At the heart of the biography of Guillaume de Machaut as currently understood there lies an inconsistency so great as almost to present a paradox, for it seems irreconcilable with the evident content of his surviving output of musical works. From 1338 until his death in 1377 Machaut possessed a canonry and prebend of the cathedral and metropolitan church of Our Lady of Reims. Conventionally it has been assumed that soon after his receipt of this benefice, and certainly by 1340, he had taken up residence within one of the prebendal mansions located in or near the precinct of the cathedral, and that he made this his permanent domicile for the remainder of his adult life – a period little short of forty years.

Although the castrato played a central role in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century musical life, he occupied a position at the margins of early modern society. As a consequence of the surgical alteration of his body and the superior musical training that he received as compensation for his ‘acquiescence’ in that act, he found himself navigating a path through a bifurcated world. For him, the surgery had both public and private consequences: while society would publicly celebrate his vocal virtuosity, it would also circumscribe his private activities, and withhold from him the right to marry, or to enjoy an intimate relationship with a woman. As he soon realised, the realities of his special status meant that many of those who would revel in his phenomenal vocal abilities would also ridicule him as effeminate and as a sexual misfit, and would accuse him, ironically, of possessing a voracious sexual appetite that rendered him a threat to women. When he travelled north to work in German-speaking societies, particularly those in which the Lutheran confession held sway, that simple migratory act instantly compounded the number of those qualities that contributed to his ‘Otherness’: while in his homeland his standing as an emasculate and a musician already set him apart from others, in Lutheran regions, his status as a foreigner, an adherent of an outlawed (and highly suspect) confession, and a member of a privileged group that moved in the rarefied atmosphere of the local court all served to intensify his marginality.

Bernardino Corio's late fifteenth-century history of Milan covers the city's past from its foundations to the collapse of the Sforza dynasty. Following the historiographic traditions established by Leonardo Bruni, its essential outlines are founded on careful use of sources and, for more recent events, contemporary memories and impressions. It is, however, also characterised by judicious revisionism and anecdotal invention. The careful reader always needs to ask why digressions have been included and what hidden points are being made. It is therefore well worth inquiring why Corio, a member of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza's court, chose to link his master's assassination on 26 December 1476 with a passage on his chapel choir and musical taste.

In a letter written in the year he died, the novelist Italo Calvino spoke of his unease with the writing of the story of his own life: ‘Each time I see my life fixed and objectified I am seized with anxiety, especially when it is notes that I myself have supplied … by repeating the same things [but] using different words I always hope to get round my neurotic relationship with autobiography.’ Such testimony from a still-living creative artist is a valuable reminder of the historiographical conundrums of even the most apparently ‘authentic’ biographical narrative. Those of us who read, research and write the stories of long-dead artists, relying as we must on the contents of documents both written and preserved for all kinds of forgotten and quite likely unfathomable reasons, have learnt to be cautious, if not a little anxious, in our relationships with what they seem to be saying to us. The more consciously autobiographical such writings appear to be, the more circumspectly we tend to tread, trying to temper the seductive pleasure of a time-dissolving intimacy with our subjects which such texts seem to promise with our historians' sense of their Siren dangers. Nevertheless, in the case of the still largely unknown story of Philippe de Monte, whose scarce documentary sources, apart from a rich but small handful of private letters, consist of the often enigmatic prefaces to his published music, the addition of two new, very substantial and intensely autobiographical documents can hardly fail to excite expectations of increased access to ‘the man himself’.

Was music notated at Rome before the St Cecilia gradual, finished in 1071, was begun? If so (as seems likely), does the common wisdom hold true that no examples of such notation have survived? And if a search through sacramentaries, lectionaries, evangeliaries, bibles and homiliaries written in urban and suburban Rome before 1071 should disclose bits of such notation, what would they reveal? An earlier stage of music writing indigenous to Rome, or a borrowed technique recently imported? And if borrowed, borrowed from where?

