guy of saint-denis and the compilation of texts about ... · responsible for the harley anthology...

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Guy of Saint-Denis and theCompilation of Texts about Musicin London, British Library, Harl. MS. 281

Constant J. Mews, Catherine Jeffreys, Leigh McKinnon,Carol Williams, and John N. Crossley1

The British Library manuscript Harl. 281 provides a carefully structured anthology of texts,copied by a single hand, about the theory of music as interpreted in Paris in the earlyfourteenth century.2 The first of its two sections (ff. 5r–38v) opens with what is presented asthree distinct books by Guido of Arezzo (d. after 1033):3 the Micrologus, the Trocaicus (asynthesis of various Guidonian texts, primarily the Regule rythmice), and a third book onmusic in the form of a dialogue, in reality the anonymous Dialogus de musica once attributedto Odo and often linked to Odo’s oeuvre. These three books are expanded by additionalmaterial and followed by a fourth text, the so-called Tonale Beati Bernardi, an anonymoustonary that provides a Cistercian interpretation of plainchant performance concerns. Thesecond section of Harl. MS. 281 (ff. 39r–96v) contains three more recent texts, possiblyintended to create a group of seven. The first of these is the Ars musice of Johannes deGrocheio (Jean of Grouchy), presented here (ff. 39r–52r) without identification of its

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1 Research for this article was partly supported by Australian Research Council Discovery project grantDP0555959 pursued at Monash University, Australia. The authors would like to extend their gratitude toRodney M. Thomson for discussion of many ideas in this paper.

2 Harl. MS. 281 was described by Humfrey Wanley (1672–1726) in A Catalogue of the Harleian Collection ofManuscripts, purchased by Authority of Parliament, for the Use of the Public; and preserved in the British Museum[Commenced by H. Wanley, and successively continued by D. Casley, W. Hocker, and C. Morton, with an index by T.Astle], 2 vols (London, 1759[–1763]). Wanley’s description is reproduced in A Catalogue of the HarleianManuscripts, in the British Museum: With Indexes of Persons, Places, and Matters (London, 1808), vol. i, p. 104. Themanuscript is also described in Guidonis Aretini, Micrologus, ed. Jos. Smits van Waesberghe, Corpus Scriptorumde Musica, iv (s.l.: American Institute of Musicology, 1955), pp. 28–29 and Christian Meyer, Manuscripts from theCarolingian Era up to c. 1500 in Great Britain and in the United States of America. Part 1: Great Britain (Munich,1992), pp. 74–78.

3 While some names, such as Johannes de Grocheio and Petrus de Cruce, will be referred to by their Latin form, inaccordance with musicological practice, English forms will be used for certain others for the sake of clarity (forexample, to distinguish Guido of Arezzo from Guy of Saint-Denis).

Guy of Saint-Denis and the Compilation of Texts about Music in London, British Library, Harl. MS. 281

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author.4 No other copies are known of the two final works in the anthology, the relativelyshort Tractatus de tonis (ff. 52v–58r) by Petrus de Cruce, cantor of Amiens cathedral in thelate thirteenth century, and the much more elaborate Tractatus de tonis (ff. 58v–96r) of Guyof Saint-Denis.5 This latter treatise, edited for the first time in 1998 by Sieglinde van deKlundert, makes significant use of Grocheio’s Ars musice and the writings of Guido ofArezzo, and refers positively to the activities of Petrus de Cruce.6 Who, then, wasresponsible for the Harley anthology as a whole, and what was the reasoning behind thissynthesis, which brings together both traditional and more contemporary thinking aboutmusic current in Paris in the late thirteenth century?

