Guillaume de Machaut's motet no. 15 is structured, from a literary point of view, around an opposition fundamental to the late medieval courtly tradition: that between two key personification characters, Amours and Faux Semblant. This opposition is introduced as the first words of the triplum (‘Amours qui a le pouoir’) are sung against those of the motetus (‘Faus Samblant m'a deceü’).

Kevin Brownlee's essay is a welcome addition to current studies that apply literary, textual and historical insights to fourteenth-century motets. The opportunity to comment on his paper before publication stimulated these observations; he graciously agreed that I should offer them as a coda.

Early Italian opera with its diverse roots, streching into the history of music, Classical and Renaissance literature, and the culture of the late Cinquecento, continues to attract historians of culture and musicologists. If one only glances over the work done in this area during the last twenty-five or so years one cannot fail to be impressed by the important writings on early opera by Nino Pirrotta, on the Florentine Camerata by Claude Palisca, on the Classical literary tradition in the early librettos by F. W. Sternfeld and on early Mantuan opera by Iain Fenlon. We also owe a detailed account of the first performance of Peri's and Caccini's Euridice to Claude Palisca, and a study of Peri's Euridice to Tim Carter. In the latter two studies the stress was on the final result of the collaboration between Ottavio Rinuccini, Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini. It seems, however, that a detailed look at one of the components, Rinuccini's dramatic poem Euridice, may offer some valuable insights into the very foundation of Peri's and Caccini's completed artistic effort and also throw new light on some aspects of Striggio's Orfeo.

David S. Chambers's provocative study of the cardinalate in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is rich in implications for music historians. A document of December 1509 suggests that at that time a cardinal's household averaged 144 familiares, and the 1526 census revealed similar figures. Moreover, the corporate income of the College of Cardinals had been regulated since 1289 by a Bull of that year that decreed that a half of certain items of papal revenue was to be divided among cardinals resident in Rome, although the actual amounts that individual cardinals received fluctuated in response to changes in the size of the college. There were other sources of income: Roman residents were entitled to the revenue of their ‘title’ church, and those few who held office in the Roman bureaucracy commanded extraordinary salaries. For cardinals with musical interests, the institutional and economic conditions necessary to sustain a musical establishment therefore existed, and despite the relative absence of information on such establishments, we may assume that there were singers and instrumentalists among the familiares of many cardinals' households.

The brief life of the madrigal comedy spans the forty-year period from 1590 to 1630. Coming at the end of the sixteenth century, the genre marked the decline of the polyphonic madrigal style and heralded the evolution of secular vocal music's emphasis on the dramatic. As a genre, the madrigal comedy is not well known, and its designation can lead to confusion, because the term refers to collections of compositions that need not consist of madrigals or by themselves form comedies. Nevertheless it is a term that retains some usefulness in isolating a body of works from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that share common elements. Not until the most recent edition of Grove's Dictionary was there an entry under the heading ‘Madrigal Comedy’; earlier editions had described such works as madrigal operas, clearly an even more problematic term. The brief life of the genre – from Orazio Vecchi's Selva di varia recreatione of 1590 to Banchieri's last publication, the Trattenimenti da villa of 1630 – as well as the variety of types of composition and of musical style to be found in these collections, and the fact that there are so few of them, make it particularly difficult to define more narrowly or more precisely.

Perhaps the best-known songs of Antoine Busnoys are those whose texts conceal in acrostics or puns some form of the name ‘Jacqueline d'Aqueville’ (for the song texts and translations see Appendix 1).The first letters in each line of A vous sans autre (no. 2) and Je ne puis vivre ainsi toujours (no. 3) yield the acrostics ‘A Iaqveljne’ and ‘Jaqueljne d'Aqvevjle’ respectively; the first line of A que ville est abhominable (no. 4) makes a pun on the surname ‘Aqueville’; and the incipit of Ja que lui ne si actende (no. 1) forms an ambiguous series of monosyllables that can also be read as the name ‘Jaqueline’.

‘This little book has verses of composed modulamen, so that he who wishes to be retentive may hold on to his breath.’ With this elegiac distich Notker Balbulus concluded the preface dedicating his Liber ymnorum to Liutward, Bishop of Vercelli, abbot of Bobbio, archchaplain and chancellor to the then emperor, Charles the Fat. The collection of sequences must have been sent to Liutward during 884, since by December of that year Notker had broken off work on his Metrum de vita sancti Galli, mentioned in the preface to the Liber ymnorum as in the process of preparation. The genesis of the book of sequences can be traced farther back: Notker tells in his preface how, on showing verses to his teacher Iso, corrections were proposed. Later he presented some ‘little verses’ to his teacher Marcellus (the Irish monk Moengal) who ‘with joy’ collected them on parchment scrolls (rotulae) and gave them to his students to sing. Marcellus died at St Gallen in 871, Iso in the same year at the monastery of Moutier-Grandval, where he had been sent to teach some time previously. Many of the ‘versus modulaminis apti’ must have been composed already by 871.

In 1449, the records of the church of Our Lady at Antwerp mention a new singer, Petrus de Domaro (see Figure 1). He does not reappear in the accounts of 1450, and those of the subsequent years are all lost. Musical sources and treatises from the 1460s to 80s call him, with remarkable consistency, P[etrus] de Domarto, and reveal that he was an internationally famous composer in the third quarter of the fifteenth century.