Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 146 (fr. 146), a manuscript well known for its inclusion of the Roman de Fauvel, also provides an important, albeit understudied, contribution to the history surrounding the allegorical ‘flower of the lily’, or fleur-de-lis – a floral symbol central to fourteenth-century theology and French royal heraldry. In medieval France, the fleur-de-lis emerges through text and music as a symbol capable of invoking, and being invoked by, the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary and the Virtues, all in the interest of supporting the religious and monarchical well-being of France. This study argues that the persistent return to the fleur-de-lis throughout the dits, the Chronique metrique and most especially the music and text of Fauvel in fr. 146 offers a necessary link between sacred and heraldic symbology both within the manuscript as well as within the larger historical development of this allegorical flower.

The manuscript partbooks (CTB) preserved in the Special Collections Library at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, offer no obvious signs as to their origins. The contents are almost exclusively by London composers and are carefully laid out in an apparently unique alternation of texted and untexted works, as if in performance order. Using clues from the contents, as well as from the physical state of the books, a connection is proposed to events surrounding the death of Prince Henry in late 1612, and marriage of Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine in 1613.

This essay is a response to Rob Wegman's ‘The Other Josquin’, which was published in 2008 in the Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis. In his article, Wegman tried to demonstrate that certain works, such as the six-voice motet Inter natos mulierum, have unjustly been banned from Josquin's list of works and that an underlying methodological problem continues to distort our view of Josquin's oeuvre. In order to remedy the problem of ‘authorship as a truth-claim to be proved or disproved’, Wegman introduces the image of an ‘other’ Josquin. Even though authenticity continues to be a recurring issue in Josquin studies, Wegman's article did not lead to much of a response. The present article retraces Wegman's discussion of the authorship of Inter natos mulierum and takes a closer look at his arguments in an effort to determine if the introduction of ‘another’ Josquin could be to the benefit of present-day Josquin research, and what the results of adopting such an image might be.

The article presents a new edition and English translation of the Latin music-theory treatise transmitted anonymously in Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, MS 1492, sometimes known as De musica et de transformatione specialiter, or simply the Sowa Anonymous (a reference to Heinrich Sowa's edition published in 1935). An introductory essay justifies the treatise's importance and gives reasons why a new edition is necessary. It also presents a complex case for dating the treatise to the eleventh century based on verbal and conceptual affinities with five other treatises of the era. The edition of the text is done to higher standards of orthographic accuracy than were observed in 1935 and corrects about twenty outright errors in Sowa's edition. It also includes the two embedded tonaries that Sowa omitted. The treatise is a crucial complementary witness to the state of music theory in the eleventh century.

Modena, Biblioteca Estense, MS α.M.1.13 (ModD) is a collection of masses compiled in Ferrara around 1480 for the court of Ercole I d'Este. Although several scholars have argued that the changes in ModD were the result of composers reworking their own music or intervention by the scribe, the situation is far more complex. Through a careful examination of the textual and musical changes in ModD, this essay substantiates three hypotheses: that ModD had a separate and independent editor (Johannes Martini) apart from the scribe who copied it (Fra Filippo), and that both tampered with the music to a different extent; that the reasons behind the changes were in part politically and religiously motivated; and finally that several of the masses in ModD contain sections written by someone other than their original composer, a practice that may have been more common than we currently believe.