Margaret Bent

The Saxilby fragment

The two folios which are the subject of this study are the property of the vicar and churchwardens of the parish of St Botolph, Saxilby-with-Ingleby, some six miles west of the city of Lincoln. The leaves are of parchment, are adjacent and may once have been conjoint, but are now disjunct. The overall dimensions of each leaf are approximately 430 × 325 mm; each has four good margins, leaving a music area of 358 × 247 mm. Each side is ruled with twelve five-line staves in red ink, apparently without the use of a rastrum; the staves are a little less than 20 mm high. On all four sides each of the two voices was supplied with an initial letter executed in blue paint with red tracery. Each initial is a single staff in height, and is similar in style to the subsidiary capitals of Old Hall and many other English manuscripts of the fifteenth century. In its surviving state the manuscript has undergone a sad mutilation: a rectangle four staves deep has been cut away from the top left-hand corner of folio 1 v , removing the initial ‘E’ of the top voice complete with the red tracery trailing from it down the edges of the staves below. In so doing, the vandal also removed a good deal of music from both sides of the leaf.

A new canonic Gloria and the changing profile of Dunstaple

John Dunstaples reputation as the most famous English composer of the Middle Ages has stood almost unchallenged since his death. Two epitaphs attributed to one of his patrons, John Wheathamstead, Abbot of St Albans between 1420–40 and 1452–64, give him equal credit as a mathematician and astronomer (or rather, astrologer). Dunstaple was evidently proficient in the quadrivial arts of music, astronomy and mathematics (arithmetic and geometry), but only his musical activities have been thoroughly explored. At least two books that were in his library may provide hints about the level of his attainment in mathematics and astronomy. One is a fascicle within another volume that carries the often quoted ‘Iste libellus pertinebat Johanni Dunstaple cum duci Bedfordie musico’. The other and more extensive of the two manuscripts, Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MS 70, contains treatises on astronomy and astrology by standard authors in various hands. Some of these have what must be a scribal signature (often in the form ‘deo gratias quod Dunstaple’), apparently signalling his own hand for those treatises. If this is indeed the case, we have dozens of folios of closely written Dunstaple autograph and several signatures. His copy of the older astrological treatise by Bartholomew of Parma is copiously illustrated by excellent line-drawings of zodiacal signs and constellations. If these drawings are also in his hand (and they are harmonious with the surrounding script), we must add fine draughtsmanship to his known accomplishments.

Performative Rhetoric and Rhetoric as Validation

This paper explores parallels and differences between the status of verbal and musical texts with respect to content, grammar, and rhetoric. It considers the role that memory and personal apprenticeship played in the performance of unwritten or incompletely notated music, which was not necessarily ‘improvised’. Now we have only the notated texts, which has often obscured how composed music, written or not, was then inseparable from its now unrecoverable performative rhetoric, or actio. Fifteenth-century manuals not only on music but on painting and dance were self-consciously modelled on rhetorical treatises to establish their status as liberal arts.