Reading and Reminiscence: Tinctoris on the Beauty of Music

Reading and Reminiscence: Tinctoris on the Beauty of MusicAuthor(s): Christopher PageSource: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 1-31Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/831952 .

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Reading and Reminiscence: Tinctoris on the Beauty of Music

BY CHRISTOPHER PAGE

ROUND THE YEAR 1490 the duke of Milan resolved to employ painters to work at the Certosa di Pavia, the Carthusian monas-

tery founded a century earlier by Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti. An agent examined the work of four candidates working in Florence- Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Perugino, and Ghirlandaio-and his report is a precious record of contemporary vernacular language for assessing the technical and aesthetic qualities of paintings.' All four artists, in the agent's opinion, have a distinctive aria. Filippino Lippi paints with an aria dolce that is indeed piit dolce than Botticelli's aria, described as virile. Lippi's work, however, does not show as much skill (tanta arte) as Botticelli's. Perugino's paintings have an aria angelica and his work is molto dolce, while Ghirlandaio's have a bona aria. The reason why we value these remarks so highly is precisely the reason why we find them hard to interpret: they have surely been nourished by the kind of conversation about pictures, conducted in the vernacular, that must have taken place amongst lovers of paintings in the Quattrocento. In his study Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Michael Baxandall therefore attempts to read the Milanese agent's language in terms of much broader "languages" that are more accessible to us: the aesthetic and cognitive styles of Quattrocento civilization. In effect, Baxandall asks whether the agent's words mean more than we might expect, or less than we would hope.

An earlier version of this paper was read at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, New York University, in September I995. I am most grateful to Nancy Freeman Regalado, Margaret Switten, and Edward Roesner for their advice on certain points. I have also benefited from the comments of Margaret Bent, Bonnie J. Blackburn, David Fallows, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Andrew Kirkman, Tess Knighton, Ann Lewis, Thomas Luongo, John Milsom, and Daniel Leech Wilkinson.

' See Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 26 and io9-io; and idem, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery ofPictorial Composition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).



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Fifteenth-century references to the aesthetic qualities of music sometimes raise a similar question. In a celebrated passage of his allegorical romance Le Champion des dames, the poet Martin le Franc praises the "frisque concordance" of music by Dufay and Binchois, declaring that "ilz ... ont pris de la contenance / Angloise."' The poet seems very well informed; he names six composers, he deploys technical terminology with confidence (fainte, pause, and muance), and with the words contenance Angloise he offers the only known locution in Middle French that registers a wide-ranging sense of musical style. Here again the modern reader must find a contemporary context for the language employed, but fifteenth-century ways of talking about music by Dufay and his contemporaries have left little trace behind them, at least as far as the vernacular languages are concerned.3 One might begin with the idiom of Le Champion des dames, essentially the hyperbolized manner of Middle French romance and chronicle; Tapissier and Carmen are said to have "astonished" (esbahirent) their Parisian audiences, and indeed to have amazed "all Paris" (tout Paris), but they "never" (onques) made music as fine as that of Dufay and Binchois, whose compositions are "wondrous" (merveilleuse). Such language evokes a narrator who marvels to find the moral and aesthetic ideals he shares with his readers so fully realized in the persons and events he describes. Can it express anything recognizable

2 For text and translation of the relevant passages see David Fallows, "The contenance angloise: English Influence on Continental Composers of the Fifteenth Century," Renaissance Studies I (1987): 189-208.

3 If fifteenth-century musicians used any vernacular terminology to identify the goals of a rehearsal, for example, or to distinguish the effect of one performance from another, the music theorists writing in Latin do not make much use of it. The irruption of vernacular usage into plainchant theory is perhaps not to be expected, but even when the theory of mensural music begins to register elements of vernacular terminology, as it increasingly does around I300, the resources employed are not abundant. See, for example, Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum Musicae, ed. Roger Bragard, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 3 (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1955-73), 2:43, 57, 99, 240, 242, all pertaining to the names of intervals. The yield from Jacques is somewhat richer than this, however; see especially 2:36 ("in eodem puncto"). The situation some 150 years later, as represented by a theorist such as Nicolo Burzio, shows little change. In his Florum libellus Burzio is prepared to use "a practitioners' word" ("ut practicorum utar vocabulo"), but he does so with obvious condescension from a higher Latin idiom, and in every case the practitioners' word is an alternative name for an interval (tertia, sexta, decima) or for a voice part (supranus, ut vulgi utar vocabulo). Nicolai Burtii Parmensis Florum Libellus, ed. Giuseppe Massera, Historiae Musicae Cultores Biblioteca 28 (Florence: Olschki, 1975), 74, I22, and I24. For two contrasting views of what Johannes Tinctoris means by singers "who ... are said in the vernacular to sing upon the book," see Margaret Bent, "Resfacta and Cantare Super Librum," this JOURNAL 36 (1983): 371-91; and Bonnie J. Blackburn, "On Composi- tional Process in the Fifteenth Century," this JOURNAL 40 (1987): 21o-84-



READING AND REMINISCENCE 3

today as a "critical" judgment? Probably not. We appear to approach safer ground for a moment with Martin le Franc's fainte, pause, and muance, for these are, without any doubt, technical words borrowed from the vernacular parlance of fifteenth-century musicians. As late as Randle Cotgrave's Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (161 I) all three are succinctly defined in senses very close to those which modern scholars have generally assumed for Le Champion des dames.4 But if Martin le Franc has chosen these terms to identify things which are "new" in the nouvelle pratique of Dufay and Binchois, we remain uncertain what they are;5 nor is it apparent how fainte, pause, and muance define an aesthetic or affective reaction to the nouvelle pratique, if indeed they are intended to do so. Le Franc's evocation of the "frisque concordance" of the composers' music is another matter, however, for while this gives at least an appearance of technical reference ("concordance") it also conveys an aesthetic impression ("frisque"). Indeed, the nontechnical and affective character of "frisque" may explain why this word is sometimes passed over in silence by modern scholars, and why little use has been made of the abundant material which the standard lexical records of Old and Middle French provide for the interpretation of it.6 Frisque was one of the key words of courtly idealism in Middle French, and a consistent sense may be discerned beneath most instances of the word. Something, or some- one, is "frisque" if its aspect instantly gives pleasure to others without a moment's reflection required to establish what is being enjoyed and why. Not surprisingly, "frisque" is often associated with lively move-

4 Cotgrave's definitions, and others of importance relating to these three terms, are collected in Graham Strahle, An Early Music Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), s.v. "feint," "pause," and "muance." Cotgrave's definitions, not hitherto brought to bear upon Le Champion des dames as far as I am aware, are the clearest and most explicit so far found.

5 Fallows, "The contenance angloise." 6 The principal sources are AlgirdasJ. Greimas and Teresa M. Keane, Dictionnaire

du moyenfranCais: La Renaissance (Paris: Larousse, 1992), s.v. "frisque" (with references but without citations); Adolf Tobler and Erhard Lommatzsch, Altfranzbsisches Wirt- erbuch (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1925-36; Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, I954- ), s.v. "frisque"; Frd&eric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l'Ancienne Langue Frangaise, io vols. (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1881-88; Libraire ?mile Bouillon, I889-1902), s.v. "frische"; Edmond Huguet, Dictionnaire de la langue francaise au seizieme sikcle, 7 vols. (Paris: Libraire Ancienne 1douard Champion, 1925-32; Paris: Didier, 1946-62), s.v. "frisque"; William Rothwell, Louise W. Stone, and T. B. W. Reid, Anglo-Norman Dictionary, Modern Humanities Research Association Publica- tions 8 (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1992), s.v. "fresch"; Jaqueline Picoche, Le Vocabulaire psychologique dans les Chroniques de Froissart: Le Plaisir et la Douleur, Publications du Centre d'etudes picardes 21 (Amiens: Centre d'6tudes picardes, 1984), s.v. "frische," "frichement," "frichete."




ment and with beauty of clothing:7 it expresses a quality of lively motion and of surface. Perhaps Martin le Franc's "frisque concordance" expresses an affective response to the surface sound of music by Dufay and Binchois (perhaps to the more obviously convivial and "occasional" rondeaux) heard in an essentially gregarious context among ceulx qui les hanterent and ceulx qui lesfrequenterent.

Le Champion des dames offers the most extensive and articulate response to fifteenth-century music to be found anywhere in contemporary French, but that is not my principal reason for dwelling upon it here. The most intriguing aspects of Martin le Franc's account are precisely those which have sometimes attracted the least attention. Scholars have long recognised that fainte, pause, and muance are not particularly informative as they appear in Le Champion des dames, and David Fallows has recently proposed that they are not to be associated with the contenance Angloise mentioned several lines later, in which case their interest withers away still further.8 The affective term "frisque" is more beguiling; like the aria dolce and aria virile of the Milanese agent's report, it offers some access, however imperfect, to a contemporary aesthetic and affective response when we are prepared to broaden the way we read.

7As observed in Picoche, Le Vocabulaire psychologique. 8 Fallows, "The contenance angloise," p. 196. Fallows proposes that the sense of the

key stanza be divided in the middle so that there is a break after the fourth line (i.e., after muance): "Car ilz [i.e., Guillaume Dufay and Binchois] ont nouvelle pratique / De faire frisque concordance / En haulte et en basse musique, / En fainte, en pause et en muance; / Et ont pris de la contenance / Angloise, et ensuy Dompstable; / Por quoy merveilleuse plaisance / Rend leur chant joieux et notable." Breaking the sense after muance makes it appear that Martin le Franc is praising Dufay and Binchois for a number of artistic innovations, only one of which is their openness to English influence. I concur with this intepretation, but to divide the stanza into two parts after "muance" actually emphasizes the importance of Dunstable's influence upon Dufay and Binchois, which is exactly the issue that prompts Fallows to counsel vigilance in his article. This is because the English translation which Fallows employs does not render por quoy in line 7 of the stanza. With those words restored, a translation of the four pertinent lines would read, "They have taken on the English way and have followed Dunstable, wherefore their music is so wondrously agreeable that it produces joy and fame" (emphasis added). I do not believe that this is the intended meaning. Martin le Franc's stanza comprises one simple, loaded sentence that adduces a series of reasons for the judgment which is framed in the last two lines; only the lightest punctuation is needed, and there is no call for a significant medial break. A second point of importance concerns the translation of the words "Et... ont pris de la contenance / Angloise." These are usually translated "They have taken on the English way," "They wear the English guise," or something of this kind. In the Middle French construction the de is partitive, however; whatever the contenance Angloise is, Dufay and Binchois have taken only some of it. This reinforces Fallows's main argument.




