John Ravenscroft (1664/5–1697) is today best known for the fact that in 1695 he published a set of church sonatas that closely imitate Corelli in their style. The discourse around Ravenscroft has ever since focused on these twelve sonatas and the significance of their relationship to their illustrious model, to the exclusion of a later set of sonatas of different kind but equal merit. Ravenscroft's fascinating and unusual biography has likewise been totally ignored. The article examines the background of his distinguished, Catholic-leaning family in England during a long, turbulent period when Catholics were severely disadvantaged and his short but productive period spent in Rome, aided by newly discovered archival documents and a rich variety of other sources, both old and more recent, most of which have previously been overlooked by music historians.

Fors seulement is among Johannes Ockeghem's most extensively discussed chansons. A much debated feature of this rondeau is that its two upper voices span almost the same high register. Sources disagree over which of these voices is the tenor: earlier and authoritative manuscripts assign this role to the uppermost voice, while later ones ‘normalise’ the disposition by giving it to the slightly lower one. Apart from a few passing remarks, musicologists have not taken into sufficient consideration that the text of Fors seulement, the lament of a woman, is modelled upon Alain Chartier's Complainte on the death of his lady, as Paula Higgins has demonstrated. This article focuses on the transformation of the rhetoric of grief from male Complainte to female rondeau, and considers anew the issue of Fors seulement's unique contrapuntal structure and its troubled reception from the point of view of the peculiarly gendered nature of its poetic voice.

St Isidore's College in Rome, belonging to the Irish Franciscan Province, preserves a manuscript from the end of the fifteenth century, MS I/88, which in addition to various Latin theological and liturgical texts contains many Italian laude and Latin hymns, nine of which have music. The two laude are Vergene madre pia and O Jesù dolce, o infinit'amore, for two voices; of the seven Latin hymns, three are for three voices, two for two, and one is monodic. All these pieces are also found in other sources except for the two-voice hymn Hic est Christus, which appears to be an unicum. This new source, in conjunction with those already known, not only permits us to understand the history of the manuscript tradition of these texts and their music, but also is very interesting in that it provides a new witness for the diffusion of the lauda in Franciscan circles and the particular ways in which it was transmitted – not in official liturgical books but within miscellaneous volumes of texts and prayers of various kinds, uses, and provenance. Finally, from a musical point of view the Franciscan manuscript confirms the use of so-called ‘simple polyphony’ throughout the fifteenth century side by side with more complex polyphony in the Franco-Flemish tradition.

This essay examines the role of music in the late-medieval and Renaissance response to plague. According to doctors, the mere thought of plague could bring on the disease; they therefore prescribed joyful music to distract the mind from insidious imaginings and to counteract the harmful effects of fear. The prescription for music, however, was not unequivocal. Some spiritual authorities looked suspiciously upon music's role as anti-pestilential remedy. These competing discourses inform a reading of Johannes Martini's and Gaspar van Weerbeke's settings of O beate Sebastiane, motets that petition St Sebastian, the premier plague saint of the Renaissance, for divine intervention against pestilence.

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.

Until the ninth century, the role of the professional musician in pre-Islamic Arabia and Mesopotamia was primarily fulfilled by women. Men were socially prohibited from working as musicians, though some transgressed gender and social boundaries by adopting feminine dress and playing ‘women's’ instruments. With the advent of Islam, patronage of qiyān (singing girls), mukhannathūn (effeminates) and later, male musicians, did not substantially change. During the early Abbasid era (750–950 ce), however, their collective visibility in court entertainments was among several factors leading to debates regarding the legal position of music in Islam. The arguments for and against took place in the realm of politics and interpretation of religious law yet the influence of traditional expectations for gendered musical performance that had existed on the cultural landscape for millennia also contributed to the formation of a musical semiotics used by both sides.

In this article, I examine the representation of musicians in the early Islamic court in Baghdad from the perspective of select ninth-century Arabic texts. First, I begin with a summary of the gender roles and performance expectations for pre-Islamic court musicians and point to their continuation into the early Islamic courts. Then, I suggest how the figure of the musician became a key referent in the development of a musical semiotics used in medieval Islamic music discourse.