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Lost Books of Polyphony in England: A List to 1500

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Andrew Wathey
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Extract

Books of medieval polyphony were relatively short-lived by comparison with other forms of book. Once their contents had become outdated, they were often broken up and used as scrap parchment. The debris from a few of these books survives in bindings and as wrappers for documents. The evidence for the existence of others must be sought in medieval administrative records: wills drawn up by individuals, documents emanating from royal and noble households and, above all, the financial and administrative acta of the greater churches. From these materials it is possible to hint at the scale of past losses and to recover, from titles quoted in full or in part, information about small sections of vanished repertories. It is possible also to trace patterns in the ownership and dissemination of written polyphony and to identify something of the structure and dynamics of its production.

Type
Articles
Information
Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle , Volume 21 , 1988 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1988

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References

Notes

1 Frank Ll. Harrison, Music in Medieval Britain (London, 1958), 132–5, 157–201, 431–6; see also Dom Anselm Hughes, ‘The Topography of English Mediaeval Polyphony', In Memoriam Jaques Handschin, ed. Higini Anglès et al. (Strasbourg, 1962), 129–36. For the Tattershall entries see also Roger Bowers, Choral Institutions Within the English Church: Their Constitution and Development, 1340–1500 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of East Anglia, 1975), A059.Google Scholar

2 Andrew Wathey, ‘The Production of Books of Liturgical Polyphony', Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475, ed. Derek Pearsall and Jeremy Griffiths, Cambridge Studies in Publishing and Printing History, 4 (Cambridge, forthcoming). An earlier form of the present list is Andrew B. Wathey, Music in the Royal and Noble Households in Late Medieval England: Studies in Sources and Patronage (D.Phil, dissertation. University of Oxford, 1987), 249–73.Google Scholar

3 Bibliographies of book lists are given in Neil R. Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books, Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks, 3 (2nd edn, London, 1964), and Medieval Libraries of Great Britain … Supplement to the Second Edition, ed. Andrew G. Watson, Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks, 15 (London, 1987).Google Scholar