For a vocabulary of musical perception and appreciation used within a greater network of texts we naturally turn to medieval treatises on "music theory," most of them in Latin with a wide range of musical and intellectual concerns. Because these writings often contain precise information about the rules of counterpoint, nota- tional usage, musica ficta, and other such matters, they are vulnerable to brisk or even rapacious readings. As Ronald Woodley has observed in a recent article on Johannes Tinctoris, "the medieval [theorist] becomes at times reduced to the position of silent accomplice to an act of simple verification."9 Woodley endorses the view that medieval treatises on music should be read as "literature." While that project could take many forms, I share Woodley's opinion that the literariness of a treatise will often be concentrated at moments of intensified intertextuality: the places where an author generates meaning by rewriting words, phrases, or even whole passages from other texts. Unfortunately, the pioneering editions by Martin Gerbert (1784) and Edmond de Coussemaker (1864-76) do not incorporate much of the ancillary material required for such study,'o and in this regard the ambitions of editors contributing to the series Corpus Scriptorum de Musica have varied appreciably." Furthermore, such research is bound to proceed in a slow and uneven fashion, for some of the books that medieval clerics studied as a matter of course and absorbed to a deep level have few readers today. The results may readily be imagined and are easily illustrated by two egregious cases. The Doctrinale given to Guillaume Dufay as a choirboy was not correctly identified as Alexander de Villa Dei's Doctrinale until i993, although

9 Ronald Woodley, "Renaissance Music Theory as Literature: On Reading the Proportionale Musices of Iohannes Tinctoris," Renaissance Studies I (1987): 2 10.

SScriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra, ed. Martin Gerbert, 3 vols. (St. Blasien: Typis San-Blasianis, 1784; reprint, Milan: Bolletino Bibliografico Musicale, 193i; reprint, Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1963), hereafter abbreviated GS; and Scriptorum de musica medii aevi nova series a Gerbertina altera, ed. Edmond de Coussemaker, 4 vols. (Paris: A. Durand, 1864-76; reprint, Milan: Bolletino Bibliografico Musicale, 1931; reprint, Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1963), hereafter abbreviated CS. " To take an example that shall concern me directly, compare Luisa Zanoncelli, Sulla estetica di Johannes Tinctoris con edizione critica, traduzione e commentario del Complexus efectuum musices (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni, 1979) with the edition of the same text in Albert Seay, Johannis Tinctoris Opera Theoretica, 2 vols. in 3, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 22 (American Institute of Musicology, 1975 and 1978), vol. 2. Zanoncelli's annotations are usually more thorough and informative. For an example of some current work in this field see Ars Cantus Mensurabilis Mensurata Per Modos luris, ed. C. Matthew Balensuela, Greek and Latin Music Theory io (Lincoln, Nebr., and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). See the review of this edition by Susan Fast in Plainsong and Medieval Music 4 (1995): 209-17.




that text survives in a stupendous number of manuscripts and prints under that very title." The prologue to Franco of Cologne's Ars cantus mensurabilis contains a passage that has apparently never been identified as a paraphrase of material from a common schoolbook, the Disticha Catonis, followed by a direct quotation from the same source.'3 We seem to be heavily dependent upon chance discoveries and identifications.

At first glance, any attempt to explore the critical and aesthetic vocabulary of the medieval music theorists might seem an unrealistic project. "A complaint sometimes made about theorists," writes James Haar, "at least those active before the middle of the nineteenth century, is that their concerns are too exclusively prescriptive, that they rarely describe music, much less evaluate it."'4 Philippe Vendrix has recently declared that French theorists of the Renaissance (let alone those of an earlier period) excluded "auditory experience ... from the theoretical field."'5s Because of his extensive writings on many aspects of music, Johannes Tinctoris (d. 151 1) deserves a place of honor in any such inquiry. He seems to have heard and studied music by virtually all the significant Franco-Flemish composers of his generation, and his career particularizes some broad themes of cultural history in the last decades of the fifteenth century. Although a Fleming by birth, Tinctoris served King Ferrante of Naples, entering his household around 1472."6 Born in a world of northern scholasticism where the "chief objects of interest . .. were ... the

" Alejandro Enrique Planchart, "The Early Career of Guillaume Du Fay," this

JOURNAL 46 (1993): 341-68, at 351. This is an important identification. Note, however, that the work in question, a manual of accidence, syntax, quantity, and figures of rhetoric, almost universally bears the title Doctrinale in medieval sources, not Doctrina as given by Planchart. See Das Doctrinale des Alexander de Villa Dei, ed. Dietrich Reichling, Monumenta Germaniae Paedagogica 12 (Berlin: A. Hofmann, 1893; reprint, New York: B. Franklin, 1974). Planchart's argument that the gift of Alexander's Doctrinale to Dufay argues for his exceptional powers as a young scholar and Latinist gains support from the Trecento evidence pertaining to the Doctrinale, and other treatises, assembled in Paul F. Gehl, A Moral Art: Grammar, Society and Culture in Trecento Florence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 97- '3 Franconis de Colonia Ars Cantus Mensurabilis, ed. Gilbert Reaney and Andr6 Gilles, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 18 (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1974), 24, sentence 3. For Cato's text see Disticha Catonis, ed. Marcus Boas (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company, 1952), 4-

'4James Haar, "A Sixteenth-Century Attempt at Music Criticism," this JOURNAL 36 (1983): 191.

's Philippe Vendrix, "On the Theoretical Expression of Music in France during the Renaissance," Early Music History 13 (1994): 249-73-

16 Ronald Woodley, "Tinctoris's Italian Translation of the Golden Fleece Stat- utes: A Text and a (Possible) Context," Early Music History 8 (1988): 173-244.




Bible, the Church fathers, and the Christian life,"" he passed his years of eminence in the more humanistic climate of Naples. Ronald Woodley has tentatively suggested that the theological elements of Tinctoris's De inventione et usu musice signal the theorist's ambivalence toward the new "Renaissance" spirit of Italy of the 1470s and 1480s;'8 if this is true-and even if not-our understanding of the language Tinctoris uses will perhaps move forward when we know more about his reading of texts and Latin translations that are now virtually unread except by medievalists pursuing highly specialized research. The situation with Horace, Virgil, Cicero, and Tinctoris's other classical favorites is perhaps not quite the same. We accordingly need to know more about Tinctoris the reader of Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologiae, for example, or Tinctoris the scholar who chooses to cite a thirteenth-century scholastic translation of Aristotle by a Fleming rather than a fifteenth-century humanistic version by an Italian.'9 At present we know what Tinctoris tells us when he names the authors he quotes, but that is just the beginning. As we shall see, there are unsignaled quotations in Tinctoris's work, the sources he alleges are perhaps not always the ones he actually used, and beyond his specific borrowings we discern the largest web of intertext that the Western world has ever known: the heritage of Christian Latin. A few chance discoveries of the kind mentioned above now enable us to explore his use of that legacy a little further.

The thirteenth chapter of the Complexus efectuum musices contains a passage where Tinctoris offers something like a phenomenology of listening. Using language that can be described, without reserve, as scholastic, he distinguishes an inner perception of music from an outer perception:

namque quanto plus (quis) in hac arte perfectus est, tanto plus ab ea delectatur, eo quod naturam ipsius et interius et exterius apprehendat: interius quidem virtute intellectiva, qua intelligit debitam compositionem ac pronuntiationem et exterius potentia auditiva qua percipit concordan- tiarum dulcedinem.20

'7Jozef Ijsewijn, "The Coming of Humanism to the Low Countries," in Itinerarium Italicum: The Profile of the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of Its European Transformations, ed. Heiko A. Oberman and Thomas A. Brady, Jr. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), 275. This is a superbly documented study, but one whose judgments are colored by Ijsewijn's tendency to regard "the fascinating appeal of Classical Latin ... the music of its sounds ... the divine harmony of its phrase" (ibid., 194) as normative.

18 Woodley, "Tinctoris's Italian Translation," 202. 19 See below, n. 22. 20 Zanoncelli, Sulla estetica, 98. Seay, Johannis Tinctoris Opera Theoretica 2:173.




For the more proficient anyone may be in this art, the more will he delight in it, because he will perceive its nature both inwardly and outwardly: inwardly by an intellective faculty, through which he under- stands appropriate composition and performance, and outwardly by an auditive faculty, through which he perceives the sweetness of the consonances.

How are we to read this passage? The chapter of the Complexus that contains it begins with a quotation from the eighth book of Aristotle's Politics: "Museus ait esse hominibus delectabilissimum cantare, propter quod in conventus et deductiones rationabiliter assumunt ipsam tamquam potentem letificare" ("Museus says 'singing is man's greatest joy,' wherefore in gatherings and social relations they rationally believe it to be a powerful source of happiness")." The Latin shows that Tinctoris's material derives from the translation of the Politics prepared by William of Moerbeke and used by Thomas Aquinas, not the much more recent and humanist translation by Leonardo Bruni." Tinctoris may well have known the commentary upon the Politics which was begun by Thomas Aquinas and completed

2" Text (as throughout this article) from Zanoncelli, Sulla estetica, 96-98; corresponding to Seay, Johannis Tinctoris Opera Theoretica 2:172-73. See next note.

