Professor Elizabeth Eva Leach awarded British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship 2025-26

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Professor Elizabeth Eva Leach© Benedict Johnson (British Academy)

Professor Elizabeth Eva Leach has been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship 2025/26. The British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowships are intended to enable established scholars, needing relief from teaching and administration, to have the time to bring to completion a significant piece of research, through sustained period of leave for one year, and is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Thank Offering to Britain Fund.

Professor Leach will be undertaking a project entitled 'Understanding lost exemplars: Medieval song transmission before the large French songbooks'. In the second half of the thirteenth century, over two dozen large vernacular songbooks were produced in various locations in Western Europe. Makers of these monumental manuscripts must have relied on other, no-longer-extant sources, which had preserved the repertoire for over a century, from the time of its creation to its copying into the surviving large written compilations. But although a tiny number of earlier individual pieces have come down to us in writing, no substantial body of source material exists. This project deduces the nature of the now-lost exemplars for large songbooks through close examination of scribal processes in two philologically related but materially different examples of surviving manuscripts. The resulting monograph will not only change the way we understand the practices of music scribes but will importantly also give insight into the circulation and preservation of individual songs in the living musical culture of the thirteenth century.