Much of the current confusion regarding the character and chronological boundaries of the Renaissance arises from the fact that it has most commonly been regarded by specialists from the point of view of their own particular field of interest. What is needed at this point is, I think, a comprehensive interpretation, a synthesis that will include all aspects of Renaissance civilization, the economic, political, and social, as well as the intellectual and aesthetic. This is especially important for its bearing on the problem of causation, even in the most restricted fields. Each branch of culture may develop to a certain extent independently along lines dictated either by its own inner logic or by the contribution of individual genius, but the general direction it follows cannot be fully understood or explained without relating it to the total complex of contemporary civilization.

The Ritson MS (British Museum Add. MS 5665) preserves for us a choir repertory whose oldest layer is given over to 44 carols—Latin, English, and macaronic. Provisionally they may be dated from about the end of the second third of the fifteenth century. Together with other fifteenth century carol manuscripts they offer considerable support to Margit Sahlin's thesis (Etude sur la carole médiévale. Uppsala dissertation, 1940) that the carol became an ornament of the processional rites of the Catholic Church. As it is applied to England, her argument runs briefly as follows: The religious and didactic carol of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is a musical-literary species directly indebted to the liturgy in matters of both form and content. It had been adopted by the Church from popular usage in the fourteenth century, retaining the technique of the earlier dance-song which paralleled, in certain ways, that of responsorial chant.