Philippe de Vitry (1291–1361) is frequently hailed as a renowned poet, music theorist, composer, diplomat and bishop. Along with Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300– 1377), he is emblematic of the French 14th century—a pivotal era in the history of Western music and poetry, and one in which he flourished as an influential public intellectual and early humanist. But while Machaut has been the subject of ongoing work within and beyond musicology, Vitry’s fortunes have been more volatile. Although he has remained central in textbook accounts and other grand narratives, Vitry’s activities as a composer have only rarely been the focus of scholarly work in recent decades. As for his theoretical writings, these have receded from the spotlight as a result of an argument that they did not, in fact, exist. Sarah Fuller’s provocative 1985 suggestion that Vitry’s Ars nova was ‘a phantom treatise’—a historiographical artefact born of a teaching tradition—resulted in a waning of interest in Vitriacan theory by essentially dissolving the category.