The twin questions of the origin and purpose of Trent 88–91, the four celebrated codices compiled by Johannes Wiser during the third quarter of the fifteenth century, have continued to puzzle musicologists ever since the manuscripts were rediscovered more than a hundred years ago. Adler and Koller, whose pioneering study of the Trent Codices, published in 1900, still retains so much of its original force, saw Wiser’s collection as having been compiled ‘in and for Trent’ under the humanistic influence of Johannes Hinderbach, provost of the cathedral from 1455 and prince-bishop of the city and region from 1465. At the time of writing, next to nothing was known about the life of the obscure priest who had been responsible for the most important musical collection of the fifteenth century, and it was not until nearly thirty years later that the Trentino scholar Renato Lunelli published his crucial discovery showing that Wiser was employed as schoolmaster at the cathedral school in Trent during the very period when he must have been busy assembling his great collection. The article in question was written partly in response to a highly polemical and largely unsubstantiated piece that had been published by the Austrian historian Rudolf Wolkan a few years earlier. Wolkan had rejected the idea of a Tridentine origin for the codices, arguing that there was literally no evidence of any form of musical activity in Trent prior to Hinderbach’s time, and that the reign of his predecessor, Georg Hack (1444–65), which Adler and Koller had defined as the period during which most of the copying must have taken place, would not have been conducive to so large-scale an artistic enterprise, owing to Hack’s strained relations with the city over which he presided. Instead, Wolkan maintained that the codices had been compiled in Vienna, where they might have formed part of Hinderbach’s library, and suggested that it could have been under his auspices that they eventually reached Trent.

During the course of his thirty-year career in Italy between the early 1470s and the first years of the sixteenth century, Tinctoris witnessed the printing of only two of his own theoretical works. His glossary of musical terms, the Terminorum musicae diffinitorium, has been convincingly shown to have issued from the Treviso press of the author's compatriot and contemporary Gerardus de Lisa, around 1495, although the work had clearly been compiled in manuscript form some twenty years previously. The Diffinitorium has, indeed, fared relatively well at the hands of modern scholarship, though one suspects that its generic significance as an early musical dictionary has occasionally clouded critical judgement on its actual content, and there still remain unanswered basic questions as to why, and for whom, the book was printed at all. By contrast, the other, fragmentary treatise of Tinctoris to be printed in his lifetime, De inuentione et usu musice – a work frankly more interesting by far than the Diffinitorium – has received surprisingly scant attention, and a reassessment of the place, date and circumstances of its publication is long overdue. In addition, it seems appropriate to take the opportunity of presenting here some new fragments of the treatise which have recently come to light in north-east France.

For James Haar on his 70th Birthday

The sixteenth century in Italy was a time when academies of all kinds flourished as venues, and often as arbiters, of literature and high culture. A casual look at the academies might give the impression that they were mostly social in nature, that they functioned as a pastime for bored aristocrats and ambitious letterati. As originally constituted, the Accademia degli Umidi, founded 1 November 1540, indeed fitted this description, but with one difference characteristic of Florentine society - it was organised by twelve men of various social classes with a common interest in poetry and language. The academy expanded considerably under the patronage of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici and on 25 March 1541 was reconstituted as the Accademia Fiorentina. Its avowed purpose was to promote the Tuscan language as an instrument of literature and knowledge, in an age when mastery of Latin was required of any educated man. In advancing the cause of vernacular literature, the Accademia Fiorentina, like other academies of the time, greatly extended the programme of Italian humanism, making available the fruits of humanist thought and enquiry to a larger public.

The conventional view on the origin of the gradual was stated succinctly by Peter Wagner: ‘The Responsorial solo in the mass is of apostolic origin…in imitation of the Jewish liturgy a solo from the psalmist was inserted between the readings.’ The precise form this view has taken more recently in the works of both musical and liturgical historians can be summarised as follows. The early Mass or Eucharist consisted of two major parts. The essential part, the Eucharist proper, had its origins in the Last Supper, a Jewish ceremonial meal, possibly the Passover Seder. This was preceded by a ‘service of the Word’, made up of four elements: scripture reading, discourse on the reading, congregational prayer and psalms sung in response to the readings. This pre-eucharistic service was plainly and simply an adoption en bloc of the ancient synagogue service.

