39 - Sacred song in the fifteenth century: cantio, carol, lauda, Kirchenlied

Summary

This chapter describes a cluster of musico-poetic repertories under the generic title of "sacred song": repertories distinct from plainchant on the one hand, and from secular song on the other. Sacred song was flowering almost everywhere in fifteenth-century Europe. The varied repertories of devotional and ritual song would form a major component of that century's artistic heritage. Manuscripts from Bohemia and Moravia provide an almost unbroken overview of the development of the cantio in that area until the late sixteenth century. Major Bohemian collections compiled around 1480-1540 contain polyphonic motets and mass sections from the Franco-Netherlands repertory alongside native Latin motets in a traditional style, chorale settings, and monophonic sacred songs. The English fifteenth-century carol differs from all other repertories in being consistently polyphonic; its few monophonic specimens may be survivors of a fourteenth-century practice. The documented history of the Italian lauda begins in the thirteenth century with the foundation of urban lauda companies.