The Harley anthology might be compared to other compilations from the period, perhapsmost immediately with the Tractatus de musica (Paris, BnF lat. 16663) prepared by theDominican theorist Hieronymus de Moravia (Jerome of Moray) sometime after 1271.7

Hieronymus also combined ancient and modern authorities, in his case giving pride of placeto the De institutione musica of Boethius, quoted and summarized in extenso within histreatise and paired with extensive citation from a range of more recent treatises onmensurable music.8 This study presents evidence that Harl. MS. 281 was commissioned andcorrected by Guy of Saint-Denis, author of the final treatise in the anthology, and that the

4 Only one other manuscript is known of the Ars musice (Darmstadt, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek MS. 2663,ff. 56r–69r, from the Carthusian house of Saint Barbara, Cologne, s. xiv). The attribution of the Ars musice toJohannes de Grocheio occurs only in the Darmstadt manuscript. The Darmstadt copy appears to derive from theexemplar of Harl. MS. 281, rather than from the Harley copy itself. Both the Darmstadt and Harley versions ofthe Ars musice are reproduced in facsimile in Ernst Rohloff, Die Quellenhandschriften zum Musiktraktat des Johannesde Grocheio: Im Faksimile herausgegeben nebst Übertragung des Textes und Übersetzung ins Deutsche, dazu Bericht,Literaturschau, Tabellen und Indices (Leipzig, 1972). In this publication, Rohloff (pp. 171–2) dates the Ars musice to1275, correcting an older view that it was from around 1300, initially formulated by Johannes Wolf, ‘DieMusiklehre des Johannes de Grocheo: Ein Beitrag zur Musikgeschichte des Mittelalters’, Sammelbände derInternationalen Musikgesellschaft, i (1899), pp. 65–130 at p. 67, defended by Heinrich Besseler, ‘Zur “Ars musicae”des Johannes de Grocheo’, Die Musikforschung, ii (1949), pp. 229–31, and widely repeated in musicologicalliterature. A new edition and translation of the Ars musice, based on Harl. MS. 281, is being prepared by the authorsof this article for publication in the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (TEAMS) series (Kalamazoo,MI: Medieval Institute Publications, forthcoming).

5 Petrus’s tonary is discussed in Glenn Pierr Johnson, ‘Aspects of Late Medieval Music at the Cathedral of Amiens’,2 vols (PhD diss., Yale University, 1991), vol. ii, pp. 479–81. On Guy of Saint-Denis, see Anne Walters Robertson,The Service-Books of the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis: Images of Ritual and Music in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1991),pp. 113, 133 and 334–5.

6 Guy mentions Petrus de Cruce twice: see Guido von Saint-Denis, Tractatus de tonis 2.1.102 and 2.8.75, ed.Sieglinde van de Klundert, 2 vols (Bubenreuth, 1998), vol. ii, pp. 78 and 133. Van de Klundert comments on Guy’suse of Grocheio in her first volume, vol. i, pp. 45–55.

7 There are also some other compilations with which Harl. MS. 281 can be compared, for example, the so-calledBerkeley Manuscript, a late fourteenth-century composite of music theoretical learning edited in toto in Oliver B.Ellsworth (ed., trans.), The Berkeley Manuscript: University of California Music Library, ms. 744 (olim Phillipps4450) (Lincoln, 1984). Another example is Marie Louise Göllner, The Manuscript Cod. lat. 5539 of the BavarianState Library (Neuhausen–Stuttgart, 1993).

8 Hieronymus de Moravia, Tractatus de musica, ed. Simon Cserba (Regensburg, 1935). Michel Huglo identified‘a fratre ieronimo moravo’ as referring to Moray in Scotland, where there was a Dominican community from1232, in ‘La Musica du Fr. Prêcheur Jérome de Moray’, Max Lütolf zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. B. Hangartnerand U. Fischer (Basle 1994), pp. 113–16, reprinted in Huglo, La Théorie de la musique antique et médiévale(Aldershot, 2005), with addenda, p. 12. Hieronymus’s Tractatus includes extensive citations from the Demusica mensurabili of Johannes de Garlandia (John of Garland), the Ars cantus mensurabilis of Franco ofCologne and the Musica mensurabilis of Petrus Picardus, possibly the same person as Petrus de Cruce; seeJohnson, ‘Aspects of Late Medieval Music’, vol. ii, pp. 520–33.

