One of the greatest scourges of the later medieval period was plague. While there is a considerable scholarly literature tracing the impact of the dread disease on literature and art, the impermanence of performance has rendered the extension of such studies to the field of music problematic. These problems are to some extent surmountable in studying the fifteenth-century hymn Stella celi extirpavit, a Marian invocation unequivocally phrased as a plea for deliverance from illness. In this essay, it is proposed that the Stella celi is representative of the beliefs and skills shared by a broad spectrum of late medieval society in the shadow of the plague. Analysis of musical and textual features, and the contexts of performance, further suggest links with the artistic and intellectual concerns of the Franciscan Order, which may have thus enabled otherwise ephemeral music to be preserved as an enduring response to epidemic calamity.

This study focuses on the ritual ‘conservatism’ of Henry VIII's Reformation through a new look at biblical exegeses of the period dealing with sacred music. Accordingly, it reconsiders the one extant passage of rhetoric to come from the Henrician regime in support of traditional church polyphony, as found in A Book of Ceremonies to be Used in the Church of England, c.1540. Examining the document's genesis, editorial history and ultimate suppression by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, it is shown that Bishop Richard Sampson, Dean of the Chapel Royal (1522–40), was responsible for the original drafting of the musical paragraph. Beginning with Sampson's printed commentaries on the Psalms and on the Epistles of St Paul, the literary precedents and historical continuities upon which Sampson's topos in Ceremonies was founded are traced in detail. Identified through recurring patterns of scriptural and patristic citation, and understood via transhistorical shifts in the meaning of certain key words (e.g. iubilare), this new perspective clarifies important origins of the English church's musical ‘traditionalism’ on the eve of the Reformation. Moreover, it reveals a precise species of exegetical method – anagogy – as the literary vehicle through which influential clergy were able to justify expansions and elaborations of musical practice in the Western Church from the high Middle Ages to the Reformation.

Jacques de Liège was the first theorist to use the word cadentia in relation to harmonic theory, preceding later such uses, as far as survivals attest, by a century and a half. The concept he developed under this term (set out in Speculum musicae, IV. l) has been connected in recent times to ideas in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century discant theory now related to the notion of directed progression. While there are linguistic similarities in Jacques's exposition to that of this (mostly later) theory, there are also important discrepancies in the concept's content; and there is an ideological anomaly in viewing Jacques as the exponent of an important idea of Ars nova harmonic theory. This article proposes a different reading of the concept, one congruent with Jacques's conservative intellectual stance. It identifies two contrasting, though complementary, aspects within it, and examines the role of an expression of approximation (ea, quae prope sunt, sunt quasi idem) whose ultimate significance remains uncertain. What emerges clearly, however, is that Jacques regarded cadentia as a process whereby imperfect concords were redeemed for perfection, so that their presence in polyphonic music might be tolerable in an aesthetics of retrospection. His account of polyphony draws upon an established idea in mensural theory dating back at least to John of Garland; and it contrasts significantly with the contemporaneous but more modern account of Marchetto of Padua's Lucidarium.

The German singer, composer and writer Johannes von Soest (1448–1506), also referred to as Steinwart or Steinwert, is the author of a vernacular autobiography in verse. One of the very few such documents written by a musician, it gives a highly personal insight into his career, which extended from his training as a chorister in Soest to the ducal chapel in Cleves and afterwards to Bruges (in the company of two unnamed English musicians), Aardenburg (Overijssel), Maastricht, possibly Cologne, Kassel and finally Heidelberg, where he was appointed as Kapellmeister. He subsequently decided to become a physician. The article includes a complete transcription of the text, whose original was destroyed during the Second World War, but has been preserved in Johann Carl von Fichard's rare edition of 1811, and a translation of the sections of musical interest. In an introduction his training and career choices are discussed, and his observations concerning musical practice are analysed.

In his chorale partita Auf meinen lieben Gott (BuxWV 179) Dieterich Buxtehude combines the (sacred) genre of the chorale with the (secular) genre of a dance suite by modelling the variations of the partita on popular dances. This essay explores the Sitz im Leben of the composition and shows that it was part of a larger trend to turn hymn settings into keyboard pieces that borrowed stylistic features from contemporary dances. At the same time, the choice of the hymn has to be understood within the context of contemporary piety and the ars moriendi in particular. Both aspects converge in the musical and religious practices of the educated middle class in the second half of the seventeenth century in northern Germany.

With the restoration of the Seville diocese in 1248, its organisation followed the model established by other Castilian cathedral chapters. Seville Cathedral's symbolic importance and the wealth created by its endowments resulted in a flourishing development of worship, in which music played a key role. The ritual space in the Mozarabic cathedral was radically transformed with the construction of the Gothic building over a period of almost a hundred years, from 1434 to 1517. In tandem with this architectural programme, the cathedral's musical resources also underwent transformation, being adapted according to changing aesthetic considerations, liturgical modifications and new spatial and acoustical demands. The city of Seville periodically welcomed the court, with the monarch and the royal household residing for extended sojourns in the Alcázar, which was renovated by Pedro I in the fourteenth century. These royal visits favoured musical exchange with the royal chapels, especially during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel. Seville became the paradigm for the consolidation and standardisation witnessed during the fifteenth century throughout the ecclesiastical institutions of Castile and Aragon. The direct consequence of this reforming impulse was an exponential increase in the number of composers active in this environment, and the amount of polyphonic repertory created through church patronage in both the institutional and private spheres, as well as the increase in the use of that polyphony in liturgical and devotional ceremony.

A substantial collection of Cinque- and Seicento prints lies hidden in the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica in Bologna. Practically unknown to scholars, at 274 titles it is among the largest collections dating from the Renaissance. The fortunate series of events that account for its survival are retraced, beginning with its formation c. 1580 and its purchase by Padre Giambattista Martini (1706–84) from the Pagliarini booksellers in Rome with the aid of Girolamo Chiti, and ending with its partial dispersion in the nineteenth century. A complete index of the collection is included, together with a list of the unica.