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Yolanda Plumley, The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). xxiv + 460 pp. ISBN 9780-19-991508-8. £51.00.
In her meticulously researched volume, Yolanda Plumley traces practices of songcitation from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the Age of Machaut. In doing so, she transgresses the disciplinary boundaries of genre, language, and particularly the artificial border between poetry and song. Plumley's term, 'Grafted Song', is a wide-ranging one. She translates the term from the Medieval French enté, referring to new songs incorporating phrases of text or melody circulating between lyrics. Plumley chooses this horticultural term in contradistinction to the current terminology of the refrain. Rather than limiting herself to refrain-songs, she seeks out allusion and citation in all guises. Within the typical 'Refrain Forms', such as the balette and ballade, she discovers new types of poetic grafting. The catalogue of grafted songs Plumley identifies is impressive; she expands the number of known citations in many familiar repertories containing lyric quotation, as well as drawing new attention to...