9 The three paper leaves measure 135 x 95 mm (f. 1), 170 x 65 mm tapering to 45 mm (f. 2) and 185 x 135 mm(f. 3). Ff. 1 and 3 are mounted on guards, and f. 2 is mounted on paper. References to individual folios in thepresent study follow the modern foliation. The earlier foliation, ff. 1–93, is recorded in the 1808 catalogue ofHarleian manuscripts in the British Museum: A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts, vol. i, p. 104. Thatfoliation omitted f. 89, but the numbering is corrected for the final folios. The modern foliation is used inAugustus Hughes-Hughes, Catalogue of Manuscript Music in the British Museum, 3 vols (London, 1906–1909;repr. 1964–1966), vol. iii, pp. 298, 300 and 302–4.

10 This misidentification occurs in Christian Meyer, Manuscripts from the Carolingian Era, p. 74.11 The twelve quires are: 16 (ff. 5–10), 28 (ff. 11–18), 38 (ff. 19–26), 48 (ff. 27–34), 54 (ff. 35–38), 68 (ff. 39–46),

78 (ff. 47–54), 810 (ff. 55–64), 98 (ff. 65–72), 108 (ff. 73–80), 118 (ff. 81–88), 128 (ff. 89–96).12 These seven quires are: 2 (f. 18v), 3 (f. 26v), 4 (f. 34v), 6 (f. 46v), 8 (f. 64v), 9 (f. 72v) and 11 (f. 88v).13 Most folio signatures have been erased, but they are still visible for quires 7 (ff. 47r –50r), 10 (ff. 73r–76r) and

11 (ff. 81r –84r) and in part for quires 4 (f. 30r) and 12 (ff. 91r and 92r).14 Staves with notation are included on ff. 9v, 10v, 12v, 19r, 20r, 24r, 36r–38r, 53r–58r, 79r and 80r–96v.


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contents of the manuscript as a whole reflect the same concerns found in Guy’s Tractatus detonis, namely how traditional monastic teaching about music could creatively interact withmuch more contemporary perspectives. We suggest that it may have been prepared forstudents studying at the College of Saint-Denis in Paris, located near the Dominican houseof St Jacques, home of Hieronymus de Moravia, before shifting to the Quai des Augustinsby 1281. Our study also explores the subsequent history of Harl. MS. 281, particularly inthe sixteenth century, when it came into hands of Jean Gosselin (c. 1505–1604), keeper ofthe French Royal Library during the wars of religion. Gosselin’s possession of themanuscript, which subsequently passed through the hands of Christopher Wren Jr and thenSir Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, indirectly sheds light on an otherwise mysterious phasein the history of the French Royal Library between 1561 and 1593.

The Redaction of Harley 281: A Manuscript of Saint-Denis?

The main text of Harl. MS. 281 was first foliated as ff. 1–93 in the sixteenth century but wasrefoliated after 1808 as ff. 1–96, taking into account three paper leaves (ff. 1–3) and a parchmentflyleaf (f. 4) carrying annotations by Jean Gosselin.9 The parchment flyleaf, which is mountedon a guard, had been previously misidentified as part of the gathering system for folios 5–96and would have been the original flyleaf to the volume.10 Folios 5–96 are preserved onparchment of relatively inferior quality with a number of buckled folios and lacunae. Foliosmeasure 220 x 145 mm (the result of post-sixteenth-century retrimming) comprising twelvequires preceded by a singleton (f. 4).11 There are framed catchwords for seven quires,12 and thereare pencilled folio signatures on the first half of each quire on the recto side.13 The written spacemeasures 150 x 100 mm, with 40 lead-ruled text lines. Where present, musical staves occupythree text lines, with a fourth line used for text underlay, for up to ten staves per folio.14

Rubrication, musical illustrations, text highlighting and musical staves are in red. Red ink isalso used to cross out text on ff. 5–38v; from f. 39r, text is predominantly crossed out inbrown ink.