22 For Moerbeke's translation of the Politics see Aristotelis Politicorum Libri Octo cum vetusta translatione Guilelmi de Moerbeka, ed. Franz Susemihl (Leipzig: Teubner, i872). The translation of Leonardo Bruni (Aretinus) is available in various early printed editions. I cite Aristotelis Stagiritae Politicorum sive de Republica libri octo Leonardo Aretino interprete (Venice, 1568). There are three pertinent passages (in Zanoncelli, Sulla estetica, the passages from Aristotle are given in Greek with no reference to Moerbeke):

I. Zanoncelli, Sulla estetica, 84; Seay, Johannis Tinctoris Opera Theoretica 2:168: "ut inquit philosophus in octavo Politicorum, musica sit delectabilissimorum, quod musicarum concordiarum dulcedo gaudia eorum amplificet ratione concludimus." Seay presents everything from "musica" to "concludimus" as a quotation from Aristotle, whereas Tinctoris is only paraphrasing Moerbeke's "musicam autem omnes esse dicimus delectabilissimorum" (Susemihl, 350) and is borrowing only the genitive plural superlative delectabilissimorum. Bruni's version is quite different: "musicam vero omnes fatentur esse ex iocundissimis" (fol. I28v).

2. Zanoncelli, 94; Seay, 2:172: "facit illud philosophi in octavo Politicorum: Melodie Olimpi faciunt animas raptas." This is almost verbatim Moerbeke's "melo- dias Olympi ... faciunt animas raptas" (Susemihl, 352); Bruni is again different: "per Olympi modulationem manifestum est: ea nanque abstrahit animam et quodammodo rapit" (fol. 129r).

3. Zanoncelli, 96-99; Seay, 2:172-73: "Namque prout refert Aristoteles in octavo Politicorum, Museus ait esse hominibus delectabilissimum cantare, propter quod in conventus et deductiones rationabiliter assumunt ipsam tamquam potentem letificare." This entire passage, from "Museus" until the end, is taken verbatim from Moerbeke (Susemihl, 350), although in Seay's edition the quotation from Aristotle is incorrectly shown as ending with "cantare," twelve words too soon. Bruni is different: "Museus carmen dulcissimam rem esse mortalibus" (fol. I28v).




by his "disciple," Petrus de Alvernia;23 in some manuscripts, indeed, the translation by Moerbeke and the Aquinas/de Alvernia commentary appear together, as in a handsome copy of both texts produced in the early fourteenth century in the papal curia at Avignon.4 If Tinctoris knew his Politics in such a form, his eye might have settled upon this passage from Petrus de Alvernia's commentary upon Politics 8:

Est autem intelligendum, quod sonus harmoniae musicae primo compre- henditur ab auditu, et cum proportionaliter movet ipsum, et secundum mediam rationem, in qua constitutus est, delectationem inducit, et huic delectationi possunt participare omnes. Sed ulterius et in intentione soni harmoniaci intellectus considerat rationem et causam proportionis.... Istam autem cognitionem veritatis de proportionibus musicalibus conse- quitur delectatio intellectualis.25

It is to be understood that the sound of musical accord is first understood by the sense of hearing, and as [the accord] stirs [the sense of hearing] with its proportion and according to the rational principle by which the sound is composed, it induces pleasure, and everyone may share in this pleasure. But as a secondary conception the intellect considers the principle underlying the accord and the cause of the proportion.... Intellectual delight follows this recognition of the truth of musical proportions.

Petrus de Alvernia's distinction between auditus and intellectus is recognizably the potentia auditiva and virtus intellectiva of Tinctoris.'6 The scholastic terminology gives a sharp articulacy to both passages but does not change the fundamental simplicity and timelessness of the ideas expressed or implied: the more one knows about musical art, the more one adds the pleasure of understanding to the pleasure of sensation. In effect, both authors draw a form of the distinction between the judicium rationis and the judicium aurium made by many

23 On the manuscript tradition of the Aquinas/Alvernia material see Hyacinthe-F. Dondaine, "Le Super Politicam de Saint Thomas: Tradition manuscrite et imprimee," Revue des sciences philosophiques et thiologiques 48 (1964): 585-602.

4 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, lat. 2 io6. For a detailed description of this manuscript see Claudius Leonardo and Maria M. Lebreton, Codices Vaticani Latini. Codices 2o60-2117 (Rome: Biblioteca Vaticana, 1987), 184-87.

25 S. Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici in Octo Libros Politicorum Aristotelis Expositio, ed. Fr. Raymundus M. Spiazzi (Turin and Rome: Marietti, 1966), 423.

26 Especially as the terms potentia and virtus are synonymous in certain senses in the Summa theologiae. See A Lexicon ofSt. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Roy J. Deferrari, Sister M. Inviolata Barry, and Ignatius McGuiness (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1948), s.v. "virtus" (i).



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music theorists,27 and any attempt to assess Tinctoris's musical

sensibility in the light of his remarks must therefore be broadly based if wayward judgments are to be avoided."8

Any attempt to assess the nature of Tinctoris's reading must be similarly broad in scope. We do not know how many other medieval commentaries upon Politics 8 contain articulate and pertinent remarks to match those of Petrus de Alvernia, nor is it certain where we should look for works that use material of this kind but in a different context. Treatises on physiology, perhaps, or on the nature of sound? These gaps in our knowledge are unlikely to be filled for some time. So it would seem that the parallels between the two passages quoted above do not necessarily license us to imagine Tinctoris consulting a glossed copy of the Politics. In order to understand how he remembered texts,

27 In a recent study, "Sense and Sensibility in Late-Medieval Music: Thoughts on Aesthetics and Authenticity" (Early Music 23 [1995]: 299-312, at 300), Rob C. Wegman misconstrues this fundamental conception of the medieval music theorists. Wegman states that in "typical scholastic fashion, [Tinctoris] attempts to give the art of counterpoint an objective status, by appealing to 'the judgement of the ears', and constructing a rational framework of rules on that empirical foundation." The medieval theorists, however, had learned from Boethius, De Institutione Musica 5:2, among other passages, to regard the judgment of the ears with suspicion.

28 Wegman, "Sense and Sensibility," provides a classic example. Alluding to Tinctoris's passage several times, but not actually quoting it, Wegman proposes that Tinctoris advocates "a kind of appreciation in which inward and outward have collapsed into a single experience" (p. 303). It would surely be remarkable if Tinctoris were to advocate anything else. To commend "outward" understanding only would be to exalt the limitations of those who perceive beauty of sound alone, while to champion "inward" understanding only would be to undervalue the beauty of sound that Tinctoris clearly relishes. A further point requires comment. Wegman touches on the matter of Tinctoris's Christian faith very rarely, one instance being the passage where he briefly interrogates the concept of "transhistorical humanness." He proposes, as an aside, that Tinctoris would probably have regarded "transhistorical humanness" as "a euphemism for original sin: to be human meant nothing more than to be in need of Christ's mercy and God's grace" ("Sense and Sensibility," 312 n. 9, emphasis mine). This is mistaken, for original sin was not regarded as a simple stamp upon humankind, like the navel; it was held to account for most of what is eternally human, including Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, Anger, Pride, Avarice, and Envy. It therefore demonstrated a continuity of humanness from the Fall to the Judgment. Medieval music theorists were not reluctant to invoke a transhistorical humanitas, sometimes citing the dictum of Boethius that "nihil est enim tam proprium humanitatis, quam remitti dulcibus modis, adstringi contrariis" ("nothing is so natural to human kind as to be relaxed by sweet melodies and tensed by contrary ones"). See Anicii Manlii Torquati Severini Boetii De Institutione Arithmetica Libri Duo, De bIstitutione Musica Libri Quinque, ed. Godefridus Friedlein (Leipzig: Teubner, 1867; reprint, Frankfurt: Minerva, 1966), 179; and for a notable medieval citation The Lucidarium of Marchetto of Padua: A Critical Edition, Translation and Commentary, ed. Jan W. Herlinger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 77. The humanitas invoked here is broader than nos Christiani, or simply nos, terms frequently used by the music theorists.



READING AND REMINISCENCE I I

how he remembered sounds, and how he could bring the two kinds of reminiscence together, something more determinate is needed; we require examples that allow us to read what Tinctoris is reading so that we can read Tinctoris.

The theorist's well-known account of a musical performance he heard at Bruges may provide such an example. Certain phrases have been italicized here for reasons that will become clear below:

Neque preterire in animum venit: quod exiguo tempore lapso: duos fratres Orbos natione Flamingos: viros quidem non minus litteris eruditos quam in cantibus expertos: quorum uni Carolus: alteri Johannes nomina sunt. Brugis audiverim: illum supremam partem et hunc tenorem plurium cantilenarum: tam perite: tamque venuste hujusmodi viola consonantes: ut in ulla nunquam melodia: me profecto magis oblectaverim. Et quia rebecum (si sonitor artifex et expertus fuerit) modulos illis quam simillimos emittat: quibuslibet affectus spiritus mei (occulta quadam familiaritate) ad leticiam quam simillime excitantur: Hec itaque duo instrumenta mea sunt. mea inquam: hoc est quibus inter cetera: animus meus ad afectum pietatis assurgit: quaeque ad contemplationem gaudiorum supernorum: ardentissime cor meum inflammant. Quo mallem ea potius ad res sacras: et secreta animi solamina semper reservari: quam ad res prophanas et publica festa interdum applicari.29

Nor does it come to mind to pass over the fact that, a little while ago, I heard two blind brothers, both Flemings, at Bruges, one of whom is called Charles and the other John, men who are to be sure no less scholarly in Latin letters than proficient in music, the former playing the superius and the latter the tenor of many songs, harmonizing them together as skillfully and as beautifully on a viola of this kind, so that indeed I have never delighted more in any music. And because the rebec (if the player be a craftsman and proficient) can produce melodies as similar as possible to those [of the viola], with any [melodies] my emotions are aroused, [by the rebec], through a mysterious inner kinship, to as similar a delight as possible. Accordingly these two instruments are mine, mine I say, that is to say that through these, among other things, my mind rises to a feeling of devotion, and which most ardently inflame my heart to the contemplation of heavenly joys. For this reason I would rather have them be reserved always for sacred matters, and for private solace of the mind, than sometimes used for secular matters and public festivities.

