Margaret Bent, The Motet in the Late Middle Ages (New York, Oxford University Press, 2023), 776 pp., ISBN: 9780190063771

MARGARET BENT’S LATEST BOOK CULMINATES more than forty years of tireless original research on the fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century motet. It is a hybrid that collects and revises previously published essays and adds almost as many new ones to complete its 32 chapters. A companion website offers downloadable state-of-art pseudo-diplomatic editions of many of the motets examined in the book, carefully laid out to allow for synoptic analysis. Commentaries to these editions appear in respective chapters. Listening examples for chapters 9 and 13 are also available from the same website. The quality of the book’s presentation and copyediting is close to perfect. Bent’s research is indebted to several enduring collaborations and near constant scholarly exchange with the medieval musicology community and beyond: the book’s abundance of eminently useful editions and translations of motet texts, for example, could not have occurred without the enduring assistance of Latinists David Howlett and Leofranc Holford-Strevens. Bent regularly engages with the scholarship of established and emerging musicologists who are focused on similar crucial questions. She often flags the need for further research on various topics. This book will appeal to both specialist and non-specialist researchers and students of medieval music, French and Latin literature, and West European medieval culture, as well as performers and avid listeners of early music. Chapters 9 and 13 will be particularly useful in musicology and even composition classrooms, and other chapters will undoubtedly be mandatory reading in future undergraduate history surveys and graduate seminars.