The text and rubrication on ff. 5–96 were entered by a single scribe in a neat, low-gradegothic rotunda bookhand of clear Italianate influence. Indications of this influence includean even, vertical script, short ascenders and descenders, and distinctive letter shapes, suchas a round ‘d’ with a left-leaning, near horizontal ascender and a ‘trailing s’ at the end of



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words.15 The main scribe worked with a second individual,16 who wrote in what we mayterm the scholar’s hand. This scholar was evidently familiar with the detail of music theory;he was responsible for minor corrections throughout the manuscript and major correctionson ff. 66v–69r, 70r and 89r–v to the Tractatus de tonis of Guy of Saint-Denis.17 By contrast,few corrections were carried out by the main scribe. Comparison of the word ‘etiam’ froma musical illustration on f. 13v with the same word from a correction made in the scholar’shand on f. 68v (fig. 1) indicates that this scholar also entered the musical illustrationsincluded on various folios between ff. 7v and 33r as well as text under staves. Capital lettersin the scholar’s hand also correspond to the hand that fills in, or writes over, letters that referto note names in the text (fig. 2).

Although the script of the main text is characteristic of a scribe of Italian origin, themanuscript includes distinctly Parisian pen decoration comprising red and blue flourishedinitials with red and blue single-side borders on the left (fig. 3). There are also alternate redand blue initials (flourished in red for blue initials and blue for red initials), and alternatered and blue paraphs. Music in Harl. MS. 281 is notated using a system of square notationtypical of Parisian plainchant sources of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries(fig. 4). Features of this system include red staves, standardized directions of note heads,

15 For a description of this script as found in the mid-thirteenth century, see Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse,‘Wandering Scribes and Traveling Artists: Raulinus of Fremington and his Bolognese Bible’, in Jacqueline Brownand William P. Stoneman (eds), A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of Leonard E. Boyle, O.P. (Notre Dame,Indiana, 1997), pp. 32–67 at p. 48. This script is also described by Albert Derolez, The Palaeography of GothicManuscript Books: From the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 103–111 and 119–121.Derolez notes that, in this script, the ‘i longa or j was only used after short i’, which is the case in Harl. MS. 281;Derolez, The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books, p. 106.

16 Glenn Pierr Johnson describes this second individual as someone ‘who made various emendations’ in Harl. MS.281 but implies that this individual was not connected to the production of the manuscript; Johnson, ‘Aspects ofLate Medieval Music’, vol. ii, p. 481.

17 The corrections are detailed by van de Klundert, Tractatus de tonis, vol. ii, pp. 141–74.


Fig. 2. Pitch letter names in the scholar’s hand scattered throughout the text on f. 6r.

Fig. 1. The word etiam in a musical illustration on f. 13v (left) and on f. 68v (right).


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diamond-shaped descending notes, vertical strokes within staves and use of the plica toindicate liquescence.18 The plica strokes added to the podatus, clivis and scandicus resemblethe plica used in thirteenth-century Parisian mensural notation.19 The notation seems tohave been undertaken by the scholar responsible for text underlay and musical illustrations.

Distinctly Parisian flourished initials with folio-length, left single-side borders occur atnine points in Harl. MS. 281,20 but at only one point among the twelve quires of themanuscript does a new quire correspond with one of these initials. This occurs on f. 39r, atthe opening of Johannes de Grocheio’s Ars musice. This effectively divides the manuscriptinto two parts: the first, on ff. 5r–38v, is itself divided into three books (libri), each openingwith a flourished initial with folio-length borders. The first of these is Guido of Arezzo’sMicrologus (‘Little discourse’) on ff. 5r–16v with certain interpolations. The second, on ff.16v–24v and introduced as a trocaicus (‘trochaic verse’), is made up of a combination ofvarious texts of Guido of Arezzo, namely the Regule rythmice, Prologus in antiphonarium andextracts from the Epistola ad Michaelem. The third book, on ff. 24v–38v, is attributed toGuido of Arezzo but is in fact the Dialogus de musica with interpolations,21 extracts from theEpistola ad Michaelem and certain other additional matter. The Hindu-Arabic numeral ‘3’ iswritten at the top of the recto side of ff. 25–34 (that on f. 25 as ‘3us’ [tercius] in the hand ofthe main scribe). This refers not to the third gathering but to this being the third book inthe collection of Guidonian texts. It is not clear why there is no similar identification tobooks one and two of those attributed to Guido of Arezzo. A rubric on f. 34r (‘Expliciunt


