The Chigi Codex occupies a place of honour among music manuscripts of the Renaissance; thirteen masses by Ockeghem along with L'homme armé masses by Josquin, Busnoys, Brumel and Compère figure prominently among its contents. According to Herbert Kellman, it was copied between 1498 and 1503 for the Burgundian nobleman Philippe Bouton. Several coats of arms of the Spanish families Cardona and Fernández de Córdoba appear in different places in the manuscript and Kellman suggested that the transfer of the Chigi Codex to the Spaniards occurred after the death of its first owner in 1515. Seven works, the foliation in the upper right margin of the recto folios and a table of contents with a heading that reads Tabla de missas y motetes were added by a Spanish scribe. Since Mouton's motet Quis dabit oculis, written on the death of Anne of Brittany in 1514, is also among the added works, Kellman concluded that these additions to the Chigi Codex were made after that date. The assumption that the manuscript travelled to Spain is further supported by a seventeenth-century inscription written in Italian on the flyleaf of the manuscript, which affirms that the book was used in Spain.

The literary origins of the Italian sixteenth-century madrigal, as well as the presumed inexpressive nature of the so-called prima pratica as compared with the seconda pratica, perhaps represent two of the most abused commonplaces of modern musical historiography. Most scholars still believe that the linguistic, rhetorical and stylistic principles codified by Petrarchist humanists such as Pietro Bembo directly stimulated the birth of the new literary-musical genre. Even more problematic is the attitude of those who extract the dichotomy prima/seconda pratica from its specific cultural context - the Artusi-Monteverdi controversy - and apply it to an extended historical period, largely covering the whole history of the madrigal itself.

Many studies have been devoted to the producers of Lutheran music in seventeenth-century Germany – composers, editors, publishers and printers. Little attention, however, has been paid to the tastes and preferences of the consumers of this music. This article represents the first study of this subject, and draws on music inventories and account books to examine the Lutheran market for sacred music during this period. It presents a number of key findings, all of which relate to purchasing patterns: that community members donated a considerable amount of music to Lutheran institutions; that music prices remained quite stable for decades; that Lutherans cultivated the older motet alongside the newer sacred concerto throughout much of the century; that Lutherans sought out music by Italians and northern Catholics as well as by Lutherans; and that after c. 1640, the composer Andreas Hammerschmidt dominated the Lutheran market for sacred music, outselling all of his contemporaries.

Through Patrick Macey’s extensive research on Josquin des Prez’s Miserere mei Deus, the historical context of this monumental motet, especially its connection with the Savonarolan reform movement and its repercussions at the Este court of Ferrara, has received major attention. Above all, Macey has shown how this piece generated a whole cluster of compositions throughout the sixteenth century that bear musical, structural and/or textual references to Josquin’s work. One of the main elements of this intertextual web includes the use of Josquin’s soggetto ostinato – either literally or with slight variations – by composers such as Adrian Willaert, Cipriano de Rore and Nicola Vicentino, who were all connected with the Este court at a certain point in their careers. Macey’s discoveries have brought to light a highly intriguing reception history, to which other scholars have also contributed. In the present essay, I wish to add yet another piece of evidence to the afterlife of this Miserere tradition. I will focus on two lesser-known motets by Gioseffo Zarlino, Miserere mei Deus and Misereris omnium, both of which were published in his collection Modulationes sex vocum (Venice, 1566) (see Figure 1). Not only did they inscribe themselves in the intertextual network that was initiated by Josquin, but also they can be linked to the Ferrarese court in general and to Duke Alfonso II in particular.

Modern understanding of the production and dissemination of thirteenth-century polyphony is constrained by the paucity of manuscript sources that have been preserved in their entirety; the panorama of sources of medieval polyphony is essentially fragmentary. Some of the surviving fragments, however, were torn from lost books of polyphony that were to some extent comparable to well-known extant codices. The fragment of polyphony preserved in the binding of manuscript 6528 of the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid is illustrative in this respect. This fragment displays a number of codicological and musical features that are strikingly similar to those of the Florence manuscript (F). Both sources share format and mise-en-page, make use of similar styles of script, notation and pen-work decoration, transmit the pieces in the same order, and present virtually identical musical readings. The Madrid fragment thus provides new evidence for a standardised production of polyphonic books in thirteenth-century Paris. The study provides a detailed account of the fragment’s codicological and philological features, and explores the hypothesis that it originated in the same Parisian workshop that produced F.

