spazio letterario, edited by Guglielmo Cavallo, Claudio Leonardi, and Enrico Menesto (Rome, 1992-), or the indispensable Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, edited by F. A. C. Mantello and A. G. Rigg (Washington, D.C., 1996). These group projects have the advantage of drawing upon greater energy and more perspectives, but the disadvantage of lacking a single unifying perspective. Furthermore, they have not been organized chronologically. In other words, they are not so much histories constructed according to periods of time and places as