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distant); an influx of professionals; territorial behaviour to reinforce social status; and collective interests dependent on forums, networks and allegiances. If we are to view the gentry not just as a construct of the historian but as an active social impulse, then music, as a cultural practice or even a commodity in fifteenth-century England, is an undeniably attractive area for study. As an index of
Even though studies of medieval films include articles, books and entire conferences, critics tend to be silent on the subject of music in films about the medieval period, even though music is a conventional part of narrative cinema. Films use their soundtracks to engage audiences’ emotional responses, to sell CDs and to provide a musical counterpoint to the images on screen. This chapter highlights
This edited collection explores how knowledge was preserved and reinvented in the Middle Ages. Unlike previous publications, which are predominantly focused either on a specific historical period or on precise cultural and historical events, this volume, which includes essays spanning from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, is intended to eschew traditional categorisations of periodisation and disciplines and to enable the establishment of connections and cross-sections between different departments of knowledge, including the history of science (computus, prognostication), the history of art, literature, theology (homilies, prayers, hagiography, contemplative texts), music, historiography and geography. As suggested by its title, the collection does not pretend to aim at inclusiveness or comprehensiveness but is intended to highlight suggestive strands of what is a very wide topic. The chapters in this volume are grouped into four sections: I, Anthologies of Knowledge; II Transmission of Christian Traditions; III, Past and Present; and IV, Knowledge and Materiality, which are intended to provide the reader with a further thematic framework for approaching aspects of knowledge. Aspects of knowledge is mainly aimed to an academic readership, including advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, and specialists of medieval literature, history of science, history of knowledge, history, geography, theology, music, philosophy, intellectual history, history of the language and material culture.
Moderation is a major theme of John’s writings and is duly emphasised from the beginning of the Policraticus . Book I looks at a number of pursuits favoured by members of the court: hunting, music, gaming, acting and magic. In each instance, John emphasises the necessity of moderation. As noted in Chapter 2 , John regarded the intention with which an action was performed as an essential indication of its worth; actions which are motivated by the pursuit of pleasure are inappropriate, while those which are rationally considered and motivated by a desire to live
does not prove, that the cult had been suspended before that date. In any case, the cult flourished in Reggio for a minimum of a bit over three centuries. Some specialists in the history of Parma came across both Alberto of Villa d’Ogna and the wine porters incidentally from the 1970s on, for example in writing about the local wine trade or about their city’s fire fighters or about its conservatory of music. How they encountered our saint and his line of work in studying either of the first two topics, wine or fire fighting, is self
‘living waters’ of divine teaching come into human breasts from heaven, through holy books.63 When speech does exit our bodies, into the external world, it leaves as sound, and in the case of poetic performance the sound is a blend of human and nonhuman noise. Indeed, Jager draws our attention to the Anglo-Saxon practice of holding the harp or lyre near the chest. Positioned thus, ‘the harp’s sound would have come from near the pectoral region traditionally considered the source of physical words and the repository of verbal art’.64 A combination of words and music
, follies or dissipation’. From his university in Montpellier about 1300, Bernard de Gordon warned that children under twelve should not read the bawdy twelfth-century comedy Pamphilus (a basic school text in many European schools), and he condemned indecent songs, evil music and dances as corrupting influences. As supervisor of several schools in Paris, Gerson was equally worried about corrupt images. In
bachelor’s degree traditionally covering the seven liberal arts: the trivium of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric, and the quadrivium of music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. Education in adolescence was also exclusively male. Females were barred from universities, and visits from female family members were discouraged or heavily supervised. The social background of the intake remained
from Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538–92), probably one of its founding members, who came to be elected its head for life in 1568. 19 Lomazzo was a man of many talents, having been schooled in writing, painting, design, and music; he became a poet and essayist as well as a painter. He took a peculiar sort of Grand Tour by travelling through Italy as far south as Messina but also by heading north to see contemporary art in Flanders and Holland. Even while becoming so cosmopolitan Lomazzo developed a strong interest in local culture and tradition. One of his earliest
traditional studies in medievalism. So, for instance, Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale , with its deliberate anachronisms (medieval courtiers rocking to the music of Queen, the invocation of the Nike swoosh on William Thatcher’s armour), ‘spurns nostalgia in preference for a “new and improved alternate universe”’. 31 One could certainly reject nostalgic longing for the past in the study of works like A