CREATING MS C: AUTHOR, WORKSHOP, COURT

Machaut's set of complete works manuscripts forms a central pillar of our understanding of musical and generic developments and their courtly reception in fourteenth-century France. By applying the continuing scholarly advances made during the study of courtly practice and the professional Parisian book-trade to the earliest of these artefacts, this contribution reassesses the creation-history of the manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 1586. The results tap into a number of enduring discussions within Machaut scholarship. These range from questions of patronage, to aspects of Machaut's authorial control and involvement in the production of his books, to the importance of order on the single-work level within a generic grouping, and to the practicalities of manuscript creation and intentionality. Finally, proposed adjustments to the dating of some compositions call for a review of existing notions of generic development and polyphonic composition in the early part of the century, thus resonating beyond Machaut's personal output.

Should we describe genera without molecular phylogenies?

For nearly a decade I have published species descriptions and revisions of land snails in peer- reviewed journals. As a systematist, it is often requisite to reclassify species into other, sometimes unnamed genera. Although in most cases editors and reviewers have not commented on the taxonomic changes I have made and the new taxa I described, I sometimes received negative critiques when I described new genera unaided by molecular phylogenetic support. I feel these critiques have become increasingly more frequent, and am convinced that many fellow taxonomists share this experience. Addressing this problem is particularly difficult due to three reasons. First, it is impossible to support these observations with statistical data (i.e. the frequency of similar reviews increasing or not); second, the increasing number of published phylogenetic works reveals more and more cases of polyphyletic genera, which might suggest that morphology-based generic grouping is unreliable, and thus, should be avoided; and third, no publications exist suggesting not to describe genera using (still) reliable morphological foundations. Subsequently, the unsatisfactory review process of taxonomic works is often exacerbated by the biases of reviewers and their inobservance of valuable historic convention in light of the current wave of molecular phylogenies. Moreover, the future value of morphological descriptions for biodiversity assessments (i.e. IUCN) is not even addressed.

The International Relations of Intellectual Property

Intellectual Property is not a term with a standard meaning. Traditionally it was used to describe the copyright protection of authors and to distinguish this from industrial property, i.e., Patents for inventions, industrial design rights, plant variety rights, trade marks and the like. Recently it has become an umbrella for copyright, rights related to it and the various forms of industrial property. The new generic grouping has been needed for a world where demand for these rights has risen to an altogether new pitch. In part this is the consequence of extraordinary advances in technologies which make recorded information easily and precisely reproducible; and partly it supports the quest of advanced economies to conserve superior knowledge as a weapon in international trade.