Medieval Music and the Art of Memory

"It is extremely rare to find first-rate traditional mastery and a first-rate speculative imagination combined in a single scholar. Professor Busse Berger is that rarity. Medieval Music has a narrative that flows with compelling assurance and conviction. This book will rock medieval musicology to its foundations, and permit the erection of a much firmer, more interesting, and more realistic structure to take the place of the old. "--Richard Taruskin, author of Oxford History of Western Music"This complex and stimulating book is notably rich in its interdisciplinarity. Rather than remaining trammeled by a false dichotomy between the oral and the written, Berger takes the lead with Mary Carruthers and others to probe provocative questions of memory, memorization, and mnemonics. The best, and most appropriate, single word to describe Medieval Music and the Art of Memory is 'unforgettable.'"--Jan Ziolkowski, coeditor, with Mary Carruthers, of The Medieval Craft of Memory and editor of Dag Norberg's An Introduction to the Study of Medieval Latin Versification