YVONNE Rokseth would be surprised and pleased to know that a two-day conference devoted entirely to the last fascicle of the manuscript she so carefully edited in the 1930s, some eighty years ago, took place in March 2014. Her work is still the starting place for any research on Mo. The opening folio of Mo 8, fol. 350r (see the front cover of this volume), is now a familiar image. Although fascicle 8 has only this single historiated initial of singing clerics on its first folio, each motet in the nearly fifty following folios begins with illuminated initials that decorate the margins of the page with leaves, vines, and occasional dragons.

Since the work of Robert Branner in the 1970s, it has been generally accepted that fascicles 1–7 of Mo were illuminated by artists active in Paris in the second half of the thirteenth century. But because Branner considered fascicle 8 to be later (c.1300) than the scope of his book, he had little to say about it. We can presume that, when the manuscript was first produced, its folios were somewhat larger, particularly at the top margin. The folios are now c.192 × 136mm; the textblock (written space) is c.128 × 77mm. Fascicle 8 was carefully trimmed for binding so as not to cut off any of the decoration that occupies the margins outside the textblock. Rokseth believed that fascicle 8 was not originally bound with fascicles 1–7, beginning with an independent life and its own foliation. At some point fascicles 1–7 were all trimmed to match the size of the folios in fascicle 8, sometimes clipping some of their decoration at the edges. But we do not know whether fascicle 8 was joined to the seven earlier fascicles prior to the manuscript's current binding from the seventeenth or eighteenth century.

The tonsured clerics singing before a book on a lectern as depicted in the Mo 8 initial (see Figure 3.1a) come from a long line of illustrations for Psalm 97, Cantate domino canticum novum (‘Sing to the Lord a new song’). But they reflect actual practice, for on major feasts the solo singers in the choir of Notre-Dame in Paris would come down out of their stalls to sing from the eagle lectern that stood in the centre aisle between the two sides of the choir.

After the fall of Rome and the disappearance of the Roman Empire in the late fifth century, the sixth and seventh centuries are considered to represent the low point of medieval civilization in the West, when Roman administrative and political systems had crumbled and there was little to take their place. The Christian church was scattered, fragmentary and unable to exert any universal authority. As society became largely rural again under the control of local lords, and as towns and cities declined, the light of classical learning came close to being entirely snuffed out.

In Frankish territory, the sixth and seventh centuries are referred to as The Merovingian period, after the Merovingian kings. By the eighth century The Merovingian kings had become such ineffectual figureheads that the real ruler/administrator was the Mayor of the Palace, supposedly the king's chief assistant. The Carolingian dynasty stemmed from two Mayors of the Palace – Charles Martel (r. 714–41) and Pépin III the Short (r. 741–68), the father of Charlemagne (r. 768–814). Pépin enquired of the pope if the person who ruled as king of the Franks ought not to be called King of the Franks, and the pope agreed. Thus in 751, with papal sanction, Pépin deposed the last Merovingian king, sent him off to a monastery, and assumed the throne in name as well as in fact.