18 Harl. MS. 281 incorporates a left-facing virga with a short, right-hand descending stroke, a left-facing podatus andscandicus, and a porrectus with a left-facing initial note. The climacus is also left facing with diamond-shapeddescending notes. The clivis faces right, and the torculus incorporates a thick, vertical stroke with a left-facing finalnote; both the clivis and torculus have an initial right-hand descender. Liquescence is indicated using the ascendingand descending plica. A close contemporary comparison is afforded by BnF lat. 911, a manuscript dominated bychants for the feasts of Saint Louis and thought to have been compiled in Paris between 1300 and 1310. A featureof both manuscripts is the use of the plica to indicate liquescence and the absence of a custos at the end of lines. Afacsimile of f. 3r of BnF lat. 911 is reproduced in Cecilia Gaposchkin, ‘Philip the Fair, the Dominicans, and theLiturgical Office for Louis IX: New Perspectives on Ludovicus Decus Regnantium’, Plainsong and Medieval Music,xiii (2004), pp. 33–61 at p. 43. Michel Huglo discusses the use of the plica as a sign of liquescence in Parisianplainchant sources in ‘Notated Performance Practices in Parisian Chant Manuscripts of the Thirteenth Century’,in Plainsong in the Age of Polyphony, ed. Thomas Forrest Kelly (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 32–44 at pp. 37–8.

19 In the foreword to his edition of the Tractatus de tonis of Petrus de Cruce, Denis Harbinson notes the influence ofmensural notation on the notation used in Harl. MS. 281 for Petrus’s tonary (this notation is the same as for therest of the manuscript) but does so through the flawed identification of the punctum with the brevis and the virgawith the longa, and he argues that this is ‘would appear to be confirmed by use of both the plica brevis (two types)and the plica longa’. As there are no strokeless, single-note signs in Harl. MS. 281, there is no sign that could beidentified as a punctum. The virga is written consistently with a short, right-hand stroke and therefore does notcorrespond to the longa. Moreover, both strokes on ascending and descending plicas are the same length,precluding the possibility of either representing the plica longa or the plica brevis.

20 These nine points and the texts they open are: 5r – the Micrologus group of texts; 16v – the Trocaicus group of texts;23r – the Epistola; 24v – the Dialogus group of texts; 34r – the Tonale Beati Bernardi; 39r – the Ars musice; 52v –Petrus’s Tractatus; 58v – part one of Guy’s Tractatus; and 76v – part two of Guy’s Tractatus.

21 The Dialogus de musica is prefaced by the rubric, ‘Incipit tercius liber eiusdem guidonis in musicam sub dialogo’,f. 24v. Another theorist to make this attribution was Jacques of Liège, who stated that, for example, ‘Guido vero insuo Dialogo dicit sic’, and ‘sicut ait Guido in dialogo suo …’; Jacobus Leodiensis, Speculum musicae 6.36 and 6.43,ed. Roger Bragard, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica iii, 7 vols in 8 (s.l.: American Institute of Musicology,1955–1973), vol. vi, pp. 90 and 106.



Fig. 3. Manuscript decoration on f. 52v.



Fig. 4. Musical notation on f. 53v (from Petrus de Cruce’s Tractus de tonis).


