During the course of a series of articles relating medieval Italian songs to oral and unwritten traditions, Nino Pirrotta comments on a peculiar anonymous two-voice setting from the fourteenth century whose verses seem to have been broken and shattered by the music. Word repetition ‘does not result in a more effective or more understandable rendition of the text; on the contrary, it so fragments and stutters it that any meaning is lost, except as a pretext for the melody which submerges it’. The song in question, Dolce lo mio drudo, is part of a group of unica with Calabrian associations found in the oldest layer of the Reina manuscript. Pirrotta transcribes the song in full and analyses the text and its cognates in detail. It is a ballata with irregularities. I quote in Example 1 just the refrain, together with an indication of the syllable count, in order to facilitate comparison with what follows.

In the year 552, a ceremony was held to commemorate the first anniversary of the death of Martha, mother of St Simeon Stylites the Younger. The Vita of St Martha, written by an anonymous monk during the first half of the seventh century, records that the priest Antonio journeyed from Simeon's pillar at Mount Admirabilis, near Antioch, to Jerusalem to obtain a fragment of the cross. When Antonio returned to Mount Admirabilis, ‘a great crowd of men and women gathered in the grace of God, with candles and torches, to hold the service in her memory: and having kept a vigil all night, when in the early morning the living cross was displayed, all who were gathered worshipped, crying out with hymns: We adore your cross, Lord, and we glorify your holy resurrection.’

In the twelfth century, the scriptorium of the Benedictine abbey in Lambach, Austria, was a flourishing centre of manuscript production. Surviving manuscripts of many genres testify to the quality and breadth of the artistic output of the monastery during this period. For a long time, no examples of chant manuscripts were known; recently, however, a number of fragmentary chant manuscripts have been identified, and more recently still a noted Missal preserved at Melk has been attributed to Lambach. The study of the fragments has led to the discovery of an innovative method of indicating mode and final at the monastery, using the tonary-letter system attributed to the St Gall monk Hartker.

Michael Morrow was an acute reader of medieval literature, and one who knew that every medieval text is a potential source of information for the modern performer and musicologist. A striking example is provided by the 453 chapters of a fifteenth-century anthology now in the library of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. This imposing book appears to be one of the largest collections of Marian miracle-stories in the world. Assembled in the year 1409, perhaps in East Anglia, it contains forty-nine chapters about Marian devotions, liturgies, plainsongs and prayers, among them several texts that were set by English composers: Salve regina (there are ten chapters devoted to this chant alone), Alma redemptoris mater, Gaude flore virginali, Sancta Maria non est tibi similis, Salve sancta parens, Gaude Maria virgo, Ave maris Stella and Gaude virgo mater Christi.

It is common knowledge that the repertory of thirteenth-century Latin motets exhibits a great variety of poetic themes. Many of the earliest motets comment upon the feast of their parent chant and are therefore classified as ‘troping’; others praise the Virgin Mary – sometimes regardless of their associated chant; still others avoid obvious connections with the liturgy and either criticize, admonish or exhort listeners to reform. The classification of motet texts according to content has increased our understanding of overall themes and of the chronological relationships between them, but it has also raised questions. Some questions arise from the fact that the general categories of troping, Marian and hortatory texts are not mutually exclusive. Should we distinguish a ‘general’ Marian motet, like Virgo mater salutis (386) / JOHANNE (M 29), which superimposes general epithets and intercessions to the Virgin above a chant in honour of John the Baptist, from a ‘troping’ Marian motet, such as Flos de spina rumpitur (437), built over the Assumption tenor, REGNAT (M 34), which makes specific references to its associated feast? Or does this added taxonomic layer only distract us from the task of interpreting these texts?

John Dunstaple's 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.

Writing in 1882, Edmond Vander Straeten was the first to argue that the name ‘Juschino’ among the singers of Galeazzo Maria Sforza's household chapel referred to the composer Josquin des Prez. Assuming a birthdate in the early 1450s, Vander Straeten found it easy to understand why the young Josquin was at the bottom of the salary scale in 1475, the date of the documents. Soon afterwards, Eugenio Motta provided new evidence to support that identification and stretch Josquin's Milanese career to 1479. Since then the years in Milan have had a fixed and central place in all studies of Josquin's life.

In his lucid discussion of genre in medieval treatises on music, Lawrence Gushee states that: The main part of Gushee's discussion is taken up with documents written up to the thirteenth century; for that reason he pays only a brief visit to treatises written thereafter, recognizing, however, a generic category in ‘works of the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries which can be classed together merely by virtue of their size and synthetic character’. Among these he counts the treatises of Jacques de Liège, Walter Odington, Engelbert of Admont, Marchettus of Padua and Jerome of Moravia. One could add a few others to this list, such as the Tractatus de musica of Magister Lambertus and the work largely derived from that one, the Quatuor principalia musicae. These are ‘synthetic’, to use Gushee's word, in that they attempt a comprehensive treatment of their subject – they cover both theoretical and practical aspects of pitch and rhythm, and usually begin with a mythic/historic overview of music and a classification scheme that situates it within the sphere of other disciplines.

The discovery of a musical source is always something of an event. This volume of keyboard music dated 1540 and printed in Lisbon was discovered – appropriately for an Iberian source – in 1992 by Alejandro Iglesias who announced his find at a conference held at the Institution ‘Fernando el Católico’ in Zaragoza in the autumn of that year. It was heralded in the Castilian rhetorical style as the ‘discovery of the century’, and it provided a moment of high drama, especially when it became clear from Iglesias's brief description of the source that it included works by Franco-Netherlandish composers such as Josquin, Ockeghem, Compère, Agricola, Caron and Obrecht. The volume is indeed of considerable interest, not only because it offers keyboard intabulations of previously unknown works by both Franco-Netherlandish and Spanish composers, but also because it is the earliest surviving source of keyboard music from the Iberian peninsula and a rare example of printed instrumental music from the first half of the sixteenth century. Manuel Carlos de Brito, making an assessment of Renaissance Portuguese music in 1989, was perfectly justified in thinking that new music sources were unlikely to appear, and that lack of musical texts to confirm or refute the historical context suggested by documents would limit the history of Portuguese music to the realms of speculation. This discovery, surprising though it is, rescues something from that shadowy kingdom.

Johannes Tinctoris, in the prologue to his Liber de arte contrapuncti of 1477, having demonstrated his wide literary and philosophical culture, and declared that, to his astonishment, no music over forty years old is deemed worthy by the learned of a hearing, praises five living composers and three recently deceased, whose works are of such sweet savour that he judges them worthy even of the immortal gods; in so elegant a context only the pagan phrase will serve. He continues (§18): ‘Ea quoque profecto numquam audio, numquam considero quin laetior ac doctior evadam, unde quemadmodum Virgilius in illo opere divino Eneidos Homero, ita iis hercule in meis opusculis utor archetypis’.

Though so much medieval chant is anonymous – anonymity may even have been valued as expressing humility – recent articles have focused on some of the individuals who are known to have created texts and melodies for the liturgy. V. Frangeskou is one of two authors to have looked at texts by Gregory of Nazianzen, known as Gregory the Theologian, a fourth-century patriarch of Constantinople whose writings were the source of many Greek chant texts. Two other articles look at the sixth-century kontakion-poet Romanos, specifically his ‘Lament of the Mother of God’ and his apparent indebtedness to an apocryphal Gospel.