The Paris-Avignon-Northern Italy information highway: new witnesses to the transmission of late medieval theoretical material

Discussants: Jason Stoessel (University of New England)

Gathering 16 of Seville, Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina, MS. 5-2-25 is riddled with connections to a host of late medieval treatises. It provides yet another instance of the contiguous copying of versions of the Ars contrapuncti and the Libellus cantus mensurabilis (both attributed to Jean des Murs) and the anonymous Tractatus figurarum. While certainly Northern Italian, the gathering is uniquely tied to Avignon via its copy of Johannes Pipardi’s De arte cantus, and thus to Paris given that treatise’s ties to the Berkeley manuscript (1375). In this talk, I focus on two anonymous works in the gathering. First, a two-sentence paragraph contains uncommon vocabulary connected to the Berkeley manuscript, the treatise De semibrevibus caudatis housed in Paris, and the Avignonese theorist Pierre Taillandier. Secondly, the anonymous “Ad evidentiam tam mensurabilis quam inmensurabilis musice” is interestingly and unusually concordant, on the one hand, with the Introductio musice secundum Johannes de Garlandia and Volentibus introduce, and on the other hand to the much later Breviloquium musicale by Bonaventura da Brescia, the anonymous Quaestiones et solutiones, the Crawford anonymous, and works by the later theorists Heinrich Saess and Domingo Marcos Durán. I thus demonstrate that both works reveal further evidence for the transmission of music theories from France, more specifically Paris through Avignon, to Northern Italy, where they connect to later trends in the Veneto.