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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2008
Despite their intriguing testimony to the vagaries of musical life in late medieval England, relatively little attention has been given by musicologists and historians of religion to the wealth of commentary on liturgical and secular music penned by the followers of the Oxford heretic John Wyclif. In a brief mention of this material in The Premature Reformation, her magisterial study of Wyclif and the Lollards, Anne Hudson suggests that the Lollards’ suspicion of musical display reflected their more general hostility towards the decoration of churches.
1 See the transcript of an untitled paper delivered by Frank Lloyd Harrison at a symposium on ‘Critical Years in European Musical History’ at the 1967 meeting of the International Musicological Society, printed in Report of the Tenth Congress, Ljubljana 1967, ed. Cvetko, Dragotin (Ljubljana, 1970), esp. 70–2Google Scholar; andBowers's, Roger discussion in his doctoral thesis, ‘Choral Institutions within the English Church: Their Constitution and Development 1340–1500’, Ph.D. diss., University of East Anglia (1975), 4001–009c [sic]Google Scholar. The passages cited by Harrison, and Bowers, are all taken from four treatises edited by Matthew, F. D. in The English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted, Early English Text Society, os, no. 74 (London, 1880).Google Scholar While Harrison repeated Matthew's (erroneous) attribution of these works to Wyclif himself, Bowers was more cautious, following the suggestions of several more recent scholars of Lollardy that these vernacular treatises are most probably the work of Wyclif's followers. A systematic survey of dozens of Lollard writings on music is included in a related essay (currently in progress), ‘Lollards, Lancastrians, and the Liturgical Culture of Late-Medieval England’, which situates this material within the wider cultural conflict between Lollardy and orthodoxy that emerged shortly after 1400 with the promulgation of the De heretico comburendo statute and the censorious enactment of Archbishop Arundel's Constitutions of 1409. Examining the intimate relationship between cultural patronage and the suppression of dissent by the Lancastrian kings and upper nobility, the essay seeks to modify the account presented in Nicholas Watson's influential article, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel's Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum, 70 (1995), 822–64. While literary scholars have long recognized the self-consciously 'derivative' nature of much of this period's literature (attributed by Watson in large part to orthodox censorship of vernacular writing), it was of course the same period that witnessed what musicologists have long regarded as England's musical apogee (for a recent and authoritative statement, see Caldwell, John, The Oxford History of English Music, vol. 1 [Oxford, 1991], 108–10).Google Scholar I argue that a compelling explanation for the remarkable dissimilarities between literary and musical production in fifteenth-century England lies precisely in the widely divergent effects of orthodox suppression of Lollardy upon vernacular writers and liturgical composers.
2 Hudson, Anne, The Premature Reformation (Oxford, 1988), 322.Google Scholar Following Hudson (2–4), I will be using the terms ‘Lollard’ and ‘Wycliffite’ interchangeably.
3 Edited from the polemical works in British Library, MS Additional 24202, fols. 26–28v, in Hudson, , Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Cambridge, 1978), 86.Google Scholar
4 As Hudson herself has suggested elsewhere; see her comments in Two Wycliffite Texts, ed. Hudson, , EETS, os, no. 301 (Oxford, 1993), 123n.Google Scholar
5 See ‘The Testimony of William Thorpe’, ed. Hudson, , EETS, 66.Google Scholar
6 The Lanterne of Lizt, ed. Swinburn, Lilian M., EETS, os, no. 151 (London, 1917), 58–9.Google Scholar
7 This is not to say that such communities were in fact returning to traditional beliefs and practices in any meaningful way; as Brian Stock puts it, ‘all dissident movements, whether heretical or reformist, are contemporaneous phenomena, no matter how they historicize their origins’, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Toronto, 1983), 101.
8 See Nolcken, Christina von, The Middle English Translation of the ‘Rosarium Theologie’ (Heidelberg, 1979) [hereafter Rosarium].Google Scholar
9 Carruthers, Mary, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), 174.Google Scholar
10 See Carruthers's discussion in Ibid, 174–86.
11 See Richard Rouse and Mary Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia, and Sermons: Studies on the ‘Manipulus florum’ of Thomas of Ireland (Toronto, 1979), 3–4.
