The two folios which are the subject of this study are the property of the vicar and churchwardens of the parish of St Botolph, Saxilby-with-Ingleby, some six miles west of the city of Lincoln. The leaves are of parchment, are adjacent and may once have been conjoint, but are now disjunct. The overall dimensions of each leaf are approximately 430 × 325 mm; each has four good margins, leaving a music area of 358 × 247 mm. Each side is ruled with twelve five-line staves in red ink, apparently without the use of a rastrum; the staves are a little less than 20 mm high. On all four sides each of the two voices was supplied with an initial letter executed in blue paint with red tracery. Each initial is a single staff in height, and is similar in style to the subsidiary capitals of Old Hall and many other English manuscripts of the fifteenth century. In its surviving state the manuscript has undergone a sad mutilation: a rectangle four staves deep has been cut away from the top left-hand corner of folio 1v, removing the initial ‘E’ of the top voice complete with the red tracery trailing from it down the edges of the staves below. In so doing, the vandal also removed a good deal of music from both sides of the leaf.

On the day before Christmas in 1520, the Venetian organist Giovanni da Legge wrote to his friend and mentor, the theorist Giovanni del Lago:

I should like you to send me here in Rome ‘quella bella cosa’ by Tinctoris that you wanted to give me when I left [Venice]. At that time you told me you had a resolution that you had made before for the late Zampiero. I should really like to have it together with some explanation so that I could understand the reasons for the resolution, for which I should be much obliged to you. I want to see what some worthy men here have to say about it.

The medieval sequence was one of the most distinguished artistic achievements of the Carolingian age. In creating the genre, Frankish poet–musicians moulded text and music into a new and extraordinary synthesis, and created a composition that stood proudly apart from the Gregorian Propers that surrounded it in the Mass. The new style must have spread quickly throughout the Frankish Empire, eventually reaching well beyond its borders. Pieces from the earliest centres travelled far and wide and inspired new works at every turn — faithful imitations or adaptations, as well as works in which the style was consciously modified to reflect the different aesthetics of distant realms. The legacy of surviving sources, however, does not permit the details of these early developments to be traced; even the precise dates and places where the sequence was first cultivated remain obscure. The earliest surviving sources from most regions give access to only relatively mature stages of development, which already reveal a complex web of interrelationships that has been difficult to untangle.

Niccolò Fausti, master of ceremonies at St Mark's Venice from 1576 to 1598, in one of his several additions at the back of a manuscript ceremoniale of 1564, lists the days on which Vespers in the ducal basilica were performed by two choirs of singers.

With some justification musicologists have virtually ignored the group of writings by the Parisian chancellor Jean Gerson (1363–1429) entitled De canticis. The title notwithstanding, these three treatises, written between 1423 and 1426, provide much more commentary on the affects of the soul than on the effects of the vocal cords. Gerson, a reform-minded mystical theologian active at the Council of Constance, had no intention of becoming a music theorist; at times in these treatises he explicitly precludes any explanation of technical musical terms. Though many such terms are used, the reader is presumed to understand their literal meaning. It is the allegorical meaning that Gerson purports to explicate. Indeed the allegorical level is the most appropriate one for treating musical instruments, for the organ is virtually the only instrument from biblical times that was still used in late-medieval churches. Yet by the fifteenth century the treatment of instruments as symbols of states of the soul had long been commonplace, and Gerson fails to arouse new interest. Even less attractive to the modern reader is the spiritualisation of Guido's hexachord. By deleting one of the As (by changing fa to mi in mutation from soft to hard hexachords), the six syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la can be reduced to the five vowels A, E, I, O, U, which in turn signify the five primary affections or emotions: joy, hope, compassion, fear, sorrow.

