This volume unites eleven essays in four languages, selected among papers first presented at the International Symposia in Late Medieval and Renaissance Music held at Kloster Neustift/Novacella, South Tyrol, in 1997 and 2000. Their common thread is the exploration of borders and borderline areas in music of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century. The authors, all acknowledged scholars in their field, hail from countries and scholarly traditions as diverse as Israel, Greece, Italy, Spain, Germany, Great Britain and the United States. Christian Berger explores the differentiation between French and Italian styles in early fifteenth-century music, while Alice V. Clark casts light on the musical patronage of a ‘black sheep’ in the house of Valois, Duke Louis I of Anjou (1339-84). Francesco Facchin’s survey of music-related images from late medieval Padua casts the spotlight on manuscripts and their marginalia. Maricarmen Gomez examines an overlooked _cantorale_ from Palma de Mallorca, while Irmgard Lerch-Kalavrytinos introduces a recently discovered fragment with Ars Nova motets in Wurzburg. Lucia Marchi’s contribution traces intersections between music, devotion, and civic life in early Quattrocento Umbria. Jehoash Hirshberg and Andrew Kirkman investigate transitional zones between oral composition and writing in settings from the Rossi codex (Hirshberg), and between form and content in the music of Binchois (Kirkman). The semantic nodes between texts, musical settings and meanings are the subject of Virginia Newes’s study on mimesis and imitation, whilst Elizabeth Eva Leach maps out intertextualities between three polyphonic songs that (re-) interpret the _Roman de la Rose._ Anne-Marie Treacy examines the emotional use of song in Chaucer’s _Book of the Duchess_ against the models provided by the _dits_ of Guillaume de Machaut. The editors, Karl Kugle and Lorenz Welker, are Professors of Historical Musicology at Utrecht and Munich Universities. Together, they organized the 1997 and 2000 symposia. For more information, see http: //www.corpusmusicae.com/msd/msd\_cc055.htm
