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Robert de Reims, also known as \"La Chievre de Rains,\" was among the earliest trouvères-poet-composers who were contemporaries of the troubadours but who wrote in the dialects of northern France. This critical edition provides new translations into English and modern French of all the songs and motets ascribed to him, along with the original texts, the extant music, and a substantive introduction. Active sometime between 1190 and 1220, Robert was an influential figure in the literary circles of Arras. Thirteen compositions set to music are here attributed to him, including nine chansons and four polyphonic motets that were broadly disseminated in the thirteenth century and beyond. Robert's work is exceptional on a number of fronts. He lavished particular care on the phonic harmony of his words. Acoustic luxuriance and expertise in rhyming, grounded in the play of echoes and variation (often extending into the music), constitute the hallmark of his poetry. Moreover, he is the earliest trouvère known to have composed a parodic sotte chanson contre Amours (silly song against Love). Located clearly at the nexus of monophonic song and polyphony, Robert's corpus also poses the intriguing question of trouvère participation in the development of the polyphonic repertory. The case of Robert de Reims jostles and tempers the standard history of the chanson and motet. Accessible and instructive, this trilingual critical edition of his complete works makes the oeuvre of this innovative and consequential trouvère available in one volume for the first time.

This research focuses on the Iberian devotional motet, addressing its technical and stylistic characteristics as a result of the engagement of Iberian composers with a common toolbox first developed by northern composers working at the Sforza court in Milan in the 1470s, eventually spreading throughout Europe around 1500. Particularly through consideration of the earliest extant motets by Juan de Anchieta (1462–1523) contained in the well-known Segovia manuscript, the composition of which cannot postdate the middle 1490s, this article surveys the provenance and nature of the motet texts, and how the genre quickly spread through the Iberian kingdoms and was sustained in subsequent manuscript collections in Spain, Portugal, and the New World; it proposes resolution to long-disputed and conflicting authorial attributions; and examines how the genre evolved in the early decades of the sixteenth century, mostly through the works of Francisco de Peñalosa (ca. 1470–1528) and Pedro de Escobar (documented from 1507–14), placing it within the European motet tradition as the product of a specifically distinct cultural context.