The circumstantial details in this account (the Bruges setting, the names of the two players, the nature of what they played and how they

29 Johannes Tinctoris und sein unbekannter Traktat De inventione et usu musicae, ed. Karl Weinmann, corrected edition by Wilhelm Fischer (Tutzing: Hans Schneider Verlag, 1961), 45. I have retained Weinmann's reproduction of textual pointing in the print, and also retained his orthography, which normalizes the print's use of "i," "j," "u," and "v," and incorporates some classicizing changes (e.g., haec for hec).




played it, the type of instrument they used) give it an exceptional interest,3" and shed light upon Tinctoris's affective response to music, as Rob Wegman has recently emphasized:

Sometimes not even a language governed by convention can conceal from us the forcefulness of... [musical] experience. Note how Tinctoris, in the early 1480s, described the musical sensations he felt when hearing two bowed viols being played by expert musicians.... The conventions that governed Tinctoris's language-melodia, laetitia, Aristotle's [sic] 'secret association', the heavenly joys, the ardently inflamed heart-gave him a voice to express his deepest, innermost musical sensations.3'

Wegman maintains that "language governed by convention" could provide a medieval author with the resources to express profound musical pleasure and understanding. The most striking aspect of Tinctoris's passage, however, is not his use of language "governed by convention" but his concern to establish a specific and sustained allusion. The italicized words in the passage from the De inventione et usu musicae quoted above are all unsignaled borrowings from the discussion of musical beauty and its dangers in Augustine's Confessions. Tinctoris is ultimately indebted to Augustine when he expresses the keen and yet mysterious influence of musical beauty upon the human spirit by an inner kinship:32

Augustine, Confessiones 10:33, 49

omnes affectus spiritus nostri pro sui diuersitate habere proprios modos in uoce atque cantu, quorum nescio qua occulta familiaritate excitentur.

Tinctoris, De inventione 4:5

Et quia rebecum ... modulos illis quam simillimos emittat: quibuslibet afectus spiritus mei (occulta quadam familiaritate) ad leticiam quam simillime excitantur.

30 On these two brothers see Keith Polk, "Vedel and Geige-Fiddle and Viol: German String Traditions in the Fifteenth Century," this JOURNAL 42 (1989): 521. The title of the piece Cecus non judicat de coloribus often mentioned in this context is almost exactly the misreading of a passage in Aristotle's Physica that appears in at least one medieval music treatise. See Summa Musice: A Thirteenth-Century Manual for Singers, ed. Christopher Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 162-63: "Ut dicit Aristoteles, cecus non syllogizet de coloribus," and accompanying note.

3' Wegman, "Sense and Sensibility," 308. 32 Wegman (ibid.) unaccountably attributes this concept to Aristotle. The same

passage is cited, and attributed to Augustine, in Tinctoris's Liber de Natura et Proprietate Tonorum (Seay, Johannis Tinctoris Opera Theoretica 1:69). I am grateful to Bonnie J. Blackburn for the information that "species" here is an error in Seay's text and that the manuscripts have "spiritus," thus falling into line with Augustine's text.




all our emotions have their various modes in voice and chant and I do not know by what mysterious inner kinship they are aroused.

And because the rebec ... can produce melodies as similar as possible to these [of the viola], with any [melodies] my emotions are aroused, [by the rebec], through a mysterious inner kinship, to as similar a delight as possible.

Tinctoris is also indebted to Augustine when he relates that the music of the rebec moves him to return God's love:

Augustine, Confessiones 1o:33, 49

per oblectamentum aurium infirmior animus in afectum pietatis adsurgat.

through delight of the ears the baser soul may rise to a feeling of devotion.

Tinctoris, De inventione 4:5

hoc est quibus inter cetera: animus meus ad affectum pietatis assurgit:

that is to say that through these, among other things, my mind rises to a feeling of devotion.

This appears to be a moment of intensified intertextuality, but can we be sure that Tinctoris read the Confessions of St. Augustine entire, or even in part? The paths of reading and reminiscence here may be longer than they seem, for Tinctoris could have derived everything he has borrowed from the Confessions through the intermediary of Thomas Aquinas. The Dominican scholar's monumental Summa theologiae contains an article devoted to the question "whether chants should be employed in divine worship," incorporating all the material from the Confessions, duly attributed to Augustine, that Tinctoris would have needed for the allusions we have detected. Furthermore, Tinctoris knew at least this part of Aquinas's work, for he cites it twice in the Complexus efectuum musices, scrupulously giving the full reference each time.33

The writings of Tinctoris irresistibly evoke a mind that has been trained to make excerpts from texts and then to store them for future

33 Zanoncelli, Sulla estetica, 90 and II112; Seay, Johannis Tinctoris Opera Theoretica 2:170 and I77. As Tinctoris states, Aquinas's discussion is to be found at SS. Q. 9I. Art. 2. Virtually all the quotations from the Confessions in Tinctoris's surviving works are found in this article of the Summa theologiae. For those in the De inventione et usu musice, see Ronald Woodley, "The Printing and Scope of Tinctoris's Fragmentary Treatise De Inventione et Usu Musicae," Early Music History 5 (1985): 263-64; for those in the Complexus efectuum musices see Zanoncelli, Sulla estetica, 88 and 90o, corresponding to Seay, Johannis Tinctoris Opera Theoretica 2:169-70; and for the Liber de natura et proprietate tonorum, ibid., 1:69.




use. The Complexus effectuum musices, for example, is essentially a classified set of extracts from authorities plus a commentary; no other list of music's properties-and there are many of them in the pages of the medieval theorists-is adorned with so many citations. This is not to judge Tinctoris the reader, pejoratively or otherwise, for most authoritative Latin discourse in the Middle Ages proceeded by alleging the auctoritas of one brief phrase or extract from a canonical text and then moving on to another. But Tinctoris had studied law34 and must have been particularly well equipped to store authoritative passages in his memory; a passing reference in the Complexus efectuum musices reveals that it was second nature to him to recall a specific passage from the midst of a vast collection of decretals with a catenary mnemonic made from an incipit and a chapter heading: "Maiores. De baptismo."35 Such thinking might well encourage us to assume that the book Tinctoris consulted for the De inventione et usu musice was not the Confessions of Augustine but the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas.

This affects our perception of Tinctoris the reader. It is easy to imagine him making fluent use of a highly organized collection of authorities like the Summa theologiae; it would add more to our conception of his reading if we knew that he engaged with a book as exploratory and introspective as the Confessions. I now wish to suggest that he did. It is quite possible, of course, that Tinctoris knew the "musical" passages of Confessions 9 and Io but used Aquinas's article in the Summa theologiae as a useful anthology of key passages from those sections, helpfully embedded in a linking commentary of some importance to Tinctoris the Christian musician. We do not have to rely upon that supposition, however, for Tinctoris's experience of the Confessions cannot be entirely accounted for in terms of extracts quoted by Aquinas. Thanks to the discovery a decade ago of some "new" excerpts from Tinctoris's incomplete De inventione et usu musice, we can now establish that Tinctoris uses a passage from the Confessions

34 On the matter of Tinctoris's legal studies see Ronald Woodley, "Johannes Tinctoris: A Review of the Documentary Biographical Evidence," this JOURNAL 34 (1981): 217-48.

3s Zanoncelli, Sulla estetica, 78, where the passage is correctly identified; Seay, Johannis Tinctoris Opera Theoretica 2:I66, where it is neither identified nor correctly cited. For the passage to which Tinctoris is referring see Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. Aemilius Ludovicus Richter and Aemilius Friedberg, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Ex officina Bernhardi Tauchnitz, 1879 and i88i), vol. 2, col. 644. On the exercise of memory by medieval law students see James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London and New York: Longman, 1995), 52.




(9:7) which does not appear among the extracts used in the Summa theologiae at SS. Q. 91. Art. 2 as published in the Leonine recension:36

Hinc Augustino teste: Hymni et psalmi ut canerentur secundum morem orientalium partium (ne populus meroris tedio contabesceret) ab occidentalibus institutum est.37

Whence Augustine bears witness that the practice of singing hymns and psalms was instituted by the Western churches, after the fashion of the Eastern, lest the people should pine away with continual sadness.

Save for the two words "ab occidentalibus," this corresponds exactly to the text in the most recent and authoritative edition of the Confes- sions.38 Tinctoris appears to have had some other source for his knowledge of that book than Aquinas.

A closer reading of Tinctoris's Bruges reminiscence suggests that his engagement with the Confessions goes deeper than the selection of extracts from an intermediary text. It has been justly remarked that the Confessions "most eloquently demonstrated to the postclassical world that Christianity could provide both a reason and a method for examining one's personal history, the collection of unique though mundane experiences that make up an individual's life,"39 and when Tinctoris recounts the performance at Bruges he uses a first-person register that makes his own sensations surprisingly conspicuous: "audiverim ... me oblectaverim ... affectus spiritus mei ... Hec instrumenta mea sunt, mea inquam ... animus meus ... cor meum." Medieval Latin writings on music contain few passages where an author seems more intent upon exploring "personal history ... the mundane experiences that make up an individual's life" than this. The theme of memory dominates Confessions Io; Tinctoris is also remem- bering, and in a fashion remarkably sustained and intense for a medieval treatise on music. Augustine had been stirred by the

36 Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici Opera Omnia iussu impensaque Leonis XIII P.M. Edita (Roma: Ex Typographia Polyglota, 1882- ). The Summa theologiae is in volumes 4-12; for SS. Q. 9I. Art. 2, see volume 9, 295-97. On the manuscript sources and prints used for this section of the Leonine edition see volume 8, xxviii, and volume 9, v-xvi. In addition I do not find this passage from Augustine in the 1467 edition of the Secunda secundae alone (Mainz: Peter Schoeffer), nor is it in a series of sixteenth-century prints of the Summa theologiae entire (1520, 1552, 1569, and others).

