Chapter 8

道理都懂，老生常谈，但是还是觉得说得不错。
... the beginning of ‘‘The Renaissance,’’ for music, is often—though, as we will see, arbitrarily—placed around the beginning of the fifteenth century, and major historiographical divisions like that can act as barriers, sealing off from one another figures and works that happen to fall on opposite sides of that fancied line, no matter how significant their similarities. Not only that, but (as already observed in a somewhat different context) an appearance of stylistic backwardness or anachronism—inevitable when sweeping categories like ‘‘Medieval’’ and ‘‘Renaissance’’ are too literally believed in—can easily blind us to the value of supreme artistic achievements such as Du Fay’s isorhythmic motets. They are not vestigial survivals or evidence of regressive tendencies, but a zenith.