One of the greatest scourges of the later medieval period was plague. While there is a considerable scholarly literature tracing the impact of the dread disease on literature and art, the impermanence of performance has rendered the extension of such studies to the field of music problematic. These problems are to some extent surmountable in studying the fifteenth-century hymn Stella celi extirpavit, a Marian invocation unequivocally phrased as a plea for deliverance from illness. In this essay, it is proposed that the Stella celi is representative of the beliefs and skills shared by a broad spectrum of late medieval society in the shadow of the plague. Analysis of musical and textual features, and the contexts of performance, further suggest links with the artistic and intellectual concerns of the Franciscan Order, which may have thus enabled otherwise ephemeral music to be preserved as an enduring response to epidemic calamity.

The appearance of a consistent repertory of polyphonic settings of single vernacular texts, governed by a coherent set of conventions and a shared understanding of compositional ambition, was one of the lasting achievements of the composers of the fourteenth century. Although fully formed products of this accomplishment did not emerge until the century’s fourth decade, the concept of the marriage of a single vernacular poem to the type of polyphonic music previously associated with the caudae of conducti, clausulae and polytextual motets had by then been a topic for exploration for at least fifty years. It is not too much to claim that the period from Adam de la Halle to Guillaume de Machaut saw a series of changes in the relationship between vernacular poetry and polyphony that had consequences for the history of music at least up to and probably beyond Le nuove musiche (1601).

Like her crown, which according to the story shines in a constellation, L'Arianna as a work of art shimmers as a distant and mysterious object, and the loss of Monteverdi's score, apart from the famous lament, makes it one of the great ‘if onlys’ of the history of music. Artistic responses to L'Arianna range wide. In Gabrielle d'Annunzio's novel Il fuoco, Stellio Effrena and his group of aesthetes in fin de siècle Venice embrace Monteverdi, and Arianna's lament in particular, as a home-grown antidote to Wagner, elevating ‘Lasciatemi morire’ to the status of an Italian precursor of the ‘Liebestod’. Recently Alexander Goehr gave a new lease of life to Ottavio Rinuccini's libretto in his opera Arianna, first performed in September 1995, and, as if not to desecrate a hallowed object, he included in the opera a recording of the opening of Monteverdi's surviving fragment sung by Kathleen Ferrier.

By piecing together fragments of diverse archival evidence, it is possible to document a large minstrel population in urban settings in late medieval southern France that was able to support itself through a multiplicity of freelance activities and complex working relationships. Information concerning the urban minstrel in medieval Europe is usually drawn from city accounts and contracts providing details concerning the duties, function and wages of civic musicians. In order to create a multi-dimensional image of the urban minstrel, however, a wide variety of archival sources needs to be explored. Such sources – accounts of confraternities, university statutes, city statutes, tax records, property listings, private notarial contracts, among others – have offered glimpses into aspects of the minstrel community that have tended to remain elusive. This essay first establishes the nature of freelance activities, which were central to the urban minstrel's livelihood. Second, the socio-economic status of minstrels will be investigated, to determine how successful musicians were at supporting themselves in the medieval urban environment.

Ever since the publication of Frank Harrison's book Music in Medieval Britain in 1958, the study of the cultivation of liturgical music in late-medieval England has been based on the institutional structure of the Church: on the cathedrals, colleges and parish churches, and on the household chapels of the monarchy and higher nobility both spiritual and lay. In that and most subsequent studies, however, male figures have been seen to dominate the establishments under investigation. If art history (perhaps musicology's closest sister discipline) can be shown to have characterised the patronage of Renaissance art as a system dominated by ‘Big Men’, so too has musicology placed the development of English liturgical music in a culture shaped largely by noble male patrons – kings, princes, dukes, earls, archbishops, bishops and the like.

The thirteenth-century motet repertory has been understood on a wide spectrum, with recent scholarship amplifying the relationship between the liturgical tenors and the commentary in the upper voices. This study examines a family of motets based on the tenors IOHANNE and MULIERUM from the feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist (24 June). Several texts within this motet family make references to well-known traditions associated with the pagan festival of Midsummer, the celebration of the summer solstice. Allusions to popular solstitial practices including the lighting of bonfires and the public criticism of authority, in addition to the cultural awareness of the sun's power on this day, conspicuously surface in these motets, particularly when viewed through the lens of the tenor. The study suggests the further obfuscation of sacred and secular poles in the motet through attentiveness to images of popular, pre-Christian rituals that survive in these polyphonic works.

The tenor occupies a special role in vernacular motets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: not only does it underpin the melodies of the upper voices contrapuntally, it also provides intellectual and interpretative undergirding for the texts of these pieces. The biblical or liturgical context of a tenor, drawing on well-understood exegetical and literary traditions, often facilitates an allegorical reading of the upper voices, and vice versa. Because of the foundational nature of the tenor within the Ars nova motet in particular, the identification of the exact musico-liturgical sources of this voice, where possible, is of special significance. While the origins of most of Machaut's twenty-one Latin tenors have been identified, the tenor of one work, Motet 5 (Aucune gent/Qui plus aimme/ T. Fiat voluntas tua, hereafter M5), is alleged to have a most unusual source. I offer new observations about the tenor of M5 that emphasise certain compositional procedures congruent with Machaut's practice in writing his motets and may tie together the various secular and sacred references in the piece.

