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.

The beginning of the second half of the fifteenth century marks the appearance of Jean de Ockeghem at the French royal court. Apparently he was the first composer to be involved in the chapel of Charles VII, at the time when this institution, which had previously included only a few chaplains, began to expand. We owe our knowledge of Ockeghem's biography to three particular studies. The first is that of Michel Brenet (Marie Bobillier), whose ‘biographical study following unpublished documents’ laid the foundations for subsequent research on the royal chapel of the Valois monarchs. The second is an article by Jean-Michel Vaccaro published nearly thirty years ago, which reveals the precise date of the composer's death.

Only in the last few years has detailed research into Umbrian music, particularly that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, begun to appear, and until now there has been no study devoted entirely to music publishing in the region. At present we know of thirty-two books of music printed at Perugia, Assisi and Orvieto between 1577 and 1650, but there may well have been more. Since some are known only indirectly, from vague references found in intermediate sources, it is reasonable to assume that other books have been lost without trace. Our knowledge of the publishers of this music is fragmentary and incomplete, and the same often applies to the various composers, so that the historian is confronted with a picture rendered unusually indistinct by absences and losses. However, such information as we do possess, together with the surviving printed material, offers valuable evidence for the composition and circulation of music in the towns of Umbria during this period.

The chapel of St Mark's in Venice occupied a prominent place in the musical life of most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so that a Venetian writer could justly remark: ‘The chapel of these Lords is thought to be among the best in the world, and [singers] have come to serve from France and Spain.’ Yet, in spite of its importance in the history of Western music, our knowledge of its development and organisation is far from complete and contains large gaps. It will suffice to point out that we know a lot more about the Gabrielis – organists – than we do about Zarlino in his capacity as maestro and composer, that the first modern study of the chapel, barely eight years old, is the recent Vespers at St Mark's by James Moore, and that the venerable Storia della musica sacra nella già cappella ducale di S. Marco in Venezia by Francesco Caffi, the only comprehensive study of the subject, has, in default of more modern work, been reprinted several times in recent years. The situation is gradually improving, with several new studies on music in Venice and at St Mark's already available or in preparation, but one of the issues not yet treated adequately is the question of patronage at St Mark's and of the social and economic status of its singers.

Recent research on the library of Johann Caspar Trost the Elder, organist in Halberstadt, has led to the identification of a manuscript with two unknown treatises on musica poetica, one a lost treatise by Johann Hermann Schein and the other an unknown treatise by Michael Altenburg. Together they offer fresh insights into the learning and teaching of music in the early modern period. The books once owned by Trost also have close connections to his personal and professional life. This article situates the newly discovered manuscript in the framework of book history and Trost’s biography, and discusses the two treatises against the background of contemporary books of musical instruction (Calvisius, Lippius, or Finolt). The historical context of the manuscript, its theoretical sources and its origins all serve to contribute to and further the current understanding of musical education in early modern central Germany. An edition of the treatises is provided.

The existence of an unsuspected and valuable set of Anglican Services and anthems first became generally known when they were catalogued at Sotheby's London Salerooms in 1969. It may seem remarkable that a major source of pre-Restoration church music should have escaped the puplic gaze for some 350 years: it is perhaps just as surprising that so rich a repertory should have originated from Chirk Castle, a remote spot close to the Welsh border in the county of Clwyd (formerly Denbighsihire).

