Frank Dobbins in memoriam

In 1976 Louise Litterick proposed that Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys Library MS 1760 was originally prepared for Louis XII and Anne of Brittany of France but was gifted to Henry VIII of England in 1509. That the manuscript actually was prepared as a wedding gift from Louis to his third wife Mary Tudor in 1514, however, is indicated by its decorative and textual imagery, which mirrors the decoration of a book of hours given by Louis to Mary and the textual imagery used in her four royal entries. Analysis of the manuscript’s tabula and texts suggests that MS 1760 was planned by Louis’s chapelmaster Hilaire Bernonneau (d. 1524) at the king’s behest. The new theory elucidates the content and significance of Gascongne’s twelve-voice canon Ista est speciosa, which appeared beneath an original portrait of Mary Tudor and was intended to mirror the perfection of the Blessed Virgin and her ‘godchild’ Mary.

John Playford dominated the commercial music publishing trade of mid-seventeenth-century England, encouraging musical literacy and supplying beginner books for the growing domestic amateur musical class. Playford was clearly aware of the need to attract as many customers as possible in order to succeed in a commercial business; however, very little is known about his customers. This article identifies the contemporary audiences of seventeenth-century English printed music books, building on previous scholarship including Alec Hyatt King’s Some British Collectors of Music c. 1600–1900 (1963), and provides an initial record of provenance marks in surviving copies of the publications. Placing the printed book and its customer within the wider context of music-making and bookselling in seventeenth-century England develops our understanding of the social dimensions of the printed music trade, including dissemination and distribution networks.

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.

In German-speaking lands until the 1580s, Italian secular vocal music was mainly cultivated by a narrow elite of aristocrats and merchants who valued its exclusivity. Yet some German patriots – teachers, clergy and humanists – regarded such foreign imports as emasculating luxuries that would corrupt their national character. This article examines four collections of contrafacta of Italian villanellas and madrigals that were published in Erfurt and have been neglected by modern scholars: the Cantiones suavissimae (1576 and 1580), Primus liber suavissimas praestantissimorum nostrae aetatis artificum Italianorum cantilenas (1587) and Amorum filii Dei decades duae (1598). According to the prefatory material of these anthologies, their editors were motivated by a patriotic agenda of purifying Italian secular song and by a Lutheran belief in the intrinsic holiness of music. This article provides the first comprehensive identification of the originals of the contrafacta, showing that the latest Italian secular repertory travelled as speedily to Thuringian towns as to the better-known publishing centre of Nuremberg. The process of transformation in the contrafacta is discussed, including examples where church officials ruled that the change of text was insufficient to cleanse the tunes of their lascivious connotations.

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.