37 Woodley, "Printing and Scope," 264, lines 168-70, and there unidentified. 38 Sancti Augustini Confessionum Libri XIII, ed. Lucas Verheijen, Corpus Chris-

tianorum Series Latina 27 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981), 142. 39 Linda Georgianna, The Solitary SelfI bzdividuality hi the Ancrene Wisse (Cam-

bridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), I.




sublimity of the chants he heard at Milan, Tinctoris by the music he heard at Bruges; both men recognize that they have experienced an aesthetic pleasure that raises some potentially troubling issues about the way they listened. Augustine finds that he sometimes attends to the beauty of chants in a fashion that impairs his concentration upon the words being sung; "In these matters," he confesses, "I sin unawares." Tinctoris has been ravished by the music of certain instruments, but although they move him above all others to an afectus pietatis, the repertory he enjoyed at Bruges was apparently drawn from the polyphonic secular song (cantilenarum). Thus, although he was delighted by what he heard on that occasion, he remains troubled by the kind of gathering, and perhaps to some extent by the kind of repertory, which gave him that pleasure. "I would rather have [the viola and rebec] reserved always for sacred matters, and for private solace of the mind, than sometimes used for secular matters and public festivities," he declares, as if to register that something at Bruges was not quite right. The relationship between reading and reminiscence is an intriguing one here, for we may suspect that Tinctoris's memory of his experience at Bruges becomes available to him for description and interpretation as he recognizes how parts of it resemble some of Augustine's concerns in the Confessions.40 Like Petrarch, perhaps, who makes similar but much more extensive use of the Confessions in his letters, Tinctoris infuses his own writing with the diction of Augustine because "he wishes to react and speak like Augustine, no doubt in order to resemble him, to become a better Christian than he is."4' We may also suspect that Tinctoris broaches something here which, insofar as he suspects that many readers will not discern the allusion, is intimate. Perhaps we should regard this as a confession, in the dual sense of a profession of faith and an admission of guilt, for Tinctoris's decision to allow his mind to move within Augustine's makes conscience an issue in the matter of musical delight.

If we are looking for ways in which Tinctoris makes a text mean something in terms of another text, then we could scarcely have been more fortunate than to find him reading the Confessions. The intelli- gence and richness of that work, not to speak of its ability to satisfy our twentieth-century concern with introspection, make it a welcome

40This use of Augustine need not be considered in terms of the humanist technique of imitatio. Tinctoris's procedure needs no more explanation than the phenomenon of reminiscence found throughout Christian Latin.

4' Evelyne Luciani, Les Confessions de Saint Augustin dans les lettres de Pitrarque, ?tudes Augustiniennes (Paris, 1982), 8I: "[il] veut agir et parler comme Augustin, sans doute pour lui ressembler, pour devenir un chretien bien meilleur qu'il n'est."




addition to the sources for understanding Tinctoris as listener, writer, and reader. But the intensely author-centered nature of the Confessions prompts the question of how we are to trace meaning when there is no such authorial presence-when to read a word or phrase aloud is like speaking it into an echoing well. Consider, for example, a passage in the Liber de arte contrapuncti where Tinctoris names Ockeghem, Regis, Busnois, Caron, Faugues, Dunstable, Binchois, and Dufay, and then invokes the beauty of their music in language that refers to the way their compositions smell:42

Quorum omnium omnia fere opera tantam suavitudinem redolent ut, mea quidem sententia, non modo hominibus heroibusque verum etiam Diis immortalibus dignissima censenda sunt.

Almost all of their works are perfumed with such sweetness that, in my opinion, they are to be judged most worthy not only for men and demigods but also for the immortal gods.

How are we to read such language? Rob Wegman offers a sharply "musical" answer to that question by relating it exclusively to consonance: "It is only in this respect [i.e., of consonance] that a written composition might have been 'perfumed with sweetness.' "43 But consonance definitely does not provide the only terms in which this expression may be construed, although it may appear to do so if we restrict our attention to the things that Tinctoris explicitly and obviously discusses. The most striking aspect of Tinctoris's language here is that he invokes the sense of smell to denote something perceived by the sense of hearing; we shall see that in doing so he uses words with a long history.

The association Tinctoris makes between musical beauty and fragrance may reveal fundamental patterns in perception. Both sounds and aromas rely upon transmission through the air, and they dissipate in similar ways. In the twelfth century, Gerald of Wales had already noticed that "duobus enim ad delicias anima reficitur fomentis et recreatur; odora suavitate scilicet, et sonora. Est siquidem tam melodia dulcisona, quam odor suavissimus, cibus ejus" ("the soul is refreshed and restored to delights by two palliatives: that is to say sweetness of smell and sweetness of sound, for sweet-sounding melody, like the

42 Seay, Johannis Tinctoris Opera Theoretica 2:12. Since there is no transitive verb in Modern English corresponding to redoleo it is necessary to change the construction in translation.

43 Wegman, "Sense and Sensibility," 301.




most fragrant odor, is its food").44 Nonetheless, the more systematic thinkers among Tinctoris's fellow musicians, both his predecessors and his contemporaries, assumed that auditus, the sense of hearing, and visus, the sense of sight, were the supreme senses because they enabled the mind to gather the materials of knowledge and wisdom. Only in special circumstances, that is to say, would one wish to evoke an object of hearing in terms of a lesser sense, such as smell. These thinkers were following Aristotle's teaching.4s The Summa musice, a plainchant treatise of the thirteenth century, declares that "ut dicit Aristoteles, inter quinque sensus duo tantum reperiuntur disciplinares, scilicet visus et auditus" ("as Aristotle says, among the five senses there are only two found to be teachable, that is to say sight and hearing").46 This gives a highly abbreviated but broadly accurate report of Aristotle's opinions, but other theorists were .impelled by their enthusiasm for music toward a more biased reading of the Philoso- pher. Engelbert of Admont (d. 1331) declares that "auditus autem est sensus maxime pertinens ad disciplinam et doctrinam ac scienciam ipso mediante apprehendendam sicut dicit Philosophus primo Meta-

physice circa principium" ("hearing is the sense that pertains most to study, to teaching, and to the acquisition of knowledge by its mediation, as Aristotle says near the beginning of the first book of the Metaphysics"),47 but there Aristotle gives supremacy to sight. Johannes de Muris, an author with an altogether sharper mind than Engelbert of Admont, makes a case for both auditus and visus, quoting directly from Robert Grosseteste's translation of the Ethics in the process:

Et si bestialium voluptatum, per quas gustus et tactus irrefrenatus impetibus intellectum deiciunt, non immerito vituperentur excessus,

44Topographica Hibernica, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J[ohn] S. Brewer, James F. Dimock, and George F. Warner, Rolls Series, 8 vols. (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1861-91; reprint, New York: Kraus), 5:155.

45 The key texts are Parva naturalia (De sensu V), De Anima 2:9, and Metaphysica 1:1. There is no modern edition of a Latin text of the De sensu; the relevant passage is quoted from Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College 379/452, in Page, Summa Musice, 224; for the Metaphysica see Metaphysica, Lib. i-x, xii-xiv, Translatio Anonyma sive "Media," ed. Gudrun Vuillemin-Diem, Aristoteles Latinus xxv 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 7. Aristotle's teaching is frequently encountered; see, for example, the teaching of an anonymous Master of Arts toward the middle of the thirteenth century in Anonymi, Magistri Artium (c. 1245-125o) Lectura in Librum de Anima a quodam discipulo reportata, ed. Renatus A. Gauthier (Rome: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1985), 373: "Visus et auditus magis conferunt ad scienciam et doctrinam aliis sensibus."

46 Page, Summa Musice, 162. 47 Admont, Bibliothek der Benediktinerstiftes, Cod. 397, fol. 30v, corresponding

to GS, 2:339.




iuxta illud Aristotelis primo ethycorum: multi quidem igitur bestiales vitam pecudum eligentes, non propter hoc visus et auditus, qui sunt puriores et amplioris ministerii commoditate intellectui subserviunt, ordinata et moderata dampnantur oblectamenta.48

Although the excesses of brutish desire-with which the taste and touch, unbridled, confound the understanding with their assaults-are rightly to be condemned, as Aristotle says in the first book of the Ethics "therefore many bestial persons choose the life of brutes," this does not mean that the structured and moderated pleasures of sight and hearing, which are purer and serve the intellect with the convenience of broader advantage, are to be condemned.

Notice that Johannes de Muris mentions all the senses here save smell, perhaps because of an uncertainty about its status that makes him reluctant to speak of it as a sense prone to "bestialium voluptatum ... excessus," like taste and touch. Such uncertainties have character- ized the exploration of olfaction throughout history and account for the almost total want of any scholarly literature concerning the operation of the sense of smell in the past.49 Medieval authors were content to be guided through this difficult terrain by Aristotle, who declares that olfaction is more affective than rational, for "its proper object is inseparably bound up with, and so is confused with, pleasure and pain."'s Those who considered the matter took the Aristotelian

48Johannis de Muris Musica Speculativa, ed. Susan Fast, Musicological Studies 61 (Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1994), 2, where the translation used by de Muris is not identified. For the relevant passage in Grosseteste's translation of the Ethics, see Ethica Nicomachea. Translatio Roberti Grosseteste Lincohziensis sive "Liber Ethicorum" A. Recensio Pura, ed. Renatus A. Gauthier, Aristoteles Latinus xxvi 1-3, Fasciculus Tertius (Leiden and Brussels: E. J. Brill and Descl6e de Brouwer, 1972), 145-

49 For notable exceptions see Alain Corbin, Le Miasme et lejonquil, translated by M. Koshan Berg as The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the French Social Imagination (London: Picador, 1994); and Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, eds., Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994). There are few studies of olfactory experience in the Middle Ages. See R. Palmer, "In Bad Odour: Smell and Its Significance in Medicine from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century," in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. William F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 61-68; Elizabeth Sears, "Sensory Perception and Its Metaphors in the Time of Richard de Fournival," ibid., i7-39; and Georges Vigarello, Le Propre et le sale, translated by Jean Birrell as Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

5so De Anima 2:9. Compare the statement of the Augustinian friar Paul of Venice (d. 1429), a prolific logician and commentator upon the Aristotelian corpus: "homo ... non percipit odores ad quos non sequatur letitia vel tristitia" ("mankind ... does not perceive odors from which no pleasure or sadness comes"). Pauli Veneti in libros de




position of Thomas Aquinas, holding that "we cannot discern so well in a matter of odor and odoriferous things... because it is not manifest to us what a fragrance may be, as it is manifest what a sound is, or a visible thing."s 5Viewed in the light of these texts, Tinctoris's decision to praise the sweet odor of music by Guillaume Dufay and other composers seems to shift the grounds of appreciation away from the ratio, disciplina, and sapientia associated with sound to the sense of smell, which has distinctions that cannot be named.

