2011/07/21 by Richard Sherr · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Art #Art history #Byzantine Studies and History #Classics #Computer science #Library science #Medieval Literature and History #Medieval Philosophy and Theology
paper · doi:10.1093/ml/gcr061
openalex publication_date 2011/07/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
When I first read David Fallows’sJosquin (before I was asked to review it), I couldn’t put it down (not, I’m afraid, my usual reaction to musicological tomes).1 I also couldn’t lift it up, but that is a different matter. Nothing is more enjoyable than reading a beautifully written, occasionally witty, highly polemical, and totally opinionated work by a scholar who knows what he is doing, particularly one that is a reasonable length (the book is not as long as it looks, since there are ample margins and a great deal of empty white space). It is always fun to read put-downs, to see the careful opinions of established scholars labelled ‘wrong’ or, in some cases, ‘quite wrong’:2 the word ‘wrong’ appears about fifty times or on average once every seven pages. This is always entertaining in a Schadenfreude kind of way, whether or not you are one of the people who are ‘wrong’; in my case, I was dispensed with rather early on. In actual fact, Fallows accepts one of my theories, and I have my own abbreviation, SherrJ, for The Josquin Companion (Oxford, 2000) of which I am, I hasten to add, the editor, not the author.3 I really can’t complain, but I am going to anyway.4