ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses clerical abuse as a perennial topos for medieval polemicists. It was a theme visited and revisited across many sung poems of the High Middle Ages also, including those sung in motets. The chapter explores how a motet's musical setting could inflect the experience of its polemical poetry for listeners and singers, through a close analysis of a polyphonic song known from a rich variety of thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century sources and in several different polyphonic adaptations. The motet is a genre which needs some introduction. It seems to have been born at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, when texts were added to the expansive melismatic phrases of rhythmically measured polyphony found in the cathedral's liturgical compositions. The fund of aesthetic devices available in the genre could be used for other purposes, among them, polemical ones. The liturgical context of a chant serves as a thematic point of departure for the motet voices composed against it.