Medieval music theorists rarely invoke fragrance to express the nature of musical sensation. Most of their references to olfaction also call the other four senses to witness that different things please different people but that all people are pleased by variety.s2 These analytical observations have little or no affective charge. Other comparisons across the senses are usually structured as similes. A passage in the Ars nova material describes the semitone as "condimen- tum totius cantus" ("the seasoning of all music"),53 a comparison which belongs in quite another category to Tinctoris's "perfumed with sweetness," part of a passionate assessment of certain composers and their work. The most striking images that cross the boundary

Anima explanatio (Venice, 1504), 86v-87. This is part of a long and important chapter on the phenomenology of fragrance. The fundamental work on the life and writings of Paulus is still P. David Aurelius Perini, Bibliographia Augustiniana cum notis Biographicis Scriptores Itali, 4 vols. (Florence: Tipografia Sordomuti, 1938), s.v. "Venetus, Fr. Paulus."

5' Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici in Aristotelis librum De anima commen- tarium, ed. Angelo M. Pirotta (Turin and Rome: Marietti, 1959), 121.

5s2 See, for example, Guido of Arezzo in the Micrologus: "Nec mirum si varietate sonorum delectatur auditus, cum varietate colorum gratuletur visus, varietate odorum foveatur olfactus, mutatisque saporibus lingua congaudeat" ("Nor is it any wonder if the hearing is charmed by the variety of sounds, since the sight rejoices in a variety of colors, the sense of smell is gratified by a variety of odors, and the palate delights in changing flavors"). Guidonis Aretini Micrologus, ed. Joseph Smits van Waesberghe, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 4 (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1955), 159; translation from Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music: Three Medieval Treatises, trans. Warren Babb, ed. Claude V. Palisca (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 69. Compare Engelbert of Admont: "Cuius suavitatis racio est quia sicut equaliter commensurate proporciones contrariarum differenciarum in saporibus delectant gustum et in coloribus visum et in odoribus olfactum sic et in vocibus et in sonis delectant et demulcent auditum" ("The reason for this sweetness is that just as balanced degrees of different qualities delight equally the sense of taste with flavors, sight with colors, and smell with odors, so they delight and soothe hearing with sounds"). Admont, Bibliothek der Benediktinerstiftes, Cod. 397, fols. I9v-2o, corresponding to GS, 3:320; and Bragard, Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum Musicae

4:15. s3 Philippi de Vitriaco Ars Nova, ed. Gilbert Reaney, Andr6 Gilles, and Jean

Maillard, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 8 (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1964), 2 I.




between hearing and another sense move from hearing to sight. Engelbert of Admont explains that "vocatum est chromaticum a chromate quod est corpus lucidum secundum variatum aspectum ad obposicionem lucis apparens diversorum colorum sicut sunt penne pavonis et quidam panni serici" ("chromaticum derives from chromate, that is to say a brilliant object which, when placed before a light, has a variegated appearance of different colors, like a peacock's tail and certain silken cloths").54 A brief plainsong treatise which introduces a tonary in a twelfth-century sourcess declares that vox continua, the sound of liturgical recitation on a monotone, "est ubi sic se vocum sequitur ordo, ut unius finis alteriusque principium discerni facile non possit, sicut fit cum in celesti arcu colorum spectamus habitudines. Sic enim rubeus cernitur ut tamen ejus initium vel finis comprehendi non valeat" ("is where the sequence of the notes follows on in such a way that the end of one cannot easily be discerned from the beginning of another, as happens when we look at the colors of the heavenly arc; red is visible, but we cannot discern where it begins or ends"); this has been adapted from Boethius.s6 These similes and analogies all exploit a likeness between things which the reader holds apart in the mind in order to compare them; they do not assimilate one sensation to another. The movement across boundaries of sense, or synaesthesia, employed by Tinctoris when he uses the words suavitudinem redolent, assimilating beautiful sound to beautiful scent, seems to be rare in medieval music theory.57

54 Admont, Bibliothek der Benediktinerstiftes, Cod. 397, fol. 3 v, corresponding to GS, 2:341.

ss Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS lat. i05o8, printed, with the tonary, in CS, 2:78-I I15, as Guidonis Aretini De modorum formulis et cantuum qualitatibus. See Joseph Smits van Waesberghe, Peter F. Fischer and Christian Maas, eds., The Theory ofMusic from the Carolingian Era up to 1400oo, I, R6pertoire International des Sources Musicales (Munich and Duisburg, i96i), II2-13.

s6 CS, 2:79, and for Boethius, De Institutione Musica, ed. Friedlein, 5:5; English translation in Calvin M. Bower, Fundamentals of Music: Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 167. Boethius (who is not, of course, referring to liturgical recitation) is comparing the colors of the rainbow to the effect of tightening a kithara string while plucking it, so that "the sounding is continuous between the low pitch and the high." I am grateful to Edward Roesner for drawing my attention to the Boethius passage.

57 A brief passage in "the most frequently published theory treatise in Renaissance Italy," a manual of solmization and the modes first published in 1499, provides the only other instance I have encountered of the expression "perfumed with sweetness" in a medieval work of music theory and gives a pertinent illustration of how Tinctoris's metaphor draws the reader into the broader reaches of Christian Latin. At the close of this treatise, the compiler suddenly shifts away from the technical matter of his work in a most unexpected manner. Under the heading "Sancta Brigida" (St.




But does Tinctoris really seek to accomplish this? Classical Latin knew a metaphorical sense for redoleo (literally "to emit a scent"), as witness Cicero's reference to "orationes redolentes antiquitatem" ("speeches redolent of antiquity");s8 Tinctoris's suavitudinem redolent might conceivably be a dead metaphor. Another passage from the ninth book of Augustine's Confessions suggests the possibility of a different interpretation, however. Here Augustine refers again to the beauty of the music he heard at Milan:

Et tamen tunc, cum ita flagraret odor unguentorum tuorum, non currebamus post te ideo plus flebam inter cantica hymnorum tuorum olim suspirans tibi et tandem respirans.59

Yet even then, when the fragrance of your perfumes was so sweet, we did not run after you [Song of Songs 1:3] wherefore I wept all the more among the chants of your hymns sighing for you and at length breathing it in.

Two passages in Tinctoris's writings suggest that a synaesthesia of sound and smell may have colored his sense of how one might approach the ineffable nature of musical beauty with metaphorical language. In the prologue to the Proportionale musices, Tinctoris

Bridget of Sweden, d. 1373), he gives a brief account of the manner in which chant should be performed: "Clericorum cantus non sit remissus, non fractus, non dissolutus sed honestus et gravis et uniformis et per omnia humilis. Psalmodia plus redoleat suavitatem mentis, humilitatem quam et devotionem quam aliquam ostenta- tionem ... Hic modus cantandi revelatus fuit a Domino Jesu Christo Sanctae Brigidae viduae, ut habetur in suo volumine et in Libro Extravaganti cap iiii." Anonymus Compendium Musices, Venetiis 1499-1597, ed. David Crawford, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 33 (Neuhausen-Stuttgart: American Institute of Musicology, 1985), 56. Here is Tinctoris's metaphor cast in virtually identical words. The reference at the end of the extract to St. Bridget's Liber extravagancium signals a passage where the phrase appears again. Concerning the chant to be used in her order, St. Bridget declares: "Imitentur illorum cantum, qui Cartusienses vocantur, quorum psalmodia plus redolet suauitatem mentis humilitatemque et deuocionem quam aliquam ostentacionem." Den Heliga Birgittas Reuelaciones Extrauagantes, ed. Lennart Hollman, Samlingar utgivna av svenska Fornskrift-Sillskapet, Ser. 2. Latinska Skrifter (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells Boktryckeri AB, 1956), Ir8.

s8 For comparable usages in the theorists compare the Instituta patrum de modo psallendi (? ca. 1200) in GS, i:6 and 8, the latter condemning "histrioneas voces" which "plus redolent vanitatem et stultitiam quam religionem," and John Hothby's "multi alii pene innumerabiles idem faciunt ad libitum animi sui quae tamen omnia nullam artem redolent" (Johannis Octobi Tres Tractatuli Contra Bartholomeum Ramum, ed. Albert Seay, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica io [Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1964], 74). No doubt instances could be multiplied.

s9Verheijen, Confessionum Libri XIII, 143. This passage is closely related to another (ibid., I41) which appears among the excerpts from the Confessions used in the Summa theologiae at SS. II. Q. 91. Art. 2.




presents a brief survey of musical endeavor from the ancients to the greatest composers of his own generation; there he describes music in the service of the Christian faith as an art for which "ferventissime multi incenduntur" ("many are most keenly ardent").6" Although the evidence seems unpromising at this point, I propose that there may be a specific nuance in this use of incenduntur here which lies with the idea of perfume produced by burning an aromatic substance. The derivation of "incense" (Latin incensum) from incendo cannot alone substantiate this gloss upon incenduntur, so let us consider the second instance, a passage which concludes the Complexus effectuum musices, also a text with important and appreciative references to Dunstable, Dufay, Binchois, and other composers. Here Tinctoris declares that anyone who studies the art of music "affectu flagrantissimo melodie studebit."6' I refrain from offering a translation for a moment, for this passage poses an intriguing problem of interpretation. The literal senses offlagrans include "flaming" or "blazing," and the metaphorical senses "ardent" or "vehement." This suggests that "affectu flagrantissimo melodiae studebit" means "one will study music with the most ardent feeling," or something of that kind, perhaps Tinctoris's principal meaning. At this point, however, a brief but striking chapter in the history of Late Latin opens, for in medieval usage the verb flagro, "to burn," often crosses with fragro, "to be fragrant.'"6' The concept of a sweet perfume produced by burning an aromatic substance such as incense may have helped to precipitate this semantic convergence, which only required rhotacism in the stem syllable of flagro, one liquid consonant replacing another (flagro/fragro), to become a phonological convergence.63 Viewed in this light, Tincto-

