In the past years a number of manuscripts and small fragments have come to light which enlarge in various degrees our knowledge of 15th-century music in England. It may be useful to give a brief annotated list:

1. 1. British Museum, Add. MS 40011 B. Flyleaves from a Memorandum Book of Fountains Abbey containing three- and four-part settings of the Mass, and a few motets some of which are incomplete. The fragment is valuable especially for the concordances with the Old Hall MS.

2. 2. British Museum, Egerton MS 3307. Thematic catalogue: Schofield, The Musical Quarterly XXXII (1946), 509. This manuscript is one of the most important recent additions to English music of the Renaissance. It transmits a series of sacred compositions for Holy Week, and, in a separate part, carols with English words and Latin cantilenas for two and three voices. Of particular interest are a three-voice composition of the old Goliard song O potores exquisiti and a four-part motet Cantemus Domino socie, based in its text on the beginning of an elegy by Sedulius.

The bibliography published annually in the April issue of Studies in Philology since 1917, is well known to all students of the subject. So well known, in fact, that, in the opinion of the editor of the Renaissance News, it is in danger of being taken for granted, and he has therefore commissioned me to review ‘Recent Literature of the Renaissance.’ As a grateful user of the bibliography, I am glad to testify to what everybody knows, that it has saved me incalculable trouble and drudgery and led me to some of the most interesting data and fertile ideas which I have absorbed in twenty-five years. As the compilers of such a bibliography labor toilsomely for the most meager reward, our gratitude cannot be too often or too strongly expressed.

Two types of secular vocal music were cultivated in Spain during the sixteenth century: unaccompanied polyphonic songs and solo songs with instrumental accompaniment. The compositions for unaccompanied voices have been preserved principally in musical anthologies, the Cancioneros. Many remain anonymous, but recent investigations have disclosed new names and made possible new and more complete attributions. A number of the composers were chiefly celebrated for their religious works. Usually they were attached to the Royal Chapels in the Peninsula itself or in the Kingdom of Naples. Later in the century Spanish composers lived much abroad holding posts at various Italian courts or at the Imperial Court in Vienna. The great trio, Morales, Guerrero, Victoria wrote little or no secular music.

A considerable literature of solo songs with instrumental accompaniment has been preserved in the very numerous collections of music for the vihuela. This instrument, shaped very like the guitar, with narrow waist and flat back, was designed, however, for the performance of complicated contrapuntal music such as was played more generally at that time on the lute.

The genesis of Rabelais' conception of progress illustrates the coming to terms of two divergent points of view in the sixteenth century, the humanists' belief in the past and the artisans' belief in the future. That a belief in the progress of knowledge played a significant role in the thought of certain fifteenth and sixteenth century precursors of the scientific movement has been well established. It seems equally certain that the idea of progress, though increasingly common among men who were engaged in the practical arts, had little appeal for most of the humanists of the time of Erasmus and before, preoccupied as they were with classical learning as the ne plus ultra. By the end of the sixteenth century the progressive view, which had received its main impetus from the side of the technological writers, had become part of the intellectual equipment of many classically educated men, and the scientific movement, heralded by Bacon and exemplified by Gilbert and Galileo, was in full swing.

The land of Italy is itself a garden.' From this opening statement of a book which is itself a garden, Mrs. Kennedy proceeds to survey the work of masters from Giotto to Belotto for their interest in lawns, sweet herbs and blossoms. A development from lectures prepared for Toledo garden clubs, the book generously shares a sensitive scholar's appreciation of details which as often as not go unnoticed in even the better known paintings of the Italian Renaissance. It is the work of a penetrating critic and historian on a sort of sabbatical, and the result is properly refreshing.

If we investigate Elizabethan thought on the nature of human progress only in terms of J. B. Bury's strict definition of that idea as “a theory which involves a synthesis of the past and a prophecy of the future,” the results are likely to be no more fruitful than Bury found them. By these terms, a complete grasp of the idea of progress requires “an interpretation of history which regards men as slowly advancing … in a definite and desirable direction, and infers that this progress will continue indefinitely.”

Admittedly many Elizabethan concepts were unfavorable to the idea of progress. The Fall of Man accounted not only for original sin but also for intellectual and physical imperfections. It was a common belief, supported by the prophecies of Daniel and other religious teachings, that the end of the world was imminent.

The title “Música, Instrumentos y Danzas en las Obras de Cervantes,” (Music, Instruments and Dances in the Works of Cervantes) by Adolfo Salazar, [published in two parts in Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, Mexico, January to March and April to June, 1948] gives only a hint of the wealth of information and material which the author has brought together on music and musical practices in Spain during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The discussion also leads to a consideration of the earlier sources and later developments of instruments and musical and dance forms and practices. This brief summary can only indicate the items of most importance for the general history of music.

The weakest spot in the attempt to define, describe, and understand the Renaissance is our failure to consider causes. This failure is largely due to a failure of definition in time. The beginning has been placed anywhere between the Sixteenth and the Fourteenth Centuries. Most of the causes which have been suggested (the fall of Constantinople, the invention of printing, the discovery of America) are Fifteenth Century phenomena. But it is generally agreed that humanism began with Petrarch. I think we must ask ourselves why the Latin classics, which had been lying about in neglected corners of libraries, should suddenly become the most valuable things in the world. It is not enough to attribute this new enthusiasm to “fashion.” Men turn eagerly to new ideas chiefly when they are dissatisfied with the old; and there were good reasons for dissatisfaction in Italy in Petrarch's day.

Italian architecture of the sixteenth century is a field where our knowledge has outdistanced our concepts. We are in firm possession of many facts, but we cannot agree as to how they should be interpreted. What is called for is a fresh conceptual framework into which the facts can be fitted. Such a framework cannot be derived from a simple contrast of the Renaissance and the Baroque, nor can it be made to depend on a single catch-all title like Mannerism. It must have three principle characteristics. It must be based on an aesthetic analysis of the monuments. It must include all the principle groups of buildings. Finally it must bear some reasonable relationship to the general view one holds of Italian sixteenth century history as a whole.