A 1481 date for the manuscript Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, MS K. 1. 2 (hereafter Si), which contains almost ninety pieces of late fifteenth-century liturgical polyphony including works of Obrecht, Isaac and Mouton, has rested uneasily upon an argument from Sienese copying records. A fresh codicological analysis of this important source, including evidence of matching ‘twin’ watermark pairs in datable Tuscan archival documents, has yielded a new date and a new narrative for its compilation. The main corpus, in fact, is decades later than the fragmentary appendix containing works of Dufay and Josquin. The redating presented here has manifold implications for some of the most important composers of the late fifteenth century, and for peninsular patterns of musical transmission. A secure early date for the appendix copy of Josquin's Missa L'ami baudichon, for instance, enables a reassessment of that piece's transmission to sources as far away as Poland and Bohemia in the light of recent discoveries in Josquin's biography. My new date for Josquin's mass also confirms a case of Josquin emulation within another, anonymous mass in Si. The new dating further enables a reassessment of ModE M.1.13's authority as a source for one of Johannes Martini's masses, and the identification of a heretofore unknown local Sienese composer. Finally, the new narrative for the Siena choirbook may reveal Florence as a link in the transmission of repertory from Milan and Ferrara to Siena.

Among the manuscript fragments in the Archivio comunale of Sutri (Province of Viterbo), Italy, are four consecutive folios of an Old-Roman antiphoner of the later eleventh century. The two bifolios are now identified as fragments 141 (Frammenti teologici 40) and 141bis (Frammenti teologici 41). These fragments, which preserve music for the feasts of Sexagesima, Quinquagesima and Ash Wednesday, are remnants of what appears to be the oldest witness of Old-Roman music for the office. When added to the two surviving antiphoners (London, British Library, Add. MS 29988, of the twelfth century, and Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS San Pietro B 79, of the end of the twelfth century) and two recently discovered fragments (in Frosinone and Bologna), the Sutri fragments bring to five the number of Old-Roman antiphoners of which at least some evidence survives. It begins to appear that manuscripts of this music were once not so rare. The Sutri fragments show some unusual liturgical characteristics that provide new information on the Roman liturgy; I will discuss these aspects shortly.

On 15 June 1442, Frederick, the Habsburg Duke of Austria soon to be crowned King of the Romans, entered the city of Aachen amidst a notably diverse and sonorous cortège:

In the tenth century, when the earliest chant books were being compiled in the heart of the Carolingian Empire and polyphonic music was entering the realm of theoretical speculation in the anonymous writings of Musica enchiriadis and Scolica enchiriadis, organa were also being notated for performance outside music treatises. We would not know this, were it not for a two-voice organum on an antiphon for Saint Boniface written in the first decades of the tenth century on the last page of a long-neglected manuscript, now in the British Library. A second notated antiphon, Rex caelestium terrestrium, provides elements for a reconstruction of a further, ‘hidden’, organum. These newly identified organa shed light on a significant phase in Western music history, being the sole evidence from the tenth century of a polyphonic practice before the great eleventh-century collection of organa from Winchester.

In his first major published monograph, Music in the French Secular Theater, 1400–1550 (Cambridge, MA, 1963), Howard Mayer Brown skilfully plotted the development of musical practices in the traditions of farces, sotties, moralities and monologues until the middle of the sixteenth century, by which time the ‘influence of works from the ancient world and from Italy’ had turned the ‘current of educated opinion … against the older French forms’. Thus he chose to terminate his study just as the new forms of neo-classical comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy and pastorale were emerging, although he did allude fleetingly to the Protestant dramas of Louis des Masures in citing one of three cantiques from the Bergerie spirituelle (Geneva, 1566) as one of his two examples of ‘new music for the stage’. Des Masures's play is only one of a number of dramatic or quasi-dramatic pieces published with music as well as spoken text during the period 1550–1600, reflecting a fashion for new music specifically composed for the theatre. In the present paper I propose to examine this considerable repertory, which has largely escaped the attention of modern scholars.

