Appendix F - The mandore and the wire-strung gittern

Summary

There is a widespread and well-founded agreement amongst historians of musical instruments that French guiterne and its English derivative ‘gittern’ both denoted a pear-shaped, plucked and fretted instrument during the later Middle Ages, whose body, neck and peg-box were generally carved from a single block. The pictorial record of such instruments in English manuscript painting, sculpture and stained glass becomes somewhat thin and repetitive by about 1450–75, and we have already seen that a number of references to ‘gitterns’ from the reign of Henry VIII (d. 1547) concern banners or pennants, not musical instruments (Appendix A). It is significant in this context that the only fifteenth-century description of the medieval gittern by an informed observer, Johannes Tinctoris of Brabant, shows that it no longer commanded the respect of a trained musician, at least in its traditional form. Tinctoris, who knew the musical scene of Europe from Nivelles to Naples, describes the guiterra or ghiterne of the early 1480s as a much smaller version of the lute with the same shape, manner of stringing and ‘touch’ (contactum) as the larger instrument. He also reports that Catalan women played it to accompany their love songs, but that it had generally fallen out of use, ‘because of its thin sound’ (propter tenuem ejus sonum).

This explicit comment, and the apparent fading of the iconographical record, might lead one to suppose that the medieval gittern became obsolete, or at least unfashionable, towards 1500 and perhaps on a European scale. That would be a fair assumption, providing we recognise that the medieval gittern was destined to enjoy a long and continuous history after 1500 in a significantly modified form. This was largely because makers began to crossbreed it with the lute at precisely the time when it might otherwise have lost favour and declined into oblivion. The ‘quintern’ depicted by Sebastian Virdung in Musica getutscht (1511), Sig. Bij, for example, has a body built from ribs like a lute, not carved from a solid in the manner of the two extant medieval gitterns; it also has a fixed bridge, like a lute, as opposed to the floating bridge, with strings running down to one or more hitch-pins, that characterise many of the gitterns shown in later medieval art.