Speaker: Kerry McCarthy (independent scholar)
Discussants: David Skinner (University of Cambridge) and Andrew Johnstone (Trinity College, Dublin)

‘What part syngest thou? Qua voce cantas?’ John Stanbridge (1463-1510), master of Magdalen College School in Oxford and author of several innovative pedagogical books, taught his young pupils to ask that question. It is still a relevant question today. Tudor voice-parts and voice-types (both before and during the Reformation) have attracted some controversy in recent generations. This study addresses the issue from a less conventional angle. Rather than starting with questions of sounding pitch, transposition, or vocal production, it draws on a wide range of documents to revisit the five standard English voice-parts (bass, tenor, contratenor, mean/medius, treble/triplex) in what might be called ‘anthropological’ or ‘ethnographic’ terms, as specialised functions and roles exercised by participants in a complex musical culture. This approach, I would argue, also equips us to think more freely about practical matters of pitch and transposition as Tudor singers experienced them in their working lives.

This long-running series of seminars, convened by Dr Margaret Bent, considers all aspects of medieval and renaissance music. It runs on Zoom in Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and generally attracts a large international audience. Usually, a presenter speaks for around 30 minutes and then engages with invited discussants for another half an hour. The floor is then open for questions and lively general discussion. Each term’s seminars are announced in advance on this page and attendees are asked to register here.

Speakers: Elina Hamilton (University of Hawai’i, Mānoa), Peter Lefferts (University of Nebraska, Lincoln) and Elżbieta Witkowska-Zaremba (Warsaw, Polish Academy of Sciences)

De legitimis ordinibus pentachordorum et tetrachordorum by Theinred of Dover has long been known to scholars but has virtually remained inaccessible until recent years: a transcription of its text, made by John L. Snyder, was mounted onto TML only in 1996, and a critical edition by Snyder published in 2006 detailed an argument that dated the treatise to c. 1150.  This seminar brings together three perspectives for repositioning Theinred in the fourteenth century, a date that had been offered in the very earliest accounts of the theorist. Responding to the 12th-century hypothesis, Hamilton will argue for a fourteenth-century date based on a new evaluation of Theinred’s sources; Lefferts will present contexts for—and close readings of—Theinred’s text that draw him into a tight circle of prominent theorists of the same era, and Witkowska-Zaremba will consider Theinred’s theories in the context of Boethius’s De institutione musica, pointing to the ideas and solutions presented by Boethius in the fourth book of his treatise and their reception in England around 1300.

This long-running series of seminars, convened by Dr Margaret Bent, considers all aspects of medieval and renaissance music. It runs on Zoom in Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and generally attracts a large international audience. Usually, a presenter speaks for around 30 minutes and then engages with invited discussants for another half an hour. The floor is then open for questions and lively general discussion. Each term’s seminars are announced in advance on this page and attendees are asked to register here.

Speaker: Anne Walters Robertson (University of Chicago)
Discussants: Andrew Kirkman (University of Birmingham) and Sean Gallagher (Boston, New England Conservatory)

The six celebrated masses based on the L’Homme armé melody and preserved in a fifteenth-century manuscript now found in Naples (Bibl. Naz. MS VI.E.40) rest on an immense scaffold of text and melody and, as we will see, on a well-defined liturgical and typological framework. A fresh look at these pieces, drawing on books of liturgy, spirituality, and art made for Dukes Philip the Good and Charles the Bold of Burgundy, provides a deeper understanding of these works. The heretofore unnoticed source for the texts of the Kyrie tropes in Masses I and VI is the famous trope Cunctipotens genitor, which enjoyed the highest rank in the Burgundian ritual. The tropes for the remaining Kyries II-V form a didactic, liturgically focused series based on typological treatises found in the ducal library, and they suggest analogous ways of approaching other L’Homme armé masses with added texts, such as those by Regis and Tinctoris. Together, the six Burgundian masses were likely used as needed for Sundays across the year. The musical treatment of snippets of the L’Homme armé melody in each mass tenor is analogous to procedures seen in other sacred treatises produced for the court. Recognizing these features in the masses helps situate them in the Burgundian milieu and offers new insight into the ubiquitous theme of the Armed Man in music.  

This long-running series of seminars, convened by Dr Margaret Bent, considers all aspects of medieval and renaissance music. It runs on Zoom in Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and generally attracts a large international audience. Usually, a presenter speaks for around 30 minutes and then engages with invited discussants for another half an hour. The floor is then open for questions and lively general discussion. Each term’s seminars are announced in advance on this page and attendees are asked to register here.

Week 8: Wednesday 3 December

Marc Howard , Independent Scholar
The loyalties of professionals: Black soldiers in the Rhodesian army, 1963-1981

5.15pm, Wharton Room, All Souls College

Week 6: Wednesday 19 November

Sean Wilcox, University of Oxford

Art in the Age of the Maxim Gun: The South African War (1899-1902) & the British Illustrated Press

5.15pm, Wharton Room, All Souls College