Having turned 58, Jean-François Goudesenne, who holds an agrégation in musical education and had no formal training in either philology or medieval studies, has enjoyed a distinguished career as a medieval musicologist, with 4 monographs, 6 collective works and some forty articles, including 26 conference papers.
His research themes revolve around the musical and liturgical sources of the European Latin Middle Ages, in particular Gregorian chant, in which he has established himself as a specialist following in the footsteps of his predecessors, Marie-Noël Colette, David Hiley and Michel Huglo (1923-2012).
Supported by the exceptional documentary environment of one of the CNRS’s largest ShS laboratories (the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes, UPR 841), which has accumulated several generations of medieval surveys since 1937, his work is the result of numerous campaigns involving more than fifty missions to libraries and archives in France and throughout Europe.
His scientific output has brought to light a large corpus of unpublished texts, demonstrating a colossal capacity and pace of work, based on direct contact with first-hand sources such as medieval manuscripts. In this way, he has benefited from the habitus of a transdisciplinary approach, as well as from the contribution of numerous skills linked to the historical and philological sciences (liturgy, codicology, library history, archival techniques, etc.) and, above all, digital humanities, that have enabled him to set up databases and digital publications that are interoperable with international databases and benefit from the permanent hosting provided by the Humanum Consortium.
He is also the director, in collaboration with Elsa De Luca, of the Musam collection at Brepols since 2018, which includes 6 volumes. His multi-disciplinary training, both in Musical conservatoires and in Universities, as well as the many years teaching in secondary and higher education structures and in cultural circles (DRAC, Fondation Royaumont), have made him a versatile researcher for teaching, cultural promotion and the management of research teams.
