Placing amateur performers and their instrument of choice at the forefront of inquiry, this article makes a case for the Spanish guitar as an instrument through which knowing subjects sought an epistemology of musical practice, a way-of-knowing-and-doing that could even surpass other musical epistemologies already in circulation during the seventeenth century. Leading this investigation is a handwritten book of lessons wherein there emerges a preference for learning the violin using the principles of guitar playing. Next, I discuss the appearance of annotated guitar tablature in the copy of Giulio Caccini’s Le nuove musiche held in the Library of Congress, which edits Caccini’s songs to purpose their accompaniments for easier guitar playing. Together, these two documents reveal earnest attempts at being musical with a guitar in the hands or guitar playing in the mind, opening us to a world-view that hinges on the guitar as the locus of musical knowledge.

François de Billon’s Fort inexpugnable de l’honneur du sexe feminin (1555) was among the most extensive contributions to the sixteenth-century polemic on the nature of women known as the querelle des femmes. In keeping with the military connotations of its title, Billon’s ‘impregnable fortress’ is an exercise in bellicose rhetoric; his sallies are illustrated with woodcuts of roaring lions and fire-spitting cannons to heighten the effect of bravado. In the section on women’s musical gifts, he vaunts the ‘angelic sweetness’ of the female singing voice, and claims that although male musicians more often win fame, women have always been better singers:

In [singing] nevertheless women have always been the very best. Whatever may be said by Sandrin, Arcadelt or Janequin, the most renowned musicians of Europe in our time, whom I would willingly ask, ‘Where is it that one can find sweetness of vocal harmony, in general, if not in the musical throat of Woman, even if she puts forth only a little warbling?’ And if they answered that in some men one finds more, could I not rightly reply, ‘What is the reason, my friends, that so few men of your profession are married and that you all flee marriage, if not that through propriety [honnesteté] you would be forced to bring your wives (instead of choirboys) into princely chambers to sing with you, or without you, which would be found so much sweeter than any childish voice? O what harmony, if you were all married in the normal fashion to beautiful women; if they were well instructed by you in the rules of music; and if in the aforementioned manner, you tuned yourselves well with them. The pleasure of listening to you would be double, the advantage triple, and thus, frequently nothing would be sung except in duo’.

This essay studies the role played by Marguerite de Valois in the cultural life of the French court from early childhood until her death in 1615. Trained to perform in public, Marguerite acquired languages and diplomatic skills, and cultivated music and dancing in particular. Her passion for dancing and the energy and mastery she displayed in performance is traced through the testimony of contemporary records (French, Italian and English), through her own recollections, and through a discussion of her patronage of musicians, poets and dancers.

A venerable form of petitionary prayer, the litany emerged as a key aural expression of Counter-Reformation Catholicism around the turn of the seventeenth century, particularly in the confessionally contested borderlands of the Holy Roman Empire. Its explicit projection of the dogma of sanctoral intercession, rejected soundly by Protestant theologians, helped to make the litany a flashpoint for religious controversy. Especially in the duchy of Bavaria, the northern bastion of the Counter-Reformation, the litany flourished in a wide variety of monophonic and polyphonic forms that reflected its fluid position on a spectrum between oral and written traditions. This essay explores the usage and significance of the litany in Counter-Reformation Germany, focusing especially upon the Thesaurus litaniarum (Treasury of Litanies, 1596) by Georg Victorinus, music director of the Munich Jesuits. Intimately connected with currents of Catholic reform in German-speaking lands, this great anthology illustrates the varied and creative ways in which composers responded to the litany’s distinctive ebb and flow of titles and petitions to holy intercessors.

In balades 27 and 38, Machaut likens the wounds suffered by the lover to those that result from the poisons of deadly beasts. He invokes animal imagery to depict the beloved and her behaviour: she encloses within her being monstrous beasts that repel and repulse the lover, causing him grievous bodily harm. In the course of both balades the deadly beasts transform into various allegorical characters that are personifications of secular vices. One of these characters, Refusal (‘Refus’), emerges as central. Machaut personifies the lady's rejection of the lover's advances (which he makes through words/music) as the courtly vice Refusal. In Balade 27, it is her sense organs that enact this refusal: her ears cannot hear him, her mouth rejects him, and her Look kills him. I explore the resonances of Machaut's sadistic and animalistic lady in two spheres: the courtly, where the obvious antecedents for Machaut's imagery are the courtly bestiaries; and the sacred, where parallels between Refusal and the deadly sins of pride and envy can be detected, as suggested by my interpretation of these two balades and some of Machaut's motets, and the links I set forth between these sins, vices, and the senses that partake in them.