By praising rulers, whose magnificence formed a crucial part of the world order, Pierre de Ronsard and his French colleagues in the second half of the sixteenth century often depicted the world not as it was but as it ought to be. This idea informs Margaret McGowan's book on ideal forms in the age of Ronsard, in which she explores the ways poets and painters extolled the virtues and the theatrical magnificence of perfect princes following the Horatian dictum ut pictura poesis: as is painting so is poetry. McGowan demonstrates the virtuosity of the painters and poets of the sixteenth century in shaping their hymns of praise from the subject matter and ideals of ancient Greece and Rome by following Horace's advice to regard paintings as mute poems and poems as speaking pictures. McGowan shows how artists and intellectuals pursued their goals by creating four kinds of ideal form: iconic forms, sacred images derived from classical literary sources offering princes some guarantee of immortality; triumphal forms that evoke the heroic imperial past; ideal forms of beauty to be found in contemplating the beloved; and dancing forms that mirror rituals of celebration. McGowan claims that such ideal forms were intended to enlighten the ruler himself as much as they celebrated his grandeur in the eyes of others.

On the abdication of his father Charles V from the Spanish throne in 1556, Philip II was to inherit probably the most important and prestigious court chapel in Europe. Its history, structure and musical eminence were well established during the time of the Burgundian dukes in the fifteenth century, under whose patronage some of the most prominent musicians and composers found their livelihood; as an institution, it was also partly indebted to traditions and an infrastructure inherited from the Castilian court of Ferdinand and Isabella which was passed on to Charles V following the death of Ferdinand in 1516. When Philip II came to power, the amalgamation of his own court and chapel with that of the Emperor resulted in an organisation of unheard proportions, even though many officers of the Imperial court were to accompany Charles V on his retirement to the monastery in Yuste, in Spain, and others of Philip's own train were to return independently to their homeland on periods of extended leave. This was evidently a time of considerable upheaval, during which membership fluctuated and the structural organisation necessarily underwent a period of some adjustment.

Throughout history, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has taken on the connotations of its specific cultural contexts. Interpreters of the myth have invested the figure of Orpheus with symbolism to suit their own rhetorical purposes. Each retelling has emphasised certain elements of the myth to make it conform to the intended meaning. In all accounts of the story, Orpheus is a musician who charms animals and inanimate objects with his song. In the fifth century B.C., the death of his wife, Eurydice, and his attempt to rescue her from the underworld became part of the mythographic tradition. According to the best-known version of this story, Orpheus persuades the inhabitants of the underworld to return Eurydice to him, but then loses her when he looks back at her, violating the rule imposed by the underworld.

In his Prologue, Guillaume de Machaut lists the ballade entée, or ‘grafted ballade’, as one of the many genres he is inspired to write to praise and honour all ladies. It is unclear from this fleeting reference, however, exactly what type of work Machaut meant by this term and whether he was referring to a purely poetic form or to one that involved music. That the practice of citation in lyric poetry was well established at this time is demonstrated by Machaut's own output, which reveals him to have been a master of this art; this literary tradition was to continue to thrive in the later fourteenth century.

The thirteenth century was a time of turmoil in Occitania, starting with the buildup to the Albigensian Crusade during the first decade and its eruption in the second and third, which resulted in the establishment of the university in Toulouse in 1229, the founding of the Order of Friars Preachers a short time later and the unleashing of several decades of inquisition led by these Dominicans, and ultimately the dissolution of the powerful county of Toulouse. France profited both economically and politically from this plundering of the rich culture to its south: the consolidation of power by the late Capetian monarchy owed much to the absorption of Occitania into its holdings. The inhabitants of the Midi continued to demonstrate their fierce independence from their conquerors in myriad ways, some overt, some subversive. But the tempestuous events in their homeland caused some trauma among the troubadours, and although this did not necessarily result in a general deterioration in the quality of the songs that they produced, it probably is at least partly to blame for a decline in the number of both songs and composers.