The term ‘Old Beneventan’ describes the archaic non-Gregorian chant found chiefly in two eleventh-century Graduals in the chapter library at Benevento. This is perhaps in part a translation of Dom Hesbert's ‘Ancien rit bénéventain’, with a hint of analogy to the ‘Old Roman’ chant. The term means that this chant is ‘Old’, that is, that it pre-dates the introduction of Gregorian chant into southern Italy; and that it is ‘Beneventan’. But both words need to be evaluated carefully.

We know only two things with certainty about the life of Roger de Chabannes. He was a monk at the abbey of St Martial in Limoges by the year 1010, at which time he served as the teacher of his nephew, Adémar de Chabannes. And when he died, on 26 April 1025, he held the position of the abbey's cantor. Both pieces of information come to us from Adémar, monk at St Cybard in Angoulême, historian, homilist and tempestuous polemicist in the campaign to win recognition for St Martial as an apostle. Other evidence, which also may well originate from Adémar, attests to Roger's death date and office.

I. THE MUSIC: GALL-TO-GREG-TO-ROM

For archaeologists of plainchant - those who deal with the music before there are notational records - the focus has been on the repertories ROM-11 and GREG-8/10.Thanks to Susan Rankin and David Ganz for many improvements. Abbreviations for repertories: ROM = Old Roman; GREG = Gregorian; GALL = Gallican; MOZ = Old Hispanic or Mozarabic. Numerals indicate a century or range of centuries: GREG-8/10 = Gregorian recension, text witnesses of the late eighth century, as represented in R.-J. Hesbert, Antiphonale missarum sextuplex [hereafter AMS] (Brussels, 1935), with first musical witnesses of the tenth century, as in Graduale triplex, ed. M.-C. Billecocq and R. Fischer (Solesmes, 1979); ROM-8 = Old Roman states of the eighth century; ROM-9/11 = Old Roman states of the ninth through eleventh centuries, that of the eleventh century in Die Gesänge des altrömischen Graduale Vat. Lat. 5319, ed. B. Stäblein and M. Landwehr-Melnicki (Monumenta monodica medii aevi, 2; Kassel, 1970). Each represents a ‘Roman’ practice. ROM-11 appears in a handful of manuscripts from the region of Rome, dating from the eleventh through thirteenth centuries; the liturgical usage is Urban. GREG-8/10 appears in hundreds of manuscripts from all over Europe, with verbal texts reaching back to the late eighth century, and with neumatic notations to the late ninth. In liturgical and textual respects GREG is a near twin of ROM, yet it has clear marks of formulation in the Frankish north. In musical respects, what is most significant about the repertories is that they share certain amounts of modal-melodic substance, yet they differ markedly as to process, style and detail. It has been a major challenge to define those relationships and determine what they mean about earlier musical developments.D. Hiley, Western Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford, 1993) summarises earlier positions (pp. 561-2); recent book-length contributions include P. Bernard, Du chant romain au chant grégorien (Paris, 1996); M. Haas, Mündliche Überlieferung und altrömische Choral (Bern, 1997); T. Karp, Aspects of Orality and Formularity in Gregorian Chant (Evanston, 1998); J. W. McKinnon, The Advent Project: The Later Seventh-Century Creation of the Roman Mass Proper (Berkeley, 2000).

The papacy and cardinalate in the period between Innocent III (1198–1216) and Benedict XI (1033–1304) can be shown to have had a wide range of musical interests. Papal inventories, testamentary legacies, chronicles and understudied visual evidence allow the piecing together of a lively and wide-ranging concern with music, liturgy and performance. The development of polyphonic music, the growing popularity of bells, and a lively interest among artists in portraying liturgical ceremonies and musical performance at the behest of their ecclesiastical clientele allow us to form a far more nuanced picture of the musical life of thirteenth-century Rome.