11 See Rouse, Richard and Rouse, Mary, Preachers, Florilegia, and Sermons: Studies on the 'Manipulus florum' of Thomas of Ireland (Toronto, 1979), 3–4.Google Scholar
12 In addition to Rouse and Rouse (cited above, n. 11) and Carruthers (cited above, n. 9), see especially Olsen, Birger Munk, ‘Les Classiques Latins dans les Florilèges Médiévaux anterieurs au Xllle siècle’, Revue d'histoire des Textes, 9 (1979), 47–121.Google Scholar
13 See Campbell, P. G. C., L'épitre d'othéa: Etude sure les sources de Christine de Pisan (Paris, 1924)Google Scholar and Bühler, C. F., ‘The Fleurs de toutes vertus and Christine de Pisan's L'épitre d'othéa’, PMLA, 62 (1947), 32–4;Google Scholar both cited in Rouse and Rouse (see n.ll), 213–14.
14 Page, Christopher, ‘Reading and Reminiscence: Tinctoris on the Beauty of Music’, journal of the American Musicological Society, 49 (1996), 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 Ibid, 13–14.
16 Ibid, 14.
17 Ibid, 13–15.
18 The Berkeley Manuscript: University of California Music Library, MS. 744, ed. and trans. Ellsworth, Oliver B. (Lincoln, Nebr., 1984), 186, trans. 187:Google Scholar ‘Therefore, I who was fed with milk have fed them also with milk, but now that I have been refreshed with solid food, I desire that the lovers of this skill be refreshed with solid food, clarifying (as well as I can) the practice of the illustrious doctors of the church (Ignatius, Gregory, and Ambrose) and inserting some things from others consonant with these or perhaps taken from them’.
19 On this title and its musical metaphor, see Kuttner's, Stephan now-classic essay, Harmony from Dissonance: An Interpretation of Medieval Canon Law, Wimmer Lecture 10 (Latrobe, Perm., 1960).Google Scholar
20 Carruthers, Book of Memory, esp. 174–9.
21 Page, ‘Reading and Reminiscence’, 5.
22 On the abbreviation process see von Nolcken's introduction in Rosarium, 25–9; on the date and authorship of the Floretum, see 29–33.
23 See the evidence presented in Ibid, 46–51.
24 Ibid, 9.
25 See, for example, Opus Evangelicum part 2 c. 6: ‘Videtur istum sanctum [Chrysostom] parum vel nichil commendare cantum organicum vel subtilem sed pocius condempnare, quia distrahit a cogitacione mentali supracelestium tam cantantem quam eciam populum audientem; et cum non fundatur in fide scripture sed evidencius eius oppositum, videtur quod iste modus fuit ex cautela diaboli introductus’, ed. Iohann Loserth (London, 1895), 261–2.
26 For the date of this manuscript and a description of its contents, see Madan, Falconer and Craster, H. H. E., A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, vol. 2 pt. 1 (Oxford, 1922), 384–5.Google Scholar This collection has also been noted by Page, The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France 1100–1300 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 237–8n.
27 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 240, fols. 894b–898a.
28 See Hudson, Premature Reformation, 351, on the ‘alliance between the monastic and fraternal religious’ against the Wycliffites.
29 Hudson, , ‘A Lollard Compilation and the Dissemination of Wycliffite Thought’, Journal of Theological Studies, new series 23 (1972), 65–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
30 See Nolcken, von, Rosarium, 33–7;Google Scholar and Rouse and Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia, and Sermons, 202–4.
31 On ‘Of Antecristis songe’, see Nolcken, von, Rosarium, 35. I am currently preparing an edition of this treatise.Google Scholar
32 Lanterne of Lip, 58–9.
33 See von Nolcken, Rosarium, 35.
34 ‘Of Feigned Contemplative Life’, ed. Mathew, F. D., English Works, 191 (my emphasis).Google ScholarPubMed
35 See the comments in note 1 above and the provocative remarks by Hughes, Andrew in Style and Symbol, Medieval Music: 800–1453 (Ottawa, 1989), 376.Google Scholar