Writing about a late-fourteenth-century ballade in honour of Mathieu de Foix, Howard Mayer Brown candidly aired his uncertainty about the proper theoretical perspective from which to engage the music. ‘How should we in the twentieth century interpret this music: from the point of view of emerging tonality, as an example of polyphonic modality, or of the influence the extended system of hexachords had on compositional decisions, or should we use some other conceptual framework?’ In his catalogue of choices, Brown alludes to a variegated lot of modern approaches that range across appropriation (sometimes formal, sometimes casual) of terms from functional tonality, modal descriptions founded on octave species and finals, mappings of hexachordal areas, empirical observation of pitch emphases and tonal orientations.

In their pioneering study of the Trent codices, Adler and Koller divided the six manuscripts then known to them into two distinct and separate groups: a younger group, Tr88–91, which they believed to have been compiled ‘in or for Trent’ by the scribe Johannes Wiser; and an older group, Tr87 and Tr92, which they described less specifically as ‘unquestionably north Italian’ in origin. Recent findings have tended to confirm Trent as the place of origin of the former group, while at the same time indicating that the blanket description ‘north Italian’ can no longer suffice for the latter. This group comprises in effect three sources which once existed independently of each other: a principal source divided into two parts, Tr871 and Tr922, here referred to jointly as TR; and two smaller sources, Tr872 and Tr921. The few attempts that have been made to determine the individual provenances of these manuscripts rest more on informed hypothesis than hard fact, with the result that their precise origin and the reason for their association with the later codices have remained as much of a puzzle as they were when the first six manuscripts were rediscovered just over a century ago.

It is safe to say that the collections of the Museo Comunale Bardini, situated in Piazza dei Mozzi on the oltrarno in Florence, remain comparatively little known. The museum's vast store of paintings, sculpture, architectural ornament, rugs and tapestries, armour, bronzes, furniture and musical instruments all belonged to Stefano Bardini, the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collector and art dealer. Born in 1836 in the province of Arezzo, Bardini came to Florence to study painting at the Accademia delle Belle Arti. After the political turbulence of the 1860s, when Bardini fought with the Garibaldini, the young painter turned to restoration, connoisseurship and art dealing. By the age of forty-five he had established his reputation and an extraordinary personal collection. At the height of his career his patrons included the Rothschilds, the Vanderbilts, Isabella Gardiner and J. Pierpont Morgan. Many objects now in some of the world's best-known public collections passed through his hands.

It may not always seem obvious to begin a study of French music in the Renaissance with a reference from the theoretical field. By entitling his study ‘Ut musica poesis’ Howard Mayer Brown attempted to remedy this shortcoming. However, without in any way disparaging his work, this results in a series of paradoxes and uncertainties about the links which in France during the Renaissance period unite musical practice and musical thought, whether this be philosophical or theoretical. It is true that expressions like ‘musical renaissance’ or ‘musical humanism’, easy and pernicious terms, have a hard time in the French field. And it is precisely because these terms are easy and pernicious that they can be used in this way. For while there has never been any question of doubting the role of French composers in constructing the musical landscape of the Renaissance, it has never, on the other hand, been imaginable to write a history of humanism in French musical thinking of the Renaissance. It is rather as if, causing a sudden break in the course of history, French writers and theorists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had abandoned the art of sound to the practitioners, composers and performers alone. But no Western culture exists which can have a musical life without thought, and without the will to discover in it a pretext, a paradigmatic function or even an experimental field.

The manuscript Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14274 (now also ‘Tresorhandschrift l’) is a large collection of mensural polyphonic music, mostly composed in the first half of the fifteenth century, although a few pieces date back to the late fourteenth. Apart from its importance as a musical source (more than half the compositions it contains are unknown from other sources), Clm 14274 is the geographically northernmost representative of the small group of manuscripts from northern Italy and southern Germany which contain the core of the surviving repertory of early-fifteenth-century polyphony, and, as such, provides potentially vital documentary material for the study of this repertory.

Any scholar involved in the study of sixteenth-century music printed in Venice is bound to be familiar with the phrase ‘con gratia et privilegio’; yet within the framework of music-printing as a whole, the uses and significance of the printing privilege have remained somewhat obscure. The Venetian prints on which the privilege indication appears now lie scattered across the globe, but Venice continues to guard part of her brilliant past – the archives of the Serenissima Repubblica still yield documents which clarify our understanding of the production and protection of prints during the Cinquecento.