Guillaume de Machaut's autobiographical poem, Le Voir Dit, has been known to musicians mainly by reputation. In 1928 Friedrich Ludwig printed extracts from passages on music in the introduction to his edition of Machaut's complete musical works, in 1969 Sarah Jane Williams examined Machaut's remarks about manuscript production, and in a more general article, for the 1977 Machaut anniversary, she introduced Le Voir Dit to non-specialists. On the whole, however, musicians have been content to leave study of the complete text to scholars of Middle French. Their priorities are, of course, very different; much of the most influential writing on Le Voir Dit from the last twenty years has been concerned to show how the text might be read in a structuralist or post-structuralist manner, and has placed relatively little emphasis on more positivistic questions such as how the text was compiled or its relationship to the historical persons and events it mentions. Yet to anyone interested in the origins and function of this extraordinary document such issues seem fundamental; indeed, the historically minded reader might wonder how the text can be understood at all until such matters have been addressed.

The source to be discussed here is one of a collection of about 288 fragments of liturgical manuscripts. These form the section entitled Pergaminos musicales in the Archivo Histórico Provincial of Zamora in western Spain. Most of the fragments contain notated chant while a few give texts without music. Whilst studying the collection I found that one, Pergamino musical 184, contains polyphony. The significance of this new source probably lies principally in its relationship to the great polyphonic manuscript of Las Huelgas (Burgos, Monasterio de Las Huelgas) from late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century Spain. Pergamino musical 184 (hereafter referred to as Z 184) probably dates from between the middle of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth century, and therefore may pre-date Las Huelgas. The collection of Pergaminos musicales including Z 184 was recently taken from the binding of books of legal documents (protocolos) dating from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many more fragments of liturgical manuscripts are to be found still in the binding of books in the archive but an extensive search of these has yielded no further examples of polyphony

Several writers, notably Dr Margaret Bent, have drawn attention to simple forms of notation that were occasionally used in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English music in preference to ‘normal’ mensural notation. This study investigates the employment of these notations in plainsong-based cantus firmi that have, exclusively or predominantly, notes of a single value, and comments on the relationships between such notations and the more widely used notational systems of plainchant and polyphonic music.

Last year's instalment of ‘Liturgical Chant Bibliography’ was enthusiastically received by many, and I am grateful to all who sent me information about their new publications. I hope you will continue to do so; every publication likely to be of interest to chant scholars is eligible for inclusion.

Some of the most explicit statements in early Christian and medieval sources about the functions of visual images in churches are notable for their silence regarding the liturgical significance of wall decoration. There is talk of imagery of the Old and New Testaments instructing the laity so that they should know ‘the high deeds of the servants of God and may be prompted to imitate them’, or at least to remember them. Images might be said to ‘decorate with beauty the house of the Lord’, but it is difficult to find it stated anywhere that the monumental cycles that still arrest our gazes in many of the churches were executed to ‘illustrate’, or to ‘represent’, or to ‘dramatize’ the liturgy that was celebrated in those sacred edifices