In 1571 and 1581, the Ferrarese cleric-musician Don Lodovico Agostini published two books each containing, amongst other pieces, a group of madrigals cryptically notated as musical puzzles, advertised as enigmi musicali on their title pages. The enigmi are aptly named; no doubt the composer would have delighted in the doppiosenso, or double entendre, inherent in the term, for they are musical riddles in both a formal and a metaphorical sense. Their content and their very existence in print pose an intriguing array of questions beyond the obvious enquiries regarding the identifying characteristics of the genre and the identity of their composer. Certainly, the enigmi musicali invite speculation about the nature of music as a pastime in late sixteenth-century courtly Italy. Agostini's enigmi musicali are secular, polyphonic vocal works, but they cannot be classed simply as madrigals, nor are they representative of so-called lighter genres of villanelle or canzonette. They exist somewhere on the fringe of the repertoire, with a specific character that reaches in towards the (to us) more familiar forms of Italian secular music, but that also reaches out to and overlaps with other spheres of play and philosophical engagement. So where may the enigmi be placed within the wider compass of early modern social recreation, and what factors might have motivated their composition and their use? Furthermore, if we accept them as evidence of some sort of collective diversion, how are they intended to amuse – are they humorous or cerebral, or both?

The medieval sequence was one of the most distinguished artistic achievements of the Carolingian age. In creating the genre, Frankish poet–musicians moulded text and music into a new and extraordinary synthesis, and created a composition that stood proudly apart from the Gregorian Propers that surrounded it in the Mass. The new style must have spread quickly throughout the Frankish Empire, eventually reaching well beyond its borders. Pieces from the earliest centres travelled far and wide and inspired new works at every turn — faithful imitations or adaptations, as well as works in which the style was consciously modified to reflect the different aesthetics of distant realms. The legacy of surviving sources, however, does not permit the details of these early developments to be traced; even the precise dates and places where the sequence was first cultivated remain obscure. The earliest surviving sources from most regions give access to only relatively mature stages of development, which already reveal a complex web of interrelationships that has been difficult to untangle.

Devotion to the Virgin of Seven Sorrows flourished in the Low Countries in the late fifteenth century during a period of recovery from civil war, famine and economic instability. The Burgundian-Habsburg court took a special interest in this popular lay movement and, in an unusual move, sponsored a competition to generate a liturgy – a plainchant office and mass – for the growing devotion. This article identifies new sources for the text and music of the Seven Sorrows liturgy and ties them to the court’s competition. An examination of the surviving office and mass demonstrates the texts’ dependence on an earlier Marian celebration of the Compassion of the Virgin. The reworking of this older devotion reveals that the plainchant competition and the creation of the new Seven Sorrows liturgy were part of the court’s political agenda of restoring peace and unity to their territories.

The naming of John Dowland as ‘Author’ on the title page of his publication The First Booke of Songes or Ayres (1597) suggests a proprietary relationship between the composer and his work. This proprietary relationship is, perhaps, reinforced with the alignment of Dowland’s intellectual activities as ‘author’ with the notions of ‘composition’ and ‘invention’ in the same passage. All three terms could be used by the late sixteenth century to refer to notions of creativity, individual intellectual labour or origination. While many early examples of the use of ‘author’ refer specifically to God or Christ as creator, such as Chaucer’s declaration that ‘The auctour of matrimonye is Christ’, by the sixteenth century it was increasingly used to refer to an individual originator of intellectual or artistic creation closer to the modern sense of the word. Its sixteenth-century usage is, for instance, reflected in the title ‘A tretys, excerpte of diverse labores of auctores’, or as in a reference in 1509 to ‘The noble actor plinius’. Likewise, ‘invent’ or ‘inventor’ could be used to refer to the process of individual intellectual creation, exemplified by its use in 1576 ‘Your brain or your wit, and your pen, the one to invent and devise, the other to write’, while ‘compose’ could mean to make, to compose in words, ‘to write as author’ or, more specifically, to write music.

O du armer Judas, was hastu getan?

Das du deinen Herren also verrathen han,

Darumb mustu leiden in der helle pein

Lucifers gesellen mustu ewig sein,

Kyrieleison.ldquo;O wretched Judas, what have you done? / You have betrayed your Lord! / For that you must suffer torment in Hell, / You must be Lucifer's companion eternally. / Kyrie eleison”. Text from P. Wackernagel, Das deutsche Kirchenlied von der ältesten Zeit bis zum Anfang des XVII. Jahrhunderts, 5 vols. (Leipzig, 1864-77; repr. Hildesheim, 1964), ii, pp. 615-18; translation mine.