6o Seay, Johannis Tinctoris Opera Theoretica 2a:Io. 6" Zanoncelli, Sulla estetica, II2; Seay, Johannis Tinctoris Opera Theoretica 2:177. 62 If this section of the Proportionale alludes to Cicero's De oratore as suggested by

Woodley ("Renaissance Music Theory as Literature," 216), then "incenduntur" in the passage from the Proportionale just considered corresponds to "fraglaverunt" in Cicero. For the confusion offlagro andfragro, see the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, ed. R. E. Latham, D. Howlett, et al. (London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1975-), s.v. "fragrare"; Lexicon Latinitatis Nederlandicae Medii Aevi, ed. J. W. Fuchs and Olga Weijers (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977-), s.v. "i. fragro." Texts are not rare in which variant manuscripts substitute forms offragro, flagro, and fraglo for one another. See the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v. "fragrare," and the following: Verheijen, Confessionum Libri XIII, 142, variant for line 32; and Pascasius Radbertus: De Corpore et Sanguine Domini, ed. Beda Paulus, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis i6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1969), 115, variants for line 122.

63 There are also numerous cases of rhotacism in the second, unaccented syllable only, whence fraglo.




ris's "affectu flagrantissimo melodiae studebit" carries a secondary nuance: "one will study music with the most fragrant sensation."

The primary reason, however, for seeking more than a purely musical understanding of Tinctoris's locution suavitudinem redolent is that it can be found throughout Christian Latin. St. Ambrose, in his account of the six days of Creation, Hexameron, declares that Christ, like the freshwater fish "thymallus," redolet suavitatem.64 This is Ambrose on the fragrance of prayer:

anima ... inhaereat Dei Verbo, et ascenderit sicut vitis propago, in superiora se subrigens, velut fumus natus ex igni, atque alta petens, tum praeterea bonis operibus flagret. Odor autem ille orationis piae redolet suavitatem, quae dirigitur sicut incensum in conspectu Dei.6s

The soul ... will cling to the Word of God, and will have ascended like the increase of the vine, drawing itself upward, like smoke born of flame, and seeking higher things, as it would burn thereafter with good works, for the fragrance of devout prayer exhales a sweet odor which is led, like incense, into the sight of God.

Several themes here are familiar: the image of aromatic clouds, as of incense, rising heavenward like prayer; the potential for confounding flagro "to burn" with fragro "to be fragrant"; and the reference to prayer which redolet suavitatem. Another instance is provided, four centuries later, by Pascasius Radbertus (d. 859) in his treatise on the body and blood of Christ:

Nec igitur, carissime fili, ista paruipendas uitae, ubi tanta redolent sacramenta. Habes quam a longe tantus patriarcha sensit in filio flagran- tiam [var: fragrantiam] huius mysterii. Ait enim "Ecce odor filii mei sicut odor agri pleni cui benedixit Dominus." Quia profecto in isto agro corporis Christi thesaurus absconditus uernat floribus inmarcescibilibus et redolet suauitatem odoris.66

Nor, therefore, most dear son, should you belittle the things of life where so many sacramental things smell sweet. You possess that which so great a patriarch perceived from afar through his son, the conflagration [variant the fragrance] of this mystery. For he says: "Behold the smell of my son is as the sweet odor of a ripe field, which the Lord hath blessed" [Genesis 27:27]. Because, indeed, in this field of the body of Christ a hidden treasure flourishes with flowers that cannot fade and which exhales a sweetness of odor.

64 Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris: Migne, 1845), vol. I4, col. 2o8. 6s Ibid., col. 517 (De Isaac et anima liber unus). 66 Paulus, Pascasius Radbertus, I '5. I retain Paulus's orthography.




Another four centuries on we find Peter Abelard on the mystic dove:

Quanta mansuetudine vel innocentia iste Agnus Dei, sicut de ipso Baptista protestatur, praeminuerit, universa ejus opera loquuntur atque praecepta, quae tantam suavitatem redolent charitatis, ut nec inimicis liceat irasci.(p

All the works and teachings of this Lamb of God, as John the Baptist bears witness of him, proclaim his surpassing gentleness and innocence, which emit such a sweet fragrance of love that it is not even allowed to be angry with one's enemies.

Tinctoris's description of music by Guillaume Dufay and his contemporaries as "perfumed with sweetness" therefore takes on a new meaning. Beyond translation, but not beyond paraphrase, some of the senses that might have figured prominently in a fifteenth-century reading of Tinctoris's passage can be reconstructed. Alfonsus Tosta- tus, a delegate to the Council of Basel and bishop of Avila in 1449, represents common doctrine when he declares that the Old Testa- ment does indeed refer to the sweet odor of sacrifice by fire that pleases God, but olfaction is no part of God who has no corporeal being;"6 to say that the fragrance of a sacrifice has suavitas for Him means He deems it acceptable: "id est placuit Deo illud sacrificium." Tinctoris's declaration that the works of the great composers suavitudinem redolent therefore means that they perform the first effect of music as described in the Complexus effectuum musices: music pleases God. The compositions of Dufay, Dunstable, and other composers please God because He discerns both obedience and sacrifice therein: the sacrificum laudis of the psalmist.69

67 Patrologia Latina, vol. 178, col. 416. 68 Alphonsi Tostati Hispani Abulensis Episcopi opera omnia, I 3 vols. (Cologne, i6i 3),

i:I39: "Deus enim non odorat, cum non sit corporeus in essentia sua." 9Ibid., 3:301, commenting upon Leviticus 17:6 which includes the words "et

adolebit adipem in odorem suavitatis Domino": "Dicitur autem iste odor suauitatis referendo ad deuotionem offerentium, et obedientiam ad mandata diuina, in quibus Deus delectatur, quia ista sunt sacrificia cordis nostri" ("Odor suauitatis refers to the devotion of those who are offering the sacrifice, and to their obedience to divine commands, in which God delights, because these are the sacrifices of our heart"). Compare the pertinent remarks in the Instituta patrum de modo psallendi: "sancti patres nostri antiqui docuerunt et instituerunt subditos suos, praecipientes eis hunc ritum modulandi servare, talemque formam cantandi sive psallendi in choris suis tenere, per hanc asserentes et affirmantes Deo gratum esse, et placere sacrificium laudis nostrae; Angelis vero acceptabile et iocundum" (GS, i:5, my italics).




Another possible layer of meaning for suavitudinem redolent evokes the broader context in which Tinctoris praises the great composers of his lifetime. In addition to the passage I have been discussing, Tinctoris also names the leading composers of the current tempestas (the word is used in both instances) in the prologue to the Proportionale musices,70 where the generic affiliations of the references to his contemporaries emerge clearly. He assigns these musicians their place within a highly abbreviated account of technical progress in music from antediluvian times to the Christian era, when that progress has become involved with the consolidation and growth of the liturgy. The medieval music theorists show themselves acutely conscious of this historical process, as we would expect. Some of the great figures in the early church, Tinctoris declares, instituted the use of music in worship, while others composed hymns and chants; subsequently, Christian princes sought to expand the holy liturgy (ampliare culturm divinum), following the example of David. This process of addition and expansion has been furthered by the achievements of composers in his own lifetime. Now comes the famous passage: a new art has arisen, indeed, "whose fount and origin, if I may so put it, was held to have been among the English, of whom Dunstable was the chief, whose contemporaries were in France, Dufay and Binchois, who were immediately followed by the moderns Ockeghem, Busnois, Regis and Caron."7' Tinctoris conceives these musicians as composers of sacred music above all who have made a surpassingly fine effort to augment divine worship.7 We may be reminded of a passage in the great Bible commentary of Nicholas de Lyra,73 interpreting the spices and aromatic trees of Ecclesiasticus 24, I7-23:

Sicut cinnamomum etc. Hic consequenter ponitur dilatatio fame divini cultus in Hierusalem augmentati ... que quidam fame diffusio significa-

70 Seay, Johannis Tinctoris Opera Theoretica 2a:Io. 7' Ibid. 7 This is in keeping with Tinctoris's view that the composition and performance

of sacred music surpasses all other music by as much as God surpasses his Creation (Zanoncelli, Sulla estetica, 83; Seay, Johannis Tinctoris Opera Theoretica 2: 68).

73 Tinctoris cites a passage from Nicholas de Lyra's commentary upon the psalms in the De inventione et usu musice (Weinmann, Johannes Tinctoris, 32). Nicholas de Lyra's commentary survives, in whole or in part, in many manuscripts, and was the first work of its kind to be printed (i47i-72, in Rome). F. Stegmiiller, Repertorium Biblicum MediiAevi, i i vols. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas Instituto Francisco Suairez, i940-80), vol. 4, Commentaria: Auctores N-Q, 5827- 5994-




tur hic per bonum odorem ... Et ponuntur hic plures arbores et species aromatice ... hic solum introducuntur ad designandum diffusionem bone fame per suavitatem sui odoris.74

Like cinnamon, etc. This accordingly refers to the spread of the renown of the holy liturgy augmented in Jerusalem ... the which increase of fame is signified here by good fragrance ... and many trees and aromatic plants are set down here ... they are only introduced here to indicate the diffusion of good repute [of the holy liturgy] through the suavitas of its smell.

