The Transmission and Reception of the Marian Antiphon in Early Modern Britain
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The Transmission and Reception of the Marian Antiphon in Early Modern Britain Volume 1 of 2 Daisy M. Gibbs Submitted in partial fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University May 2018 Abstract A substantial proportion of extant pre-Reformation sacred music by English composers survives only in Elizabethan manuscript sources. The evident popularity of this music among copyists and amateurs after it became obsolete in public worship remains largely unexplained, however. Using the Marian votive antiphon as a case study, exemplified by the surviving settings of the popular antiphon text Ave Dei patris filia, this thesis comprises a reception history of pre-Reformation sacred music in post-Reformation England. It sheds light on the significance held by pre-Reformation music to Elizabethan copyists, particularly in relation to an emergent sense of British nationhood and the figure of the composer as a category of reception, in doing so problematising the long-standing association between the copying of pre-Reformation sacred music and recusant culture. It also uses techniques of textual filiation to trace patterns of musical transmission and source interrelationships, and thereby to gauge the extent of manuscript attrition during the sixteenth-century Reformations. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the production of the Ave Dei patris antiphon corpus, particularly the ways in which its meanings were shaped by composers in the decades before the English Reformations. Chapter 3 concerns the transformations undergone by the Marian antiphon during the 1540s and 1550s and following the Elizabethan Settlement. The remaining chapters discuss the post-1559 afterlife of pre-Reformation polyphony. Chapter 4 investigates the career of the music copyist William Forrest, and his role in reshaping and transmitting pre-Reformation music in the mid- to late-sixteenth century. Chapters 5 and 6 explore, respectively, the motivations for copying pre-Reformation music in Elizabethan England, and the means by which Marian votive antiphons circulated in manuscript after 1559. The three appendices comprise a translation of Ave Dei patris; critical editions of the settings by Fayrfax, Tallis, and Johnson; and a series of commentaries on three principal manuscript sources. i S. D. G. ii Acknowledgments Firstly I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the ‘Tudor Partbooks’ project, whose financial support has made this project possible. I am also enormously grateful to my supervisors: Professor Magnus Williamson, for his support, advice and expertise over the past three-and-a-half years, and Dr Kirsten Gibson, for her generous and invaluable feedback on my writing this year. My two examiners, Dr Andrew Johnstone and Professor Elizabeth Eva Leach, managed somehow to make my viva a completely painless experience, for which I can never thank them enough, and have given me numerous suggestions and comments which have not only improved this thesis but have also provided me with valuable food for thought for my future research. I have been immensely fortunate to have met and worked with some outstanding scholars during my time with Tudor Partbooks. I would like to thank in particular Dr David Skinner, for his thoughts on the Ave Dei patris corpus; Dr Julia Craig-McFeely, for her expertise on Sadler and for numerous manuscript images; and Dr Katherine Butler for advice on antiquarianism and Dow. I must not forget to thank Professor Julie Sanders of Newcastle University, for her generosity with both her books and her time and in whose office I first stumbled across my reading of Dow’s partbooks. Most of all I am indebted to Professor John Milsom, for his constant advice and support, and for so generously sharing with me vast amounts of unpublished research. I would also like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation to my lecturers and tutors at Oxford University, without whose support and encouragement I would never have made it this far, especially Professor Owen Rees, Professor Elizabeth Eva Leach, and Professor Suzanne Aspden. This project would not have been possible without the staff of the Philip Robinson Library at Newcastle University (especially Mark, who’s probably glad to see the back of ‘Inter-Library Loan Woman’), the Great North Museum: Hancock Library, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, and the National Archives at Kew. I am particularly grateful to the numerous archivists at various institutions who have contributed their time and resources to help me: Fabien Laforge of the Médiathèque d’Agglomération de Cambrai; Clare Hopkins of Trinity College, Oxford; Nicolas Bell and Adam Green of Trinity College, Cambridge; Jenny Thorp of New College, Oxford; Judith Curthoys of Christ Church; Stewart Tiley of St John’s College, Oxford; the staff of the iii Monastic Library at Downside Abbey; Julia Walworth, Fellow Librarian of Merton College, Oxford; and Kate McQuillian of St George’s Chapel, Windsor. The Postgraduate Research Training Programme, facilitated by Dr Laura Leonardo and Dr Robin Humphrey, provided me with space to develop as a thinker, a writer and a teacher in my first two years at Newcastle and taught me to be interdisciplinary; this thesis would be a much poorer thing without it. I would also like to thank both the current and former members of Newcastle University’s New Vocal Ensemble, for some amazing singing over the past couple of years, and for putting up with Johnson’s Benedicam Domino. I have been blessed with some wonderful friends over the past three years, to whom my thanks are due: particularly my fellow ‘mynyon’, Sarah Holmes; the Young Adult community at Brunswick Methodist Church; the members of ‘Sanctuary’ at JMC, especially Stephen Richardson; and the members of ‘PhTea Club’, without whose company the past few months’ writing up would have been much more arduous than it has been. Spring 2017 was marred by the tragic death of my friend and colleague, Darren Fenn, for whose warmth and friendship when I first arrived in Newcastle I am forever grateful; he is much missed. Lastly I must thank my family—Mum, Dad, Grandma, our heavenly boys and our precious girls—for their unfailing support, patience and love, even when the going got tough. iv Table of Contents VOLUME 1 List of Figures .............................................................................................................................x Introduction I.1. Pre-Reformation sacred music in Elizabethan England: context and problems............1 I.2. The state of the existing literature.................................................................................7 I.3. Case-study: the Ave Dei patris filia tradition..............................................................14 I.4. The subject position of the author...............................................................................17 I.5. The shape of the thesis...............................................................................................18 PART 1: CREATION Chapter 1. Robert Fayrfax’s Ave Dei patris filia: Examining the context of its production 1.1. Introduction ..............................................................................................................23 1.1.1. Contextualising Tudor polyphony: the nature of the evidence, and potential pitfalls.....................................................................................................................23 1.1.2. Robert Fayrfax’s oeuvre: the current state of knowledge..................................26 1.2. Internal evidence: the text 1.2.1. Grammatical structure......................................................................................27 1.2.2. Literary precedents............................................................................................28 1.2.3. Conclusion: the internal evidence of the text.....................................................39 1.3. External evidence for Ave Dei patris’s provenance 1.3.1. Textual responses: Lauda vivi Alpha et Ω….....................................................41 1.3.2. Chronology........................................................................................................44 1.4. Political resonances...................................................................................................47 1.5. The epistemological status of the votive antiphon: some considerations...................53 1.6. Conclusions...............................................................................................................55 Chapter 2. ‘A patriarchis preconizata’: The seven surviving Ave Dei patris filia settings 2.1. Introduction...............................................................................................................57 2.2. Robert Fayrfax’s setting: the model...........................................................................63 2.3. John Taverner’s setting v 2.3.1. Dating................................................................................................................68 2.3.2. Use of cantus firmus...........................................................................................70 2.4. Thomas Tallis’s setting 2.4.1. Chronology: Harley 1709 and Salve intemerata................................................77 2.4.2. Similarities to Fayrfax’s setting.........................................................................81 2.5. John