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toni guidonis aretini’) is followed immediately by the rubric: ‘Incipit alia ars de tonis permodum dyalogi que a quibusdam intitulatus sub nomine beati Bernardi’, introducing theTonale Beati Bernardi. The opening of both the Epistola on f. 23r (among the second groupof Guidonian texts) and the Tonale on f. 34r is marked by similar flourished initials (fig. 5).

The second part of the manuscript is also in three parts, set off with similar flourishedinitials, preserving three works from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, two ofwhich are unique to Harl. MS. 281. Grocheio’s Ars musice might seem out of place in thisanthology, as unlike all the other works in the manuscript, the discussion of musica thereinis not confined to plainchant theory. Nonetheless, in the Tractatus de tonis, Guy of Saint-Denis quotes Grocheio, without identifying him by name. That Guy is the only theoristknown to cite Grocheio hints at the possibility that he knew its author personally. Guy alsointimates that he was familiar with the singing of Petrus de Cruce, the other authorrepresented in the second part of Harl. MS. 281.22 Apart from his own Tractatus, the secondpart of Harl. MS. 281 comprises the work of theorists with whom Guy of Saint-Denis islikely to have had some sort of personal connection.

Although the script in this manuscript suggests certain Italianate features, decorative andnotational traits, coupled with the contents of the anthology as a whole, point towards Harl.MS. 281 having originated in a Parisian milieu. This assumption is supported by marginaliain the scholar hand on f. 26r that include reference to solmization syllables (‘no, ni, na’)identified by Jacques of Liège (fl. 1300–1330) as used specifically in Paris in the earlyfourteenth century (‘no, ni, a’).23 Because Guy of Saint-Denis alludes to a quodlibetaldisputation of Peter of Auvergne (d. 1304), delivered in 1301, the manuscript must havebeen copied after this date.24 This date is also consistent with the inclusion in Guy’s tonaryof three chants from the Saint Louis Office, Lauda celestis, composed in, or soon after, 1297


22 ‘Ambianensis tamen ecclesia secundum tonos magistri Petri de Cruce et exempla, que ponit ibidem, nostro potiuset ceterorum monachorum usui quoad hoc conformari videtur et nos ipsi’; ‘et magistrum Petrum de Cruce, quifuit optimus cantor et Ambianensis ecclesie consuetudinem specialiter observavit: aliqua invitatoria sunt istius toni,saltem duo. Unum videlicet, de quo ponit exemplum ille magister Petrus, qu<od> apud nos non est in usu, neceius Venite, sed videntur esse de usu Ambianensis ecclesie sumpta’. Guido von Saint-Denis, Tractatus de tonis2.1.102 and 2.8.75, ed. van de Klundert, vol. ii, pp. 78 and 133.

23 ‘Hae quidem diversae sunt apud diversos, sicut quidam dicunt, et ego puto me Parisius a quodam audivisse sexvocum haec nomina: pro, to, do, no, ni, a.’. Jacobus Leodiensis, Speculum musicae 6.62, ed. Bragard, vol. vi, p. 165.The marginalia in question read: ‘eadem trahit id est. b. fundit rotunda sub quam diapente/ verum est vero. A.Gque ni na [= sol la] diatessaron etiam majorum que no [= fa] est rotunda et hoc vero. f-fa. et diatessaron no na[= fa la] fa quam est quadrata. Et hoc est testatus cum G.’

24 Citations from the final two questions of Peter of Auvergne’s sixth and final quodlibet in the Tractatus de tonis ofGuy of Saint-Denis are included in book four, ed. van de Klundert, Tractatus de tonis, vol. ii, pp. 38–42. The dateof the quodlibet is given in several sources: ‘Explicit ultimum quodlibet a magistro Petro de Alvernia disputatumanno domini millesimo tricentesimo primo’, Frank Hentschel (ed.), ‘Der verjagte Dämon: MittelalterlicheGedanken zur Wirkung der Musik aus der Zeit um 1300, mit einer Edition der Quaestiones 16 und 17 ausQuodlibet VI des Petrus d’Auvergne’, Geistesleben im 13 Jahrhundert, ed. Jan A. Aertsen and Andreas Speer (Berlin,2000), pp. 412–21 at p. 421.