The Hebrew Old Testament contains, besides prose narratives and laws, a considerable amount of poetry. The books of Lamentations, Proverbs and Psalms and the Song of Solomon, together with the prophetic oracles that make up the books of Amos, Habakkuk, Joel, Micah, Nahum, Obadiah and Zephaniah, consist entirely, or almost entirely, of poetry. In several other books, especially Job and the books of the prophets Haggai, Isaiah and Jeremiah, poetry predominates, while in the books of history and law, although prose predominates, poetry is never entirely absent, brief though its manifestations sometimes are. The vast majority of the poetry is sacred, as would be expected from texts that occur within religious writings. The relatively small amount of profane poetry consists of a handful of short examples and the Song of Solomon.

No-one has ever seriously questioned the exclusively monophonic character of medieval Byzantine ecclesiastical chant. The introduction of the drone, or ison singing, so familiar in contemporary Greek, Arabic, Romanian and Bulgarian practice, is not documented before the sixteenth century, when modal obscurity, resulting from complex and ambiguous chromatic alterations which appeared probably after the assimilation of Ottoman and other Eastern musical traditions, required the application of a tonic, or home-note, to mark the underlying tonal course of the melody. Musicians in Constantinople and on Mount Athos were probably oblivious of the rise of polyphony in the West, particularly after the formal break between the two Churches in the eleventh century, which was preceded by a long period of increasing estrangement. And with the Latin occupation of a part of the Byzantine Empire between 1204 and 1261, there was a general distaste for and rejection of the culture of the ‘Franks’.

Music was an important metaphor for Ronsard, and references to music and musical instruments are frequently found in his poetry. His writings about music are few, however. In his article ‘Ut musica poesis: Music and Poetry in France in the Late Sixteenth Century’ Howard Brown has referred to two of the most explicit examples of such writing: the preface to Le Roy and Ballard's Livre de meslanges (1560) and the passage from Ronsard's Abbregé de l'art poëtique françois (1565) on the desirability of union between poetry and music. Such passages are important in illuminating poets' attitudes towards music and in demonstrating ways in which the relationship between text and music could be conceptualised in the sixteenth century. They are frustratingly vague, however, about how the poets' ideals should be achieved, and they leave many practical questions unanswered. Did poets have any influence on composers' choices of texts? Did movements in poetic circles ever affect the pitches or rhythms of musical settings – that is, could poets influence the way music sounded?

In calling for a new history of French music and musical life of the second half of the sixteenth century, Howard Mayer Brown's paper has presented scholars with a number of formidable challenges. It admonishes us to re-examine nearly every facet of what remains largely an enigma of music history. Simultaneously exacting and encyclopedic, it considers in turn each of four themes: the relation of words and music; the means and character of print culture; musical styles and genres; and (perhaps most important of all) the social context of the chanson itself – what Brown called ‘the anthropology of the French chanson’. His essay concerns the problems and perspectives of Renaissance musicology: how we hear and how we explain the music of the past in relation to those who first made and heard it. It thus requires us to reconsider our assumptions about the nature and workings of historical change, the status of canonical styles and those who promoted them, and the very place of music in culture.

The fascinating phenomenon of the migration of theatrical subjects between literary genres, languages and countries is enriched through a new example discussed in this article. A handwritten libretto compiled in Rome for the court of Vienna, La simpatia nell'odio, overo Le amazoni amanti by Giovanni Pietro Monesio (1664), was discovered to be a faithful translation of the Spanish play Las Amazonas by Antonio de Solís (1657), hitherto known as the basis of a much later libretto, Caduta del regno delle Amazzoni, by Domenico De Totis (1690), set by Bernardo Pasquini. Monesio's libretto not only allows us to reconstruct the manner and time of the European circulation of a Spanish subject (from Madrid to Rome, to Vienna and Naples), but also to shed light on wider cultural aspects. First of all, it increases the number of librettos closely based on Spanish plays, of which so far only a few examples by Giulio Rospigliosi were known. Secondly, it provides further proof of the hypotheticised Spanish influence on the fortune of the Amazons in Italian opera and confirmation that its first appearance was beyond the Alps rather than in Italy. Finally, in the context of the the Habsburg Viennese court, the success of the Amazons seems to be linked to the political need to create a strong symbolic association between the ‘discourse’ on the virago and the legitimation of female power.