Conference Agenda

Of the extant songbooks from circa 1500, two were owned by Florentine women and possibly used throughout their lives. One is an upright parchment manuscript displaying the arms of Margherita Castellani. The other less ostentatious oblong paper manuscript was Marietta Pugi’s, daughter of a family of notaries living near Santa Croce. Both manuscripts contain a core repertoire of well-known chansons, mixed with songs in other languages, reflecting the multicultural urban soundscape of Florence. While the pieces in these books have been studied for the purpose of tracing the influence of male composers, no one has considered them as objects of material culture embedded in the musical lives of Florentine women. How can looking at these collections through the lens of women’s experiences inform our understanding of female musicality in these years and how can consideration of the particularities of women’s lives help us better understand these sources?

Marietta’s songbook is particularly rich, featuring phonetic approaches to French and Flemish songs, playful Italian pieces, and clear signs of use including a wine stain across an opening featuring a popular canto carnascialesco. As a young Florentine woman, Marietta would likely hear and performatively embody these voices of distant lands as reflections of the cosmopolitan environment surrounding her. Previous scholarship has viewed these sources as unfinished, but I argue that they were conceived as living documents—each features an initial section that was copied at one time, followed by blank pre-ruled music staves to be filled with each woman’s personal collection. Marietta’s repertoire reflects Giovanni Mazzuoli da Strada’s reliance on women for his song text anthologies. On the other hand, Margherita’s highly ornate but textless chansonnier, begins with repertoire popular around the time of her marriage but ends with portions of a 3-voice Mass for high voices. This might seem odd, but if we map it onto her life, this turn to sacred music suggests that Margherita may have entered a religious community when widowed in 1489. If she brought her songbook with her, it was clearly an important marker of her identity as a musician throughout her life, from betrothal to cloister.

That the name “Theinred of Dover” is not generally known to musicology is baffling. This English music theorist, dated to c.1130–50 (Snyder, 2006), anticipated by almost two centuries most of the major innovations in pitch in the fourteenth century. He asserted that thirds were consonant, that consonance is a spectrum subject to the judgment of the ear, that scales could contain multiple flats and sharps, and used extreme chromaticism (up to A#). His revolutionary perspectives defied what Pythagoras had dictated and challenged the foundations of medieval harmony. That these ideas appear out of nowhere in the twelfth century has made contextualization problematic.

This paper challenges the current views to argue that Theinred worked c.1340, as one among many theorists in England. A close examination of the paleography and bibliographic history of the unique source of Theinred’s work (Oxford, Bodley 842) along with new archival finds, removes previous arguments against dating Theinred after 1200, which were based on trends in names, notational reforms, and manuscript transmission that can no longer be sustained. The impossibility of an earlier date can be demonstrated through his heretofore overlooked citations and invocations of mid-to-late-thirteenth and early fourteenth-century philosophers, including his clear use of Campanus of Novara's c.1255 translation of Euclid's Elements, and a new contextualization of what we know about the history of harmonic theory in England c.1300 through newly available editions (Hochadel, 2006). I will demonstrate how Theinred's argumentation about consonance allowed the 81:64 ditone to be substituted with the 5:4 major third–since the difference could not be distinguished by the ear–and builds on the reasoning of Walter (Odington) of Evesham Abbey (c.1300), a theory also explored by the anonymous author in the Commentum Oxoniense (c.1350). Such arguments were driven by new innovations in English singing favoring the third, as witnessed in accounts from Anonymous IV (c. 1280) and Johannes Boen (c. 1350). Positioned as a contemporary to ongoing debates in the fourteenth century, not as an anomaly in the twelfth, Theinred’s work as a product of c.1340 sheds new light on the widespread application of logic and on innovative thought in medieval harmony.

Amongst the treasures lost in 1870 in the siege of Strasbourg during the Franco-Prussian War was a manuscript of late medieval music with the call numbers Strasbourg, Bibliothèque Municipale 222 C. 22. Because the only known records of the codex are from before its destruction, one today might treat the source with some caution. It is not surprising that several studies of the Strasbourg source describe it negatively as having “many doubtful attributions.” There have been many scholars who spent their careers seeking the authors of these works. In the case of the Strasbourg source, these modern attributions are heavily favored towards the “great names” of French composers Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut, even though those attributions are mostly incorrect.

It is not just doubtful attributions that make the Strasbourg Codex seem unreliable. There lingers greater doubt about the trustworthiness of the source specifically. Because there is distrust about the reliability of the source in part it is possible that this source has been dismissed as a whole. But what would happen if we trusted this source more? Is there more to be learned of the Strasbourg Codex, musical activity in the upper-Rhine region in the late Middle Ages, or of musical style in the early 15th century much more broadly understood? All too commonly music of the Middle Ages is described as one of centers with peripheries and the narrative emphasizes a teleological path passing an artistic baton from great man to great man. In a time that is aching to hear a more diverse and inclusive history, it is imperative to not pass over the others—the fragments, the unica, the anonymous, and the otherwise unknown—but instead work to decenter a canon for medieval music that is not readily or easily acknowledged. In this paper I will explore some of the “otherwise unknowns” to demonstrate how they might play a greater role in the narrative of music from the late 14th century from a region less commonly investigated than the French repertoire of the era.