Rooted in Catholic folk piety, the song ‘O du armer Judas’ became one of the most common expressions of religious and political belief in the popular culture of sixteenth-century Germany. The Judaslied was the ideal vehicle for musical propaganda in the Reformation, and it turned the Catholic notion of the eternally damned betrayer of Christ on its ear. Protestant polemicists rewrote the song to equate Catholic authorities with Judas, and their contrafacta forged unbreakable links between the Judaslied melody and the idea of Catholic corruption. The very strong political associations the song would come to have with the Lutheran movement might well have been reason enough for a composer to avoid setting such a controversial work polyphonically, but at least four chose it as a model.Other than Senfl, Arnold von Bruck, Matthias Eckel and Cosmas Alder also arranged the Judaslied polyphonically, and a number of anonymous settings exist. See Das Tenorlied: Mehrstimmige Lieder in deutschen Quellen, 1450-1580, ed. N. Böker-Heil, H. Heckmann and I. Kindermann, 3 vols. (Catalogus musicus, 9-11; Kassel, 1979-86), iii, p. 105. Among these was Ludwig Senfl, court composer to the Catholic Wittelsbach dukes in Bavaria. Senfl's setting raises interesting questions about his position at the court, his music and religious toleration in the early days of the Reformation.

This article presents descriptions of four newly discovered sources of English late-medieval polyphony. Three concern music for the celebration of Mass; the fourth expands the known repertory of Latin and vernacular carols.

On 11 November 1417, the election at the Council of Constance (1414–18) of Oddo Colonna as Pope Martin V brought to an end a period of almost forty years of instability and crisis within the Church, which had begun with the outbreak of the Schism in 1378. After his consecration, the new pope set out to return to Rome, intending to re-establish there the Holy See, while the Council continued. Martin V entered Rome in September 1420, after travelling through Geneva, Pavia, Mantua, Milan and Florence. In the latter city he resided for almost two years, from 26 February 1419 to 9 September 1420. It was most likely during the pope's residence there that an Italian student in law, Antonio Baldana, wrote and dedicated to him a peculiar work: a narrative of the Schism written in the form of prophecy, in a mixture of prose and verse, Latin and Italian, and accompanied by thirty watercolour illustrations. The only known surviving version of this work is contained in a manuscript now preserved in Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, as MS Parmense 1194. The manuscript has been studied primarily for its iconography, while its musical implications, which form the subject of the present study, have so far passed unnoticed. In fact, as we shall see, Baldana's work is also designed as a framework for a discussion encompassing the disciplines of trivium and quadrivium – a small encyclopedia, where a distinctive connection is drawn between rhetoric, astrology and music.

This study springs from the conviction that it is time to enlarge our understanding of the canzone villanesca's genesis and evolution by engaging concepts from two related approaches, namely, genre criticism and speech-act theory. Heretofore, when adopting the formalist approach to genre, I defined the villanesca in terms of its ‘outer form’ (metre and structure), thereby reinforcing claims by Gennaro Monti and Alfred Einstein that the canzone villanesca is essentially a strambotto (or ottava rima) transformed by the addition of a refrain after each hendecasyllabic couplet. However, it has become increasingly clear that when intrinsic qualities like attitude, tone and use-value are addressed, the result is a far more comprehensive view of the changes that the villanesca experienced during the initial phrase of its development (1537–57), when Neapolitan songwriters reproduced or varied the generic expectations of their audiences.

This essay stems from the recent discovery of the cantus firmus of the motet O Maria et Elizabeth by Gilbert Banaster (d. 1487). The chant, which will be discussed in detail, is the respond Regnum mundi. Banaster's motet is known to the scholarly community on account of its unusual text, which concludes with a prayer for an unspecified king. It will be argued that Banaster chose Regnum mundi as his cantus firmus on account of its thematic relevance to the motet text, and that in so doing he collaborated in the appropriation of devotional means to serve dynastic ends.