`Musica sanat corpus per animam': Towar tU erstanding of the Use of Music in Responseto Plague, 1350-1600 Christopher Brian Macklin Doctor of Philosophy University of York Department of Music Submitted March 2008 BEST COPY AVAILABLE Variable print quality 2 Abstract In recent decadesthe study of the relationship between the human species and other forms of life has ceased to be an exclusive concern of biologists and doctors and, as a result, has provided an increasingly valuable perspective on many aspectsof cultural and social history. Until now, however, these efforts have not extended to the field of music, and so the present study representsan initial attempt to understand the use of music in Werrn Europe's responseto epidemic plague from the beginning of the Black Death to the end of the sixteenth century. This involved an initial investigation of the description of sound in the earliest plague chronicles, and an identification of features of plague epidemics which had the potential to affect music-making (such as its geographical scope, recurrence of epidemics, and physical symptoms). The musical record from 1350-1600 was then examined for pieces which were conceivably written or performed during plague epidemics. While over sixty such pieces were found, only a small minority bore indications of specific liturgical use in time of plague. Rather, the majority of pieces (largely settings of the hymn Stella coeli extirpavit and of Italian laude whose diffusion was facilitated by the Franciscan order) hinted at a use of music in the everyday life of the laity which only occasionally resulted in the production of notated musical scores. Many of the pieces associatedwith plague show traces of both Galenic medical learning and Pythagorean musical teaching, and this evidence-combined with musical and medical material gleaned from domestic household books-hints both at the use of music as an integral part of an eclectic `Regimen sanitatis' and at the enormous impact that musical ideas and practices had upon a broad spectrum of late medieval social interaction. 3 Table of Contents Abstract 2 List of Tables 4 List of Figures 5 List of Accompanying Material 5 Acknowledgements 6 Chapter 1. Introduction 7 Chapter 2. Plague 19 Chapter 3. The Sacred Relationship between Music and Medicine 46 Chapter 4. Plague and the Expression of Devotion 64 Chapter 5. The Music of the Disciplinati and Laudesi 131 Chapter 6. Stella Coeli and the Tracing of Plague Performance 147 Chapter 7. Conclusions 176 Appendix A 180 Appendix B 227 Appendix C 253 Appendix D 255 Appendix E 283 Appendix F 293 Appendix G 296 Appendix H 309 Appendix I 313 Bibliography 315 4 List of Tables Table 2.1. The Number of Plague Epidemics in Western Europe, 1346-1600 37 Table 2.2. Localities reporting the highest numbers of plague epidemics, 38 1346-1600 Table 2.3. Years with no reported plague between 1346 and 1600, by region 45 Table 4.1. Cross-referencing of chant propers for Salus populi mass 69 Table 4.2. Cross-referencing of chant propers for Recordare Domine mass 72 Table 4.3. Side-by-side comparison of passagesfrom the Missa contra 84 mortalitatem hominum and the Missa de Sancto Roccho Table 4.4. The Song of the German flagellants, as it appears in the Meusebach 103 Parchment Table 4.5. Concordancesbetween flagellant songs in the Meusebach 109 Parchment and in the Chronicle of Hugo von Reutlingen Table 4.6. Comparison of lines from Germanic flagellant songs with opening 124 of Stabat Mater hymn Table 5.1. Pythagorean consonancesused in Benivieni's lo vo darti anima 146 mia Table 6.1. Text and translation of the Stella coeli hymn 148 Table 6.2. Written references to Stella coeli extirpavit prior to 1600 152 5 List of Figures Figure 2.1. Reported Plague Epidemics in Europe (excluding Scandinavia), 41 1346-1600 Figure 4.1. Christ between St Sebastian and St Roch, late fifteenth century. 82 Bartolomeo Montagna (1450-1523) Gallerie dell'Accademia (Venezia, Italy) Figure 5.1. Barnaba da Modena, Plague Madonna della Misericordia, 1370s. 134 S. Maria dei Servi (Genoa, Italy) Figure 6.1. Comparison of monophonic Stella coeli incipits in fifteenth- 162 century British MSs Figure 6.2. Comparison of Incipits of Cooke Stella coeli with exempla of 15th 164 century popular devotional music Figure 6.3. Comparison of fifteenth-century tenors in chanson attributed to 168 Walter Frye and setting of Stella coeli extirpavit attributed to Guillaume le Rouge Figure 6.4. Notation of melody common to BL Lansdowne 462, BL Royal 171 7.A. VI, and Oxford Lincoln Lat 64 Figure 6.5. Back Pastedownof Oxford, Okes253 173 Figure 7.1. Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), St Jerome in Meditation 176 (c. 1605). Oil on canvas, 118 x 81 cm. Museo del Monasterio de Santa Maria, Monserrat List of Accompanying Material One (1) Supplemental CD, containing a databaseof recorded plague epidemics in Europe, c. 1346-1600. In Excel and SPSS formats. CD SUPPLIED WITH THE PhD HAD NO CONTENT 6 Acknowledgements The author would like to extend special thanks to: Bronach Kane and Dr Philippa Hoskin for the application of their paleographical expertise; Karen McAulay for her personal inspection of Glasgow Hunter MS 432; Ehren Mierau for advice on, and proofreading of, Latin translations; Marcia Pinzon for help with formatting matters; Dr Rosemary Horrox for her comments concerning the episcopal letters of Winchester; Gerard McBurney, Liudmila Kovnatskaya, and Anastasia Belina for assistancetracking manuscripts in Russia; Dr Gary Towne for sending unpublished modern editions of the music of Gaspar de Albertis; Dr Sarah Long for kindly allowing me to see her unpublished doctoral dissertation on liturgical practice in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Paris; Ms Mary E Larew and Drs Jonathan Wainwright, Sally Harper, and Nicky Losseff for their comments on early drafts; and, above all, to Dr John Potter for his indefatigable good cheer and invaluable comments and assistanceat all phasesof this project. 7 Chapter 1. Introduction Works of art are not objects of experience, so much as ways of putting it into question-means of inciting us to attend to discrepancies between particulars and totalities, contents and forms, facts and schemes,objectivities and subjectivities. Works of art are invitations to notice the complexity, multiplicity and precariousnessof our ordinary perception of the world. They succeed in their work when they bring it home to us that the identities and continuities that confront us in the world are our inventions as well as our discoveries. Illness and History A seldom-considered correlate to the relatively late appearanceof the human species in biological history is that the entirety of human culture has unfolded in relation, and to some degree in response, to an intricate backdrop of interactions with other forms of life. Until the second half of the twentieth century, this ecological narrative, described by one prominent researcher as `a precarious equilibrium between the microparasitism of disease organisms and the macroparasitism of... other human beings'(McNeill, 1976: 5), was but a peripheral concern in historical inquiry, garnering attention only in exceptional cases when epidemic disease was linked to a catastrophic drop in population such as the Eurasian gran mortalyte of 1347-50 now known as the `Black Death', the devastation of smallpox among the Native American populations in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and the cholera and tuberculosis epidemics of Western Europe in the nineteenth century. 2 1 Jonathan Ree, I See a Voice: A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness, and the Senses (London: Flamingo, 2000), 328. 2 This is not to dismissthe importanceof earlier scholarship,which helpedmake the future systematisationof the historicity of diseasepossible. Seein particular Lynn Thorndike, "The Blight of Pestilenceon Early Modem Civilization, " TheAmerican Historical Review32, no. 3 (1927): 455- 8 However, following the publication of McNeill's groundbreaking work Plagues and Peoples in 1976, a more concerted effort was made to integrate the interaction between man and microbe into a larger framework of historical discourse. Authors such as Alfred Crosby (1986; 1994), and Jared Diamond (1997) have argued that geographical variations in humanity's relationships with disease-causing microparastites are partially responsible for the dominance of European settlers 3 across continents, while in the preface to his work on the impact of diseaseon Tudor and Stuart England, Paul Slack wrote, 'Decimating communities, destroying families, bringing grief and pain to individuals, it [plague] deserves study in its own right as a fundamental part of man's experience in history' (Slack, 1985: 3). Medicine, in all its complexity and interdependencies, is `now too important (and expensive) a component of the human story to be left entirely to medical experts and specialists whose gaze may be narrowly focused: certainly they cannot tell the whole story of suffering' (Rousseau, 2003: 13). Illness and Artistic Culture One of the first to use art produced in the wake of an epidemic to argue for specific shifts in the style of narration of this story was Millard Meiss, who argued in an influential study of fourteenth-century Tuscan art that the Black Death of 1347-50 precipitated a shift away from an optimistic view of human life and towards a pessimistic, abstracted perspective marked by a fascination with the macabre (heiss, 1951). While his conclusions were not without detractors (c. f. Os, 1981),