Patri carissimo eidemque ingeniossimo, John Patrick Desmond (1943–2013)

Since Edmond de Coussemaker published the texts and melodies of ten liturgical dramas in 1860, the fundamental role of music in these ceremonies has been recognised. Regrettably, however, apart from a few isolated and restricted studies, amid a wealth of general literature on the subject there is still no comprehensive critical account of the musical content of these medieval ceremonies, nor of the ways in which it changed over the long period during which the genre was cultivated. Precise and detailed musical studies have tended to discuss individual examples of varied types of liturgical drama, rather than make a systematic study of a chosen layer or tradition in the repertory; and enquiries into the manner of composition of the music have been directed towards looking for dramatic or emotive features, to establishing motivic connections between the various melodies of a given ceremony, or to postulating motivic connections between the melodies of a given ceremony and the Gregorian chant. All these studies neglect one of the most important compositional aspects of the liturgical drama — the re-use of old material — and thereby fail to offer true insights into exactly how the melodies in any ceremony or group of ceremonies were composed. Only in three essays by Walther Lipphardt – on the introductory scene of the Visitatio sepulchri ceremonies, the Magi ceremonies, and the Mainz Visitatio sepulchri tradition – has an attempt been made to trace the paths of certain melodies through different sources.

Sometime between the years 1330 and 1343, Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita in Castile, included this maxim in his literary masterpiece, the Libro de buen amor. This verse, like others in the poem, attributes an ethnic identity both to objects and to vocal music, a form of ethnic marking that has been preserved in Spanish culture by linguistic usage: the Arabic particle a[1] in the prefix to words for musical instruments such as adufe (square tambourine), ajabeba (transverse flute) or anafil (a straight trumpet four feet or more in length) is a possible reminder of this phenomenon. About a century later, the chronicler Alonso de Palencia (d. 1492) applied similar ethnic markings when speaking of the music of a young Castilian converso who was to become one of the most powerful courtiers of King Enrique IV, Diego Arias Dávila: ‘per rura segobiensia…cantibusque arabicis advocabat sibi coetu rusticorum’.

This article examines the Ferrarese cultural context surrounding the virtually unprecedented choice of a text from Dante's Commedia for setting in Luzzaschi's Second Book of Madrigals of 1576. A particular focus is the quarrel in literary criticism of the early years of the 1570s over the place of Dante in the Italian literary firmament, and the position of the influential Modenese critic and philologist Lodovico Castelvetro in this quarrel. I speculate that Castelvetro, a subject of the duke of Ferrara, may have had a role in the choice of text. I also speculate that the disastrous Ferrarese earthquakes of the early years of the decade may have resounded for Ferrarese culture in the particular lines from the Commedia. Finally, I propose that the musical style chosen by Luzzaschi for this setting was an extraordinary and retrospective homage to the late style of his teacher Cipriano de Rore, another artistic figure intimately connected with the Este court. Both Rore and Castelvetro may be seen as icons of Ferrarese cultural prestige in the ongoing battle for precedence between the Este and the Medici.

With the restoration of the Seville diocese in 1248, its organisation followed the model established by other Castilian cathedral chapters. Seville Cathedral's symbolic importance and the wealth created by its endowments resulted in a flourishing development of worship, in which music played a key role. The ritual space in the Mozarabic cathedral was radically transformed with the construction of the Gothic building over a period of almost a hundred years, from 1434 to 1517. In tandem with this architectural programme, the cathedral's musical resources also underwent transformation, being adapted according to changing aesthetic considerations, liturgical modifications and new spatial and acoustical demands. The city of Seville periodically welcomed the court, with the monarch and the royal household residing for extended sojourns in the Alcázar, which was renovated by Pedro I in the fourteenth century. These royal visits favoured musical exchange with the royal chapels, especially during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel. Seville became the paradigm for the consolidation and standardisation witnessed during the fifteenth century throughout the ecclesiastical institutions of Castile and Aragon. The direct consequence of this reforming impulse was an exponential increase in the number of composers active in this environment, and the amount of polyphonic repertory created through church patronage in both the institutional and private spheres, as well as the increase in the use of that polyphony in liturgical and devotional ceremony.

Although medieval plainsong is known as a primarily diatonic repertory, the presence of a ‘non-diatonic’ tradition was brought to light long ago in the work of Jacobsthal, Delalande and others. This essay considers some aspects of this practice that have not been fully examined in previous studies and explores their relationship to early medieval theory and pedagogy. In the solo verses of the offertory chants, large sections are displaced from the diatonic background scale, sometimes permanently. The conception of irregular semitones presented in Scolica enchiriadis yields insight into this extensive ‘non-diatonic’ practice and has implications for interpreting variant readings of these problem spots. The final section of the essay explores some aspects of the Enchiriadis reception that point to changes in tone-system and pitch conception, shedding light on the contexts surrounding the suppression of irregular semitones.

The Italians had conflicting sentiments regarding the visit of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV in Italy in 1355: from the enthusiastic expectations of the impact the Emperor would have on the local political life to contemptuous scepticism and even to overt disdain. Two Italian Trecento madrigals have traditionally been considered to refer to this visit: (1) the three-voice polytextual madrigal Aquil altera/Creatura gentil/Uccel di Dio by Jacopo da Bologna, seen as related to Charles’s coronation with the Iron Crown of Lombardy in Milan; and (2) the two-voice madrigal Sovran uccello by Donato da Firenze, considered a celebratory piece for Charles’s coronation as well. This essay explores the relevant historical contexts, Milanese for Jacopo’s madrigal and Florentine for Donato’s, with a view to placing both pieces.