Rillon-Marne, Anne-Zoé, and Gaël Saint-Cricq, eds. Composers in the Middle Ages. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music, 25. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2024. Pp. xxiv, 316

The question of what precisely is a composer (or indeed the act of composing) in the Middle Ages remains an enduring methodological issue in today’s historical musicology. Inheriting a post-Enlightenment paradigm forged within nineteenth-century nationalism, the cult of genius, and the work concept, musicologists have long struggled to reconcile models of individual authorship with the collaborative realities of medieval musical creation. In Composers in the Middle Ages, editors Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne and Gaël Saint-Cricq assemble a collection of essays that seek to subvert these teleologies. They ask how the medieval composer might be restored to the center stage without succumbing to the modernist myth of the solitary genius. Furthermore, by supplanting the concept of the masterwork with the paradigm of the “composing workshop,” the volume presents a collective reappraisal of musical agency in the medieval period. Rather than reciting the volume’s contents chapter by chapter, this review will examine the collection through three thematic pillars: the historiographical dismantling of authorial autonomy; the fluid demarcations among singers, poets, and composers; and the methodological tensions surrounding network analysis and chronology.