Striggio’s forty-part motet Ecce beatam lucem survives in a unique manuscript source, dated 1587, in the Ratsschulbibliothek in Zwickau. Its text, first published in 1595, formed part of a Pindaric ode written by the neo-Latin poet and Calvinist Paul Schede Melissus (1539–1602). A closer consideration of Melissus’ biography indicates that he probably wrote it after 1575, long after the wedding festivities with which the motet has habitually been associated (Florence, 1565; Munich, 1568). Its subject matter – a Calvinist vision of the New Jerusalem – also makes it an unlikely wedding text and inappropriate for Catholic festivities. Rather, it was probably used as the text of a contrafactum, for an as yet unidentified occasion, with which Striggio himself had little or no connection.

This article examines the Tractatus de musica of Jerome of Moray (‘de Moravia’), affirming his Scottish identity, as proposed by Michel Huglo in 1994. It argues that the Tractatus de musica presents an important overview of Parisian music theory in the thirteenth century, relating to both chant and mensurable music in that century, because it combines the views of several generations: the Positio discantus vulgaris, which he says was used ‘among the nations’; the De mensurabili musica of John of Garland, who corrected its deficiencies; and the treatises of Franco of Cologne and Petrus Picardus. It considers Jerome's career in three phases: his exposure to music and music theory in Scotland; his studies in Paris, most likely under John of Garland, perhaps at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame; and his involvement in the liturgical reforms within the Dominican Order, implemented by its Master, Humbert of Romans in 1256. Rather than assigning Franco's Ars cantus mensurabilis to 1280 (as proposed by Wolf Frobenius) and Jerome's Tractatus to sometime after this, I suggest that Jerome was exposed to John of Garland's teaching in the 1240s and that the Franconian system may have started to gain ground in the 1250s. Jerome compiled his Tractatus over a period of time, adding an excerpt about cosmic music from the commentary of Thomas Aquinas on Aristotle's De caelo perhaps as early as 1271 or 1272, in response to the criticisms of John of Garland and his followers being made by Johannes de Grocheio.

In the second half of the fourteenth century, the Italian music theorist Johannes Vetulus de Anagnia wrote a treatise named Liber de musica. Extraordinarily complex and replete with theological digressions, this work has to date remained little understood. Examining Liber de musica through the lenses of practice and philosophy sheds new light on this enigmatic text. Vetulus’s theory is in certain respects innovative, but in others it is conservative. Vetulus theorised a unique but impractical system of mensural divisions that synthesises and exhausts some of the central conceptual principles of contemporaneous performance. He makes sense of these divisions within a Platonist intellectual framework that reimagines Trinitarian theological concepts in a musical context. Approaching this treatise as far as possible on its own terms reveals that Vetulus developed a symbolic epistemology of music in which a mutual reciprocity could emerge between the tripartite structures of music, nature and the divine.

This article proposes a methodology for differentiating between scribal hands in square chant notation. Drawing on several Dominican chant books copied in thirteenth-century Paris, the methodology outlined here may also prove a useful starting point for approaching square chant notations from various other origins. Specifically, this approach highlights eight parameters that may be useful for identifying and distinguishing scribal hands in square chant notation, namely, by examining the forms of F-clefs, custodes, liquescent neume shapes, general neume shapes and/or note groupings, C-clefs, accidentals, hairline extensions and the general appearance of the notation. This methodology is used to identify the notators working within the chant books of the Dominican exemplar manuscript Rome, Santa Sabina, XIV L 1, demonstrating the presence of one main notator, an ‘overseer’ or corrector intervening across several parts of the manuscript to supply missing material, and a second corrector or user of the manuscript adding missing material on one folio only. Through such palaeographical study, it was possible to reveal the different roles of the scribes notating this manuscript, to hypothesise about the process by which the liturgical material within the manuscript was compiled and to identify a potential network of notators working in Dominican manuscripts in Paris in the third quarter of the thirteenth century.

William Herebert’s Middle English poems, which appear in his Commonplace Book (c. 1314), have been undervalued by scholars. Yet, far from being a lonely purveyor of an ungainly series of translations, Herebert instead was a skillful adapter of Latin hymns into dance songs. Echoing his contemporaries and following the example of St Francis, Herebert revised the forms of two Latin poems, ‘Gloria, laus et honor’ and ‘Popule meus, quid feci tibi’, into two English lyrics: ‘Wele, heriȝyng and worshype’ and ‘My volk, what habbe y do þe?’ In doing so, he dealt imaginatively with poetic form, liturgical content, concepts of time and matching words to music – and he ended up producing early examples of English carols. Herebert’s achievements in dance song demonstrate that the seemingly outrageous idea of the dancing friar is not as alien to religious devotions as one might expect. We conclude with speculations concerning the performance of Herebert’s songs.

This article presents, contextualises and analyses four bifolios of medieval polyphony (Stockholm Riksarkivet, fragments 535, 813 and 5786) probably copied in Northern France around 1300. These fragments – recording three-voice organa and Latin motets – feature two different non-rhythmic uses of red notation described in fourteenth-century theoretical treatises following Philippe de Vitry but never seen before in practice: an organum uses red ink to highlight ‘alien’ notes added to its chant foundation and a motet tenor to prompt octave transposition.

This article synthesises new and existing evidence for a transitional and still little-studied period in the history of Latin-texted polyphony. It makes the case for an apparent gap in evidence for polyphonic composition and circulation at the turn of the thirteenth century into the fourteenth, exploring the possible explanations for and ramifications of a lacuna in surviving sources around 1300 and proffering new insights into what has been lost.