François de Billon’s Fort inexpugnable de l’honneur du sexe feminin (1555) was among the most extensive contributions to the sixteenth-century polemic on the nature of women known as the querelle des femmes. In keeping with the military connotations of its title, Billon’s ‘impregnable fortress’ is an exercise in bellicose rhetoric; his sallies are illustrated with woodcuts of roaring lions and fire-spitting cannons to heighten the effect of bravado. In the section on women’s musical gifts, he vaunts the ‘angelic sweetness’ of the female singing voice, and claims that although male musicians more often win fame, women have always been better singers:

In [singing] nevertheless women have always been the very best. Whatever may be said by Sandrin, Arcadelt or Janequin, the most renowned musicians of Europe in our time, whom I would willingly ask, ‘Where is it that one can find sweetness of vocal harmony, in general, if not in the musical throat of Woman, even if she puts forth only a little warbling?’ And if they answered that in some men one finds more, could I not rightly reply, ‘What is the reason, my friends, that so few men of your profession are married and that you all flee marriage, if not that through propriety [honnesteté] you would be forced to bring your wives (instead of choirboys) into princely chambers to sing with you, or without you, which would be found so much sweeter than any childish voice? O what harmony, if you were all married in the normal fashion to beautiful women; if they were well instructed by you in the rules of music; and if in the aforementioned manner, you tuned yourselves well with them. The pleasure of listening to you would be double, the advantage triple, and thus, frequently nothing would be sung except in duo’.

In balades 27 and 38, Machaut likens the wounds suffered by the lover to those that result from the poisons of deadly beasts. He invokes animal imagery to depict the beloved and her behaviour: she encloses within her being monstrous beasts that repel and repulse the lover, causing him grievous bodily harm. In the course of both balades the deadly beasts transform into various allegorical characters that are personifications of secular vices. One of these characters, Refusal (‘Refus’), emerges as central. Machaut personifies the lady's rejection of the lover's advances (which he makes through words/music) as the courtly vice Refusal. In Balade 27, it is her sense organs that enact this refusal: her ears cannot hear him, her mouth rejects him, and her Look kills him. I explore the resonances of Machaut's sadistic and animalistic lady in two spheres: the courtly, where the obvious antecedents for Machaut's imagery are the courtly bestiaries; and the sacred, where parallels between Refusal and the deadly sins of pride and envy can be detected, as suggested by my interpretation of these two balades and some of Machaut's motets, and the links I set forth between these sins, vices, and the senses that partake in them.

Patri carissimo eidemque ingeniossimo, John Patrick Desmond (1943–2013)

A venerable form of petitionary prayer, the litany emerged as a key aural expression of Counter-Reformation Catholicism around the turn of the seventeenth century, particularly in the confessionally contested borderlands of the Holy Roman Empire. Its explicit projection of the dogma of sanctoral intercession, rejected soundly by Protestant theologians, helped to make the litany a flashpoint for religious controversy. Especially in the duchy of Bavaria, the northern bastion of the Counter-Reformation, the litany flourished in a wide variety of monophonic and polyphonic forms that reflected its fluid position on a spectrum between oral and written traditions. This essay explores the usage and significance of the litany in Counter-Reformation Germany, focusing especially upon the Thesaurus litaniarum (Treasury of Litanies, 1596) by Georg Victorinus, music director of the Munich Jesuits. Intimately connected with currents of Catholic reform in German-speaking lands, this great anthology illustrates the varied and creative ways in which composers responded to the litany’s distinctive ebb and flow of titles and petitions to holy intercessors.

This essay studies the role played by Marguerite de Valois in the cultural life of the French court from early childhood until her death in 1615. Trained to perform in public, Marguerite acquired languages and diplomatic skills, and cultivated music and dancing in particular. Her passion for dancing and the energy and mastery she displayed in performance is traced through the testimony of contemporary records (French, Italian and English), through her own recollections, and through a discussion of her patronage of musicians, poets and dancers.