This passage plays with the literal sense of Latin odor "smell" and the transferred sense "fame," but while the importance of such wordplay to medieval commentators should not be minimized, the imaginative and associative wellspring of Nicholas de Lyra's writing lies deeper than that. Surely there is a controlling metaphorical conception in these lines: the suavitas of a fragrance, spreading from its source, drifting like incense or the smoke of sacrifice,75 reaching further and further afield, resembles the consolidation and the spread of the Christian faith and its liturgy. According to Nicholas de Lyra, indeed, the sweet odors are only named in this passage from Ecclesi- asticus to "indicate the diffusion of good repute [of the holy liturgy]." Such a potent conception of sweet odor would have suited Tinctoris's praise of the great composers whose sacred music had helped to "ampliare cultum divinum."

In order to give any account of these meanings it is necessary to separate them, but they are experienced together, as the scents compounded into a powerful aroma are perceived as one. None of them, however, is likely to quell the modern reader's suspicion that when Tinctoris refers to the fragrance of beautiful music by Dun- stable, Dufay, and Binchois he evokes a synaesthesia which has a meaning not so easily paraphrased. We may also suspect that a quality of musical perception operates here that is not easily accommodated to the "inward" and "outward" model of musical understanding that Tinctoris himself (following a long tradition) describes in his writings. One may read in Plato, and one may determine for oneself, that the sense of smell is quintessentially affective: an odor pleases or it does

74 I have consulted the text in the six-volume Biblie iam pridem reinovate ... complectens pentateuchum: una cum glosa ordinaria: et litterali moralique expositione Nicolai de Lyra (Basel, 1501-2), 3:412-13.

7s The Vulgate Bible contains twenty-nine instances of the word suavitas, eighteen of which are forms of the collocation odor suavitatis and suavitatem odoris. Many of these refer to the odor of a burned sacrifice.




not please.76 A fragrance may induce profound and complex feeling, but it does not readily engage rational judgment77 nor can it be easily described, if described at all. As Paul of Venice declares in the commentary upon Aristotle's De Anima: "color has determinate and known distinctions, such as white and black; sound has low and high, but there are distinctions of smell that cannot be named."'8 No doubt this phenomenology was intuitively understood by many in the Middle Ages; it was explicitly recognized by those who had studied Aristotle's Parva naturalia (De sensu), De Anima 2:9, or the first book of the Metaphysica, all available in Latin translation by the mid-twelfth century.79 Taken together with the intoxicating references to sweet odor in the Song of Songs, the subject of a large and intense literature of commentary, these texts help to explain why medieval theologians frequently associate olfaction with a form of religious experience so exalted that neither language nor any means of human reason can encompass it.

Let us briefly consider a single example, drawn from the writings of an important French theologian whose name is well known to musicologists in another connection: Pierre d'Ailly (d. 142o), bishop of Cambrai, and a churchman who may have exerted a positive but indirect influence upon the early stage of Guillaume Dufay's career. A major figure at the Councils of Pisa and Constance, a trained musician, and the leading French theologian of his generation, Pierre d'Ailly composed a treatise on contemplation, the Compendium con- templationis,

' in his sixties. The third part of this work concerns "the spiritual senses": the five inward senses which correspond to the five

76 Plato, Timaeus, 66d. 77 See Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, 82-83, where there is a striking passage

from Jean Franqois Saint-Lambert's annotations to his own poem Les saisons (Am- sterdam, 1769, at pp. 34-35): "L'odorat nous donne les sensations plus intimes, un plaisir plus immediat, plus ind6pendant de l'esprit, que le sens de la vue: nous jouissons profond6ment d'un odeur agr6able, au premier instant de son impression" ("Odor gives us the most intimate sensations, a more immediate pleasure, more independent of the mind than the sense of sight; we get profound enjoyment from an agreeable odor at the first moment of its impression").

78 Pauli Veneti in libros de Anima explanatio, 87: "color enim habet suas differencias expressas et notas, sicut albedinem, nigredinem. Sonus et acutum et graue; sed odor suas differencias habet innominatas."

79 See above, n. 45. 8o The text is printed in Petrus de Alliaco: Tractatus et Sermones (Stra3burg, 1490;

reprint, Frankfurt/Main: Minerva, 1971). The material paraphrased here may be found at sig. d.i-d.3. On Pierre d'Ailly and the young Guillaume Dufay see David Fallows, Dufay, revised ed. (London: J. M. Dent, 1987), 16-17; and Planchart, "The Early Career of Guillaume Du Fay," 342.




outward and bodily ones. Spiritual hearing is especially associated with potentia anime memorativa (3:7) and spiritual sight with potentia anime intellectiva (3:8). Material presented above shows us that Pierre d'Ailly here follows Aristotle by presenting sight and hearing as the senses which precipitate understanding (potentia intellectiva) and memory (potentia memorativa). The theologian takes a different view of smell, touch, and taste, however, for he accords all of these senses a potentia anime affectiva: they are concerned with states of feeling (3:9-I ). Furthermore, Pierre d'Ailly unforgettably describes the characteristic motion of spiritual olfaction as an act of desiring (actum desiderandi). As a hungry man smells food and so senses that he approaches something he desires, so the sense of spiritual olfaction draws the soul toward God with a feeling of intense desire.8'

Pierre d'Ailly's discussion suggests a pattern for the three passages by Tinctoris examined in this article. In the first, Tinctoris distinguishes between an "inward" and an "outward" understanding of music: the pleasure in surface sound which is accessible to all, and the delight of informed understanding which is accessible to a few. This distinction appears to vaunt the status of intellection, and yet there is a tension in Tinctoris's writing between the theorist and the Christian musician: between the scholar who longs to rationalize the things that make music beautiful, as far as that may be accomplished, and the Christian who believes, with Augustine, Aquinas, and innumerable other teachers, that the highest response to music is an affectus pietatis, a feeling beyond intellection-a savor of God. There is a second source of tension, however, for behind all learning stands the spectre

s8 Compare two further texts, both of the thirteenth century. (I) The second commentary upon the Song ofSongs by Thomas Gallus, in Thomas Gallus Commentaires du Cantique des Cantiques, ed. Jeanne Barbet (Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin, 1967), 69. Comparing the nine orders of angels to nine states of spiritual awareness, Thomas Gallus declares that the supreme state is one in which intellectus is lost; only afectus remains. In this exalted state one senses the sweetness (suavitas) of God like fragrances which elude intellection: "superintellectuales ... fragrantias." (2) The commentary upon the Song of Songs by the Augustinian Giles of Rome (d. 1316), archbishop of Bourges and a "disciple" of Aquinas. Giles argues that there is a distinction, in the way one may come to know God, between the intellectual urge to study, which often leads the student astray into learning for its own sake, and the urge to make progress "in loving and sweetness" (dulcedo). The intellectual path "gives delight to hearing and sight," but the path of loving and sweetness "gives delight to taste, smell and touch." Once again the sense of smell is associated with the affective and nonintellective. Giles's commentary, falsely attributed to Thomas Aquinas, is printed in the Venice edition (Editio altera Veneta) of the works of Thomas Aquinas (Venice, 1745). For a census of manuscripts, see Stegmiiller, Repertorium Biblicum Medii Aevi, vol. 2, Commentaria: Auctores A-G, 9rr. I am grateful to Dr. Denys Turner for drawing my attention to these two texts.




of intellectual pleasure for its own sake. In a section of the Summa

theologiae that Tinctoris cites twice, Aquinas says that "whoever studiously makes music for the sake of pleasure, his soul is drawn away from the things which are sung."8' This is exactly the concern which Augustine expresses in the Confessions, and we may wonder whether Tinctoris's quotations from that book in the De inventione et usu musice give special resonance to a note of anxiety that he sounds about the pleasure, both aesthetic and intellectual, that he enjoyed when he heard the two string players in Bruges play secular pieces. Tinctoris's wish that the viola and rebec, which so ravished him on that occasion, be reserved "for sacred matters and for private solace" and not used "for secular matters and public festivities" amounts to a censure of the

very occasion which so delighted him. As with Augustine, there is an issue of conscience involved: a question of what right listening is. In the passage where certain composers are praised for writing music that is "perfumed with sweetness," Tinctoris perhaps invokes a way of

conceiving the affectus pietatis that music may induce. The music of the Franco-Netherlandish masters could not be sensed with the bodily and so outward sense of odor, one of Pierre d'Ailly's sensus exterioris hominis, but it could certainly possess a sweet smell for the spiritual and so inward sense of smell, one of the sensus interioris hominis. Here the issue of "inward" and "outward" understanding of music is being re-expressed and indeed transformed.

Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University

ABSTRACT

In his Liber de arte contrapuncti Johannes Tinctoris (d. 1511) invokes the beauty of music by Binchois, Dufay, and other composers, referring to the way their compositions smell. How are we to assess the meaning of such an unexpected idea? Questions such as this are easily overlooked in modern studies of the medieval music theorists, for the technical information those writers impart encourages us to read their works in a severely purposeful fashion. The treatises of Tinctoris, a voluble and most informative writer, are a case in point. The project of reading Tinctoris's work in a "literary" manner might take many forms, but one kind of literariness is concentrated at moments of heightened intertextuality. Such entanglements of sense have first to be discovered before they can be assessed, however, and the process of tracing intertextualities may be an arduous one since the books that medieval clerics studied as a matter of course have few readers today. Some

82 "Ad quintum dicendum quod per cantum quo quis studiose ad delectandum utitur, abstrahitur animus a consideratione eorum quae cantantur." See above, n. 33.




newly identified intertexts in Tinctoris allow us to see the intricacy of the weave in several unexpected cases. Tinctoris consults a commentary upon Aristotle's Politics; he secretly rewrites a passage from Augustine's Confessions, bringing reading and reminiscence together in a moment of self-scrutiny; finally, as he invokes the sweet odor of music by Dufay and other composers, he brings reading and reminiscence together with an impulse that is hard to convey now that the language of learning does not resonate with the diction of biblical and patristic Latin: it is a kind of rapturous allusion which crosses and re-crosses the boundaries embodied in modern terms such as "piety," "beauty," and "learning."



Reading and Reminiscence: Tinctoris on the Beauty of Music

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