Seminar in Medieval and Renaissance Music - Naufragantes/ Navigatrix/ Aptatur: A Newly Discovered Motet on St Nicholas

24th October 2019, 5:00 pm

Two large fragments of a rotulus have been recently discovered in a manor house in Dorset. The fragments preserve four early fourteenth-century motets of English provenance. One of these motets, Naufragantes visita/ Navigatrix inclita/ Aptatur, previously unknown to modern scholars, combines numerous unique features, beautifully illustrating and adding to the remarkable degree of compositional innovation present in fourteenth-century English motets. The four-voice motet often features four different simultaneous texts and uses a complex method of text exchange. The poetic texts plead both to St Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors, and to the Virgin Mary, the star of the sea, to intercede as protectors and guides of seafarers. Its cantus prius factus, Aptatur, used in thirteen musically distinct motets on the Continent, is found now for the first time in a motet that definitely originates in England. Because of damage to the rotulus, however, the motet does not survive in full. In this presentation, through an exploration of the motet’s melodic, harmonic, textual, and formal characteristics, I demonstrate not only how Naufragantes/ Navigatrix exemplifies remarkable compositional innovation, but I also offer a complete musical reconstruction of the motet, thereby allowing for the possibility of performance of this remarkable discovery. Images of the manuscript and a brief description are now available on diamm: https://www.diamm.ac.uk/sources/4750/#/.