The libraries of Jesus College and St John's College, Cambridge, preserve two fragmentary motets of thirteenth-century English origin which bear witness to the veneration in which Simon de Montfort, the Earl of Leicester, was held by many in the years immediately following his death in 1265. One of these motets, Miles Christi from St John's, provides two new texts for Simon's hagiology, though they are both unfortunately incomplete. The other motet, Salve Symon from Jesus College, also incomplete, is a previously unnoticed setting of the Latin poem on Simon which is the last entry in the Evesham collection of Simon's miracula. These two motets are among the very few polyphonic compositions from England that refer directly to contemporary events of the later thirteenth century. The unusually precise terminus ante quem which they share provides the music historian with one of the few firm guideposts to the chronology of the contemporary musical repertory and its notation. In addition, the decoration of Simon's feast-day with polyphony, for which there is evidence here, emphasises not only the specific regard in which the earl was held by the religious establishment, but more generally the functional context of the English motet in the liturgy of services dedicated to the saints and Mary. These motets are also witnesses to the familiar insular patterns of preservation and destruction of polyphonic music from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Since Edmond de Coussemaker published the texts and melodies of ten liturgical dramas in 1860, the fundamental role of music in these ceremonies has been recognised. Regrettably, however, apart from a few isolated and restricted studies, amid a wealth of general literature on the subject there is still no comprehensive critical account of the musical content of these medieval ceremonies, nor of the ways in which it changed over the long period during which the genre was cultivated. Precise and detailed musical studies have tended to discuss individual examples of varied types of liturgical drama, rather than make a systematic study of a chosen layer or tradition in the repertory; and enquiries into the manner of composition of the music have been directed towards looking for dramatic or emotive features, to establishing motivic connections between the various melodies of a given ceremony, or to postulating motivic connections between the melodies of a given ceremony and the Gregorian chant. All these studies neglect one of the most important compositional aspects of the liturgical drama — the re-use of old material — and thereby fail to offer true insights into exactly how the melodies in any ceremony or group of ceremonies were composed. Only in three essays by Walther Lipphardt – on the introductory scene of the Visitatio sepulchri ceremonies, the Magi ceremonies, and the Mainz Visitatio sepulchri tradition – has an attempt been made to trace the paths of certain melodies through different sources.

Evidence for assumptions about the transmission of written polyphony in the fifteenth century comes primarily from two sources: archival references, both letters and pay records; and music manuscripts, the collections of the polyphony performed at a given centre. Unfortunately it is all too rare that specific archival references can be associated with surviving manuscripts of fifteenth-century polyphony. For some centres manuscripts have survived but not the archives, while for others there are archival references to the copying of music, but the manuscripts have disappeared. Nevertheless, there is ample evidence to indicate that many large manuscripts were compiled from what Charles Hamm termed ‘fascicle-manuscripts’ – small gatherings of bifolios just large enough to contain one long work or several short ones. By means of fascicle-manuscripts music could circulate randomly, travelling with singers from court to court, or it could be transmitted intentionally, as when the choir at one centre commissioned a piece from a composer working elsewhere. According to this argument, the large manuscripts we are familiar with may not even have been the normal repositories for music in this period. They were created only when enough fascicle-manuscripts had accumulated. These would then be recopied into a single manuscript, providing a greater degree of permanence. The manuscript San Pietro b 80, a large choirbook which can now be shown to have been copied for the choir at the basilica of San Pietro in Vaticano, represents one of those rare instances when archival data can be matched to an existing manuscript.

Early-fifteenth-century music seems to be different from that of previous ages not only in that it contains new stylistic elements, but also in the way in which its novelty was brought about. Perotinus composed in a more advanced style than Leoninus, Philippe de Vitry superseded Petrus de Cruce: in such cases a renewal takes place within a tradition, or even a ‘school’, which may be unrelated to the state of music-making in other areas. The novelties introduced in the music of certain centres (which were emphasised by the musicians who belonged to these centres), could then spread to other areas and affect more traditionally minded musicians elsewhere. A distinction between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, between ‘creation’ and ‘distribution’ can be suggested, although it may have to be modified by assuming polycentrism, that is, several centres, and several networks of distribution.

Codex latinus monacensis 14274 of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, the so-called St Emmeram codex, has been well known to musicologists since its discovery and description by Karl Dèzes in the late 1920s. Since Dèzes's very perceptive study, however, its contents have been explored only insofar as individual pieces were related to a particular task: the study of another manuscript, the preparation of an edition, or the exploration of a genre. In this way much has been learned about the works of major composers such as Dufay and Dunstaple and the manuscript has been seen as similar in many ways to other contemporaneous manuscripts in its presentation of a collection of works by major continental and English composers within a context of music of its more immediate surroundings. These more immediate surroundings, the place of origin of the manuscript, have yet to be securely established.