In a significant number of his motets, Guillaume de Machaut uses melodic repetition to provide audible cues to their talea structure. He further breaks or alters that repetition in order to call attention to final talea statements, thereby providing a sounding clue to the motet's end. The use of this technique in a genre well known for its intellectual complexities seems to show a special concern for the unprepared listener, a concern that is less clearly manifested in the work of other motet composers in 14th-century France. This has implications both for how we see Machaut in relation to his contemporaries and for how we may approach his motets today.

The study of the medieval motet in France has recently been rejuvenated, in part by returning to the motet's point of origin – its tenor. Some scholars have focused on the tenor's pitch content, showing how it shapes the motet's harmonies, and how it is in turn shaped by local chant variants; others, by considering the tenor's text and the origin of that text in the liturgy and frequently in the Bible, have shown the motet to be perhaps the quintessential musical manifestation of medieval intertextuality. By bringing together sacred and secular, Latin and vernacular, the motet, better than any other musical genre, exemplifies both the Boethian ideal of music as something much larger than sound and the interconnectedness of all things in the medieval mind. The discovery of hitherto unknown chant sources for motet tenors is therefore an opportunity to reinterpret the texts of the motets they underpin.

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interesting in the light of recent scholarship on relations between center and periphery. Following the work of Elena Fasano Guarini on Tuscany and Giorgio Chittolini on Lombardy, scholars have reconceptualized the relationships between center and periphery as an increasingly dense web of connections, both institutional and extrainstitutional. By focusing on the peripheral towns rather than on the urban centers, Pigozzo's study does much to flesh out the complexity of these relationships in the area around Treviso, pointing to the intersection of rural, urban, and Venetian interests in regional state formation.