The project is currently configured as two chapters in collections of essays [both commisioned]
‘The Conductus and Latin Song: The Legacy of Classical Antiquity’
During the long thirteenth century (c1160 to c1320), Latin song – both monophonic and polyphonic – was based on texts saturated with references to a range of literary traditions and canonic texts: biblical, patristic and classical. Of these three literary trajectories, classical antiquity is both the least studied but also a controllable group of around 40 compositions ranging across the monophonic and polyphonic, the strophic and through-composed, the melismatic and syllabic.
‘Hercules Slaying Monsters, Aristippus Advising Diogenes: Classical Allusion, the Conductus and the Carmina Burana’
An examination of individual conducti in the Carmina burana demonstrates that not only does the Codex Buranus give a home to the classicising conductus, but in at least one case the artists responsible for the Carmina Burana took a work that previously had no relationship to classical antiquity, and changed its nature.