Review-Article REVIEWING IMAGES BY ROB C. WEGMAN THE BEST thing to be said about Christopher Page's Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France is that it aims to generate discussion about critical issues which are central to our understanding of medieval music and society.' The reverse side of the coin is that it does so by rhetorical means which are bound to draw that discussion into an atmo- sphere of confrontation. At the root of Page's polemic lies a certain impatience with musico- logy, which has employed images of medieval musical culture which he finds hard to reconcile with his aural experience as a performer (pp. xxi-xxii). In five chapters plus an afterword, Page identifies those images, and subjects them to a thoughtful critique: 'cathedralism' (a perceived isomorphism between Gothic cathedrals and motets), several basic antinomies (efflorescence/decay, elite/popular, literate/non-literate, learned/ unlearned, urban/rural), an organicist model of medieval history that construes the fifteenth century as a period of decay, and (although it is never explicitly identified as an 'image') intellectualism, that is, the tendency to privilege the intellectual over the aesthetic. The cen- tral question that arises from these various issues is: just what do we think we know about medieval music, culture and history? This is a challenging question, and if Page is correct in claiming that musicologists have not given it enough thought, then certainly a book like this is most welcome. I, for one, would not dispute his claim, but that is beside the point, and so is the claim itself. For how- ever we judge the past record of musicology, when all is said and done ourjudgement must be a matter of interpretation, and as such it can only get us side-tracked into a very different discussion-one that raises its own critical issues. One problem with Discarding Images is that it operates largely on this level of interpretation. Much of the book is devoted to tracing the recurrence of certain images in the scholarly literature, the narrative being structured essen- tially in terms of the authors discussed. And interpretation does indeed become the issue here. Selected passages from selected articles and books are regularly subjected to close reading, yielding the incriminating images, if not in what they say explicitly, then at least in the resonances of individual words and phrases. The question one repeatedly feels inclined to ask is whether Page is being fair to the scholars concerned-more particularly, whether his methods of interpretation may not have been sensitized by preoccupations which the authors could hardly have been expected to anticipate. More generally, one wonders whether Page is being fair to musicology: the publications to which he draws attention form such an odd and unrepresentative mixture, and exclude so much that has profoundly shaped our image of medieval musical culture, that the 'principal claim' which they are meant to corroborate begins to look increasingly forced: 'scholarship, musicology included, has long shown a tendency to homogenize and to monumentalize the "medieval period"' (p. xvi). Who is homogenizing and monumentalizing what? The reviewer is thus faced with a dilemma. Fairness often requires that Page's readings of his chosen texts should be qualified, yet this would require so much space, and would inevit- ably seem so confrontational, that the (presumably) principal issue, 'discarding images', could hardly be addressed in any constructive way. To say this is in itself to comment on the ' Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France. By Christopher Page. pp. xxiv + 222. (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993, ?25. ISBN 0-19-816346-0.) 265 This content downloaded from 128.112.200.107 on Sat, 15 Mar 2025 01:59:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms