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Cantus figuratus and monastic re-figuration in the late medieval Veneto
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 April 2019
Abstract
In 1409 Ludovico Barbo arrived at the monastery of Santa Giustina in Padua, intent on its reformation. Since the late fourteenth century, the scriptorium at Santa Giustina had produced some of the most significant collections of polyphonic music to survive from the period, specialising in copying the avant-garde repertories of the Ars nova. Yet the reforms Barbo sought to introduce – reforms based on ideals he and a cohort of Venetians had been living out on the island of S. Giorgio in Alga – eschewed outward ostentation, and centred on prayerful engagement with the scene of Christ's Passion. Barbo's initiatives would seem at odds with the tradition of secular polyphony cultivated at the monastery in the years before his arrival. Official documents from the reform prohibit the practice of cantus figuratus and paint a picture of a uniformly spare music aesthetic.
Manuscript and material evidence from Santa Giustina and dependent houses tells a different story, and suggests that communities found use for the monastery's musical past within the reformed practice of prayer and meditation. Vestiges of this past appear in the most unlikely of places: the Good Friday rituals that Barbo himself worked to strip of polyphonic accoutrement. The efforts of individual monks, musicians and scribes – here Rolando da Casale, whose musical expertise Barbo enlisted in the copying of new liturgical manuscripts, and Johannes Preottonus – emerge as telling examples of the ways in which institutional histories come under the pressure of their individual actors.
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References
1 ‘O quam saepe qui divinis occupantur in laudibus, solo assistunt corpore, & tanquam garrulae aves sine interiore sensu emittunt verba! … Proinde divina carmina attenta sunt intentione ruminanda, atque alacritate spiritus pronuncianda.’ Lorenzo Giustiniani, De disciplina et perfectione monasticae conversationis, quoted from idem, Sancti Laurentii Justiniani proto-patriarchae veneti opera omnia, 2 vols. (Florence, 1982), 1: 139.
2 Giustiniani's opposition between birdsong and song cum interiore sensu partakes in a tradition that viewed birdsong as a challenge to the boundary between rational and irrational sound. In Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 2007), Elizabeth Eva Leach demonstrates the extent to which the case of birdsong inflected moral-aesthetic judgements about the role of beauty and pleasure in music. Though Leach's repertorial focus lies with polyphony and not with plainchant, her observation that for the late medieval musician ‘correct judgment will rest with an internal perception, that is, a correct judgment of the intention of sound’ (238, italics mine), resonates with Giustiniani's construal of the interior sensus (which we could translate with Leach's ‘internal perception’) as an orientation of mind.
3 In his foundational study on medieval monastic culture, Leclercq describes how ‘the vocabulary [for monastic spiritual practice] is borrowed from eating, from digestion, and from the particular form of digestion belonging to ruminants. For this reason, reading and meditation are sometimes described by the very expressive word ruminatio.’ Leclerq, Jean, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Misrahi, Catharine (New York, 1982), 73Google Scholar.
4 Mary Carruthers has pointed out that rumination ‘is perhaps too peaceful and too introspective in its modern connotations’ and rather that ‘[the monk] scares himself, he grieves himself, he shames himself: this is literally compunctio cordis, wounding oneself with the puncti of text and picture’. Carruthers, Mary, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge, 1998), 105Google Scholar.
5 Carruthers's contributions to the study of memoria in the Middle Ages play out across two volumes: The Book of Memory: A Study in Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990) and The Craft of Thought, though the latter focuses more intently on the place of memoria within medieval monastic culture.
6 Aristotle's notion of the ‘mental picture’ (phantasm or eikon) is prominent in both De anima and De memoria et reminiscentia. Take, for instance, his pronouncement that ‘without an image thinking is impossible’ in De anima, 450a, trans. J.I. Beare, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ, 1984). Elizabeth Sears discusses the consequences of Aristotle's sense hierarchy within late medieval creative practice in ‘Sensory Perception and its Metaphors in the Time of Richard of Fournival’, in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. William F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge, 1993), 17–39.
7 For Rolando's musical and monastic career before and after the reforms, see Giulio Cattin, ‘Ricerche sulla musica a S. Giustina di Padova all'inizio del 1. Quattrocento: Il copista Rolando da Casale. Nuovi frammenti musicali nell'archivio di Stato’, Annales Musicologiques, 7 (1977), 17–41 and, more recently, Francesco G.B. Trolese, ‘Il monastero di Santa Giustina di Padova e le sue attività scrittorie’, in I frammenti musicali padovani tra Santa Giustina e la diffusione della musica in Europa, ed. Francesco Facchin and Pietro Gnan (Padua, 2006), 52–6. For his hand and its link to the Paduan fragments, see Michael Scott Cuthbert's ‘Trecento Fragments and Polyphony Beyond the Codex’, Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University (2006), 204–30.
8 ‘Item quod committatur d. Rolando quod notet [h]ymnos, Kirieleison, Gloria et omnia que cantantur uniformiter.’ Congregationis S. Iustinae de Padua O. S. B. Ordinationes Capitulorum Generalium – Parte I (1424–1474) (Montecassino, 1939), 38.
9 On the documents Rolando is known to have penned for the Benedictine monasteries, see Cattin, ‘Ricerche sulla musica a S. Giustina di Padova’, 24–7.
10 I borrow the term ‘notational aesthetics’ from Emily Zazulia, who demonstrates the concept's pertinence to late medieval and Renaissance compositional practice in ‘Verbal Canons and Notational Complexity in Fifteenth-Century Music’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania (2012), esp. ch. 3.
11 Giorgio Cracco offers a nuanced account of the aristocratic attitudes held by the society's Venetian patrician founders, the predominating members of its ranks, in his introduction to Sancti Laurentii Justiniani: Opera Omnia, 2 vols. (Venice, 1982). Complicating Carlo Ginzburg's impression of the Algan reforms as ‘un'iniziativa aristocratica e socialmente chiusa’ (‘Folklore, magia, religione’, in Storia d'Italia, vol. 1, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti (Turin, 1972), 603–76), Cracco points out that members of lower rank along with non-Venetians also participated in the spiritual reforms of the community, albeit on a more modest level.
12 Humanist Bernardo Giustiniani, nephew to Lorenzo, furnished the Venetian saint's vita in Opusculum de vita Beati Laurentii Patriarchae Venetiarum (Venice, 1475). For Lorenzo's influence on the canons of S. Giorgio in Alga and on the spirituality of fourteenth-century Venice more broadly, see Silvio Tramontin, ‘La cultura monastica del quattrocento dal primo patriarca Lorenzo Giustiniani ai Camaldolesi Paolo Giustiniani e Pietro Quirini’, in Storia della cultura veneta: dal primo quattrocento al Concilio di Trento, ed. Girolamo Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore Stocchi (Venice, 1981), 431–57.
13 Cracco gives the history of the early expansion of the reforms on Alga into the Veneto in ‘“Angelica Societas”: Alle origini dei canonici secolari di San Giorgio in Alga’, in La Chiesa di Venezia tra medioevo ed età moderna, ed. Giovanni Vian (Venice, 1989), 101–3. In many ways the Algan initiatives to re-found existing religious institutions throughout northern Italy served as an unofficial arm of the Republic's influence in the terraferma.
14 Paolo Sambin sees the move into the monastery of S. Giovanni Decollato as ‘un ponte ideale gettato tra San Giorgio in Alga e S. Giustina’. Paolo Sambin, ‘Marginalia su Lodovico Barbo’, Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia, 9 (1955), 249–58, at 251.
15 Padua maintained a strong and mutually fruitful relationship with the canons on S. Giorgio in Alga. Pietro Marcello, the native Venetian installed as bishop of Padua after the Republic's conquest of the city, assisted this relationship considerably. In 1420, for instance, Marcello invited a group of canons from S. Giorgio in Alga to ‘restore’ the Benedictine convent of S. Giacomo in Monselice. Expelling the Benedictine nuns from the site, Marcello praised the members of S. Giorgio in Alga, who ‘quibus in locis, quenam monasteria tum longa vetustate demissa, tum prepositorum obmissione dirupta reparaverint, officient et inhabitent’. Cracco, ‘“Angelica societas”’, 103.
16 The Carrara ruled Padua from 1318 to 1405, with a brief intermission from 1328 to 1337 during which the city was in the hands of the Scala family of Verona. Barry Collett describes how the fourteenth-century appointment of abbots in commendam in this region led to the economic abuse and spiritual decline of its monasteries, where ‘the system was being used to grant financial reward to curial officials or to sons of powerful families’ (as is clearly the case with Andrea's appointment). Barry Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation: The Congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua (Oxford, 1985), 1–3.
17 Cattin was the first scholar to carefully consider the fragments that together comprise these collections (‘Ricerche sulla musica a S. Giustina di Padova’). Through close attention to paleographic and repertorial connections, Cuthbert has largely resolved, or at least greatly clarified, the complex relationships that exist among the fragments. Cuthbert, ‘Trecento Fragments’; idem, ‘Groups and Projects among the Paduan polyphonic sources’, in I frammenti musicali padovani, 183–214.
18 A tradition of musical innovation, as we shall see, in some ways continued at S. Giustina from Carrara to Venetian rule. Cuthbert has rightly cautioned against trying to pin output from the S. Giustina scriptorium to the period before or after Barbo's reforms. Cuthbert, ‘Trecento Fragments’, 95.
19 Cuthbert, ‘Trecento Fragments’, 117; Lawrence Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (New York, 2012), 65, 344.
20 For a useful look into the intellectual and artistic commitments of Carrarese humanism, see Andrea Bolland, ‘Art and Humanism in Early Renaissance Padua: Cennini, Vergerio, and Petrarch on Imitation’, Renaissance Quarterly, 49 (1996), 469–87, along with Ronald G. Witt, ‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Brill, 2000), 81–116. Jason Stoessel has greatly clarified the role of musicians, theorists and composers in Padua's humanist networks in a series of essays on the topic: ‘Music and Moral Philosophy in Early Fifteenth-Century Padua’, in idem (ed.), Identity and Locality in Early European Music, 1028–1740 (Farnham, 2009), 107–27; ‘Climbing Mount Ventoux: The Contest/Context of Scholasticism and Humanism in Early Fifteenth-Century Paduan Music Theory and Practice’, Intellectual History Review, 27 (2017), 317–22.
21 Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation, 1–4.
22 It is important to note that Barbo's reforms were never directly at odds with the reigning intellectual outlooks in Padua; he sought instead to exploit the erudition of the society's members and turn their learning towards a more stimulating spiritual practice. Collett has explained how for Barbo, ‘the influx of students, both Italian and foreign, [that] made the university one of the most cosmopolitan and intellectually vigorous in Europe [… was] a fruitful field for Barbo, whose intellect and piety made a powerful impact upon many students, and of the 200 monks who were professed within the first ten years, most were drawn from the university, including many foreign students’. Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation, 4.
23 Pietro Marcello, bishop of Padua, lauded the canons as ‘viros quidem scientia praeditos’; see Cracco, ‘La fondazione dei canonici secolari di San Giorgio in Alga’, Rivista di storia della chiesa in Italia, 13 (1959), 70–81, at 70. Giorgio Picasso discusses Barbo's scholarly inclinations in ‘Gli studi nella riforma di Ludovico Barbo’, Los monjes y los estudios (Abadia di Pblet, 1968), 303–10.
24 Congregationis S. Iustinae de Padua O.S.B. Ordinationes Capitulorum Generalium – Parte I (1424–74), ed. Tommaso Leccisotti (Miscellanea Cassinese 16) (Montecassino, 1939), 242–3: ‘Hortamur et admonemus, ut patres et fratres plus operam dent lectioni sacre scripture quam Ciceronis, poetarum et litterarum grecarum. Monemus etiam ut cantum figuratum omnino dimittant.’
25 Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation, 28–54. A fascinating inventory of the S. Giustina library's vast and diverse collection of books survives in Padua, Museo Civico, MS 229. A critical edition of the source can be found in Giovanna Cantoni Alzati, La biblioteca di S. Giustina di Padova, Libri e cultura presso i benedettini padovani in età umanistica (Padua, 1982).
26 Cracco's introduction to Sancti Laurentii Justiniani: Opera Omnia provides an overview of Giustiniani's interpretation of the medieval notion of silentium.
27 Cracco, ‘La fondazione dei canonici secolari di S. Giorgio in Alga’, 81.
28 Ildelfonso Tassi clarifies Barbo's synthesis of Franciscan mysticism and the Devotio moderna in his Ludovico Barbo (1381–1443) (Rome, 1952), especially in ‘Parte seconda: La spiritualità’, 97–139.
29 ‘Haec autem passionis Christi continua meditatio mentem elevabit.’ Barbo, De incendio divini amoris, in Opera Omnia, 2: 460.
30 Barbo wrote the Forma orationis et meditationis while serving as abbot at S. Giustina. The most thorough discussion of the context for its production is still Tassi, Ludovico Barbo, esp. 97–139. Tassi furnishes an edition of the Forma orationis et meditationis at 143–52.
31 Tassi, Ludovico Barbo, 102–3: ‘Conceditur et placet ut petitur, et moderate statuant circa hoc, quia observantibus regulam grave est totum officium cantare.’
32 The injunction occurs in the context of the Declaratorium regule, the interpretation of the rule of St Benedict drawn up by Barbo and others. See Cattin, ‘Tradizione e tendenze innovatrici nella normative e nella pratica liturgico-musicale della Congregazione di S. Giustina’, Benedictina, 17 (1970), 254–99, at 259.
33 Zazulia uncovers the inseparability of rhythm and shape in mensural theory, and points to the special inherence of both in the term figura. Zazulia, ‘Verbal Canons and Notational Complexity in Fifteenth-Century Music’, 92–102.
34 Erich Auerbach's essay ‘Figura’, in idem, Neue Dantestudien (Istanbul, 1944), 11–71, still provides the richest appraisal of the shifting meaning of the term from antiquity through the Middle Ages. For the term's adoption in thirteenth-century theories of musical time see Charles Atkinson, ‘Franco of Cologne on the Rhythm of Organum Purum’, Early Music History, 9 (1990), 1–26, at 14.
35 For instance, in Cicero's De oratore, a work of great influence on Western medieval monasticism, we find: ‘It has been sagaciously discerned by Simonides or else discovered by some other person, that the most complete pictures are formed in our minds of the things that have been conveyed to them and imprinted on them by the senses, but that the keenest of all our senses is the sense of sight, and that consequently perceptions received by the ears or by reflexion can be most easily retained in the mind if they are also conveyed to our minds by the meditation of the eyes, with the result that things not seen and not lying in the field of visual discernment are earmarked by a sort of outline and shape [figura] so that we keep hold of as it were by an act of sight things that we can scarcely embrace by an act of thought.’ Translation from Karol Berger, ‘The Hand and the Art of Memory’, Musica Disciplina, 35 (1981), 87–120, at 114, who poses the relationship this text bears to the use of visual aids for musical memory.
36 Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 95.
37 Ibid.
38 Tassi, Ludovico Barbo, 103.
39 It bears stating that the colophon dating the Rituale canonicorum S. Georgii in Alga places it half a century after Barbo and Giustiniani's deaths. Even so, there is a good deal of (albeit complex) evidence to suggest that its repertories circulated in Venice throughout the second half of the fifteenth century, and represent an important vein in the region's music-liturgical tradition. Much of this evidence centres on the body of laments studied here. Prospects for connecting the region's lament tradition are proposed in Giovanni Cremaschi, ‘“Planctus Mariae”: Nuovi testi inediti’, Aevum, 29 (1955), 393–468, and, more recently, in Giulio Cattin, ‘Santa Giustina, gli ordini mendicanti e la musica’, in I frammenti musicali padovani, 31–8.
40 For more on the manuscript's production and its intended audience, see Moro and Cattin, ‘Il codice 359 del Seminario di Padova (anno 1505). Canti liturgici a due voci e laude dei canonici di San Giorgio in Alga’, in Contributi per la storia della musica a Padova, ed. Giulio Cattin and Antonio Lovato (Padua, 1993), 141–89, at 142.
41 Ibid., 168.
42 Other psalms change according to hour and weekday, and on feast days they can be replaced by specially chosen psalms that bear a stronger thematic relationship to the feast and its meanings.
43 Digital images of the manuscript are now available through the PHAIDRA platform of the University of Padua: http://phaidra.cab.unipd.it/o:169739.
44 ‘L'intonazione musicale poi si distingue dai precedenti esempi a due voci per una maggiore complessità ritmico-melodica, rilevabile anche a prima vista a causa del frequente impiego di ligaturae … di note breves, semibreves e del punctum augmentationis. Ad un esame più approfondito, tuttavia, ci si avvede che siamo davanti a una imitazione ancora sommaria della scrittura polifonica mensurale; la notazione rivela numerose imprecisioni che rendono impossibile una trascrizione ritmicamente corretta, salvo a intervenire con emendazioni frequenti.’ Moro and Cattin, ‘Il codice 359 del Seminario di Padova’, 170.
With regard to another Good Friday lament included in Pad 359, the processional ‘Heu, heu domine’, Cattin (ibid., 161) has noted its ‘carattere pseudo-mensurale’, which is ‘riducibile a misura soltanto a prezzo di numerosi emendamenti’.
45 Leo Treitler, ‘Cantus Planus Binatim in Italy and the Question of Oral and Written Tradition in General’, in Le polifonie primitive in Friuli e in Europa: Atti del congresso internazionale Cividale del Friuli, 22–24 agosto 1980, ed. Cesare Corsi and Pierluigi Petrobelli (Rome, 1989), 145–61, at 152.
46 Treitler, ibid., references Pirrotta's ‘Church Polyphony Apropos of a New Fragment at Folino’, in Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, ed. Harold Powers (Princeton, NJ, 1968), 113–26.
47 Virginia Newes discusses the various problems with the Pad A transmission in her ‘Writing, Reading and Memorizing: The Transmission and Resolution of Retrograde Canons from the 14th and Early 15th Centuries’, Early Music, 18 (1990), 218–34, at 224–7.
48 Ibid., 226.
49 Tassi, Ludovico Barbo, 102–3.
50 Ibid., 103–4.
51 Wash 171 is the only source for Preottonus's biography. He is otherwise unknown to history. In the incipit to John Hothby's De arte contrapuncti (fol. 81r), Preottonus claims a first-hand meeting with the English theorist, allowing Benjamin Brand to infer some of the biographical circumstances of both in ‘A Medieval Scholasticus and Renaissance Choirmaster: A Portrait of John Hothby at Lucca,’ Renaissance Quarterly, 63 (2010), 754–806.
52 See, for instance, Cattin, Giulio, ‘Polifonia Quattrocentesca Italiana nel Codice Washington, Library of Congress, ML 171 J 6’, Quadrivium, 9 (1968), 87–102Google Scholar.
53 ‘è anche facile rilevare che i suoi interessi o le sue preferenze andavano a musiche connesse con i riti della Settimana Santa’. Ibid., 101.
54 Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 160.
55 For a broader investigation of the medieval planctus tradition to which Cum autem was indebted, see Sandro Sticca, The Planctus Mariae in the Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages, trans. Joseph R. Berrigan (Athens, GA, 1988).
56 Elżbieta Witkowska-Zaremba, ‘Music between Quadrivium and Ars Canendi: Musica speculativa by Johannes de Muris and its Reception in Central and East-Central Europe’, Cantus Planus IV: Pécs (1990), 119–26.
57 Giuliano di Bacco accounts for the Wash 171 transmission within its wider circulation in De Muris e gli altri: Sulla tradizione di un trattato trecentesco di contrappunto (Lucca, 1996), 208–21. The fact that all fourteen manuscripts transmitting the work are of Italian origin, and most of these copied (as is the case with Wash 171) during the second half of the fifteenth century, makes the attribution unlikely. For a history of the (mis)attribution, see Lawrence Gushee et al., ‘Muris, Johannes de’, in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. More recently, Karen Desmond has argued for the inadequacy of straightforward notions of authorship and attribution as they come to bear on the Ars nova theory ‘complex’ to which both the Ars contrapuncti and Notitia artis musicae belonged. Desmond, Karen, ‘Texts in Play: The Ars Nova and its Hypertexts’, Musica Disciplina, 57 (2012), 81–153Google Scholar. She usefully proposes the hypertext paradigm as a structure for understanding the complex relationships that existed among co-circulating ars nova treatises such as those found in Wash 171 (85).
58 Tanay, Dorit, Noting Music, Marking Culture: The Intellectual Context of Rhythmic Notation, 1250–1400 (Holzgerlingen, 1999), 56–63Google Scholar.
59 Anna Maria Busse Berger discusses the musical implications of medieval methods of pedagogy that prioritised the exhaustive memorisation of multiple solutions, rather than the mastery of abstract rules in Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley, CA, 2005), 115–18. Both the structure of the Ars contrapuncti and Preottonus's extension of that structure reflect the disposition that Busse Berger describes.
60 Ibid.
61 On the Sanctus and Agnus Dei, F. Alberto Gallo reports: ‘nella struttura di questi due pezzi risulta particularmente evidente lo strettissimo legame che in questo tipo di composizione intercorre tra la melodia liturgica e la sua veste polifonica. Ogniqualvolta infatti il tenor presenta ripetizioni di un motivo, anche il cantus viene ripetuto sempre identico.’ Of the three Benedicamus settings, Gallo identifies the first as ‘costituito dalla attuale melodia In festis Solemnibus in I Vespris’ and the second ‘dalla melodia della stessa attuale messa IV cui appartengono i precedenti Sanctus e Agnus Dei’. The tenor of the third Benedicamus is unknown. Gallo, ‘“Cantus planus binatim”: Polifonia primitiva in fonti tardive: Firenze, BN, II XI 18; Washington, LC, ML 171 J 6; Firenze, BN, Pal. 472’, Quadrivium, 7 (1966), 79–89, at 86.
62 I refer here only to the dots of division used in the final melisma. The dots used over the first half of that word are dots of addition.
63 Tassi, Ludovico Barbo, 149.
64 Ibid., 151.
65 Stoessel, ‘Climbing Mount Ventoux’, 318–21.
66 Chandra Mukerji gives books pride of place in her analysis of the transformations wrought by (and to) material culture in the modern age, locating Renaissance humanism as an important point of origin for these changes. Mukerji, Chandra, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York, 1983)Google Scholar. Sarah Kyle's recent Medicine and Humanism in Late Medieval Italy: The Carrara Herbal in Padua (Routledge, 2017) is a fascinating tour of early fifteenth-century humanism in Padua, taken through the life of a single book and its makers, owners and readers. See especially p. 67 for the humanist commodification of manuscript luxury.
67 An avid disciple of the movement, Niccolò di Prussia bridges the generation between Barbo and Preottonus; he joined the congregation in 1414, was named prior of S. Fortunato di Bassano in 1431, and served as the congregation's historian until his death in 1456. Tassi, Ludovico Barbo, 50.
68 Bernardo Pez, Thesaurus Anedoctorum novissimus: seu Veterum monumentorum (Augsburg, 1721), 2.3, col. 315–17. Tassi, Ludovico Barbo, 128, dates the anecdote to the earliest reform’s period, placing it somewhere before 1418.
69 Berger was the first to draw attention to the connections between the Ratio paschalis and Guidonian hand in a brief but instructive excursus on the computus in ‘The Hand and the Art of Memory’, Musica Disciplina, 35 (1981), 105–11, pointing out the obvious but until then unobserved fact that both devices relied on the nineteen places on the left hand, which could be made available either for calculating the date of Easter or for representing the gamut. Berger acknowledges that his digression into the topic ‘should by no means be taken to exhaust the diverse ways in which the hand was used by the computists’ (109). Preottonus's inclusion of the Ratio paschalis in Wash 171 suggests another form of use, albeit a highly personal and idiosyncratic one.
70 Leclerq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, 237.
71 See Borst, Arno, Computus: Zeit und Zahl in der Geschichte Europas (Berlin, 1990), 31–7Google Scholar. Richard Crocker has pointed out that the Carolingian calendrical project occurred largely at the same time, and within the same monastic milieu as the standardisation of the musical scale, noting the ‘striking parallel between the problem of establishing a standard calendar out of all the conflicting methods inherited from antiquity and the problem of establishing a standard scale’ and that, ‘in the 7th- and 8th-century monastery, these problems lay on the desk of the same man – the cantor-teacher-librarian’. Crocker, Richard, ‘Hermann's Major Sixth’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 25 (1972), 19–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 17.
72 Examples of common patterns are described by Karl Mütz in his commentary to late medieval calendrical treatises in Computus chirometralis: Spätmittelalterliches Lehrbuch für Kalenderrechnung, lateinisch und deutsch, mit Kommentar (DRW-Verlag, 2003), esp. 96, 98–9, 103–4, 126.
73 Another of his musical hands (fol. 80v) – rendered in watercolor – includes naturalistic details of a sleeve, framing a veined, flesh-coloured hand with fingernails.
74 Seminal in this regard is Busse Berger's Medieval Music and the Art of Memory which, taking seriously the importance of memoria (a cultural practice adjacent to but fundamentally distinct from ‘orality’) in medieval music pedagogy and composition, largely shifted the terms of debate about music transmission in the Middle Ages.
75 Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 11–12, sees this dual function of memory – as both the archive for and the architect of thought – reflected in the fact that ‘the Latin word inventio gave rise to two separate words in modern English. One is our word “invention,” meaning the “creation of something new” (or at least different) … [The other] is “inventory”.’ She clarifies the crucial co-dependence of these two senses in its monastic usage, in which ‘having “inventory” is a requirement for “invention”’.