This comprehensive collection of essays offers a paradigm of the scholarly and analytical approaches toward the motet in its most varied incarnations from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Featuring essays from leading scholars in the field, including Paula Higgins, Craig Monson, Patrick Macey, Anne Robertson, Jessie Ann Owens, Meg Bent, and Joshua Rifkin, it offers insightful readings of specific motets or motet repertoires and a broad-ranging analysis of the function and context of the motet in the middle ages and renaissance.