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and performed at Saint-Denis.25 The compilation of Harl. MS. 281 in the period shortlyafter 1300 is also suggested by the inclusion in Guy’s Tractatus of extracts from thecommentary on the Politics initiated by Thomas Aquinas and completed by Peter ofAuvergne, which was available to scholars for copying by booksellers, as a University of Paristax record from 1304 makes clear.26

Whereas much Parisian book production during this period was typically directed by alibraire, who oversaw all aspects of manuscript preparation including engaging scribes, themusical illustrations appear to have been added not by a professional scribe but by ourscholar.27 There are several elements that point towards the identify of this scholar.Marginalia in the scholar’s hand, usually rendered on the right-hand side of the half-folio,were penned by an individual with an advanced understanding of music theory.28 Mostcorrections made by this individual are minor; major corrections, such as the rewriting ofwhole sentences and the deletion of an entire paragraph on f. 67r, are confined to theTractatus de tonis by Guy of Saint-Denis. These corrections are noted by van de Klundert inthe apparatus to her critical edition of this text, although she did not investigate theirsignificance.29 The changes made to the treatise are more than simply scribal corrections:


25 These chants include the mode one antiphon Lauda celestis, the mode three antiphon Hostem pestis and themode six responsory Cum esset in accubitu. Guy also cites the Saint Louis hymns Rerum deus tenax vigor andGaude mater. Michel Huglo has claimed that because Guy cites an ‘unknown chant for Corpus Christi’, hisTractatus must have been composed between 1315, when Corpus Christi was introduced at Cluny, and 1318,when the Corpus Christi Office was introduced into Parisian usage; see Michel Huglo, ‘Guy de Saint-Denis’,New Grove Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed 17 July 2007) <www.grovemusic.com>. Although Huglo does notname the chant in question, Guy does mention the antiphon Paratum panem for the Octave of Corpus Christi.Contrary to Huglo’s claim, however, the year in which the feast of Corpus Christi was adopted at Saint-Denishas not been established. Robertson, for example, dates its introduction to the ‘late thirteenth and earlyfourteenth centuries’ and notes that this feast was added to at least one thirteenth-century missal of Saint-Denis at the same time as the feast of Saint Louis, which was celebrated at Saint-Denis from at least 1297;see Robertson, The Service Books of the Royal Abbey, p. 77 and n. 140. By coincidence, Guy mentions Paratumpanem in the same paragraph as the responsory Cum esset in accubitu for the feast of Saint Louis; Guido ofSaint-Denis, Tractatus de tonis 1.3.152–3/157, ed. Klundert, vol. ii, p. 33. The feast of Corpus Christi wasestablished by papal Bull in 1264, while the year 1318 coincides with the obligatory celebration of the feast inDominican houses; see William R. Bonniwell, A History of the Dominican Liturgy (New York, 1944), pp.223–226. Van de Klundert has also answered Huglo’s claim in Tractatus de tonis vol. i, p. 18, n. 19.

26 ‘Librorum pretium ab Universitate Parisiensi taxatum, quod debent habere librarii pro exemplaricommodato scholaribus … Item, Politicorum [Thome], xij pecias…ix den.’ Heinrich Denifle (ed.),Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, 4 vols (Paris, 1889–1897; repr. Brussels, 1964) no. 642, vol. ii, pp.107–111 (hereafter CUP).

27 Libraires active in Paris during this period are identified in the register of book producers in Richard H.Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris1200~1500, 2 vols (Turnhout, 2000), vol. ii, pp. 11–142.

28 On f. 8r, for example, the outline of diatessaron ‘affinities’ from chapter seven of Guido of Arezzo’s Micrologushas the following marginalia clarification in the scholar hand: ‘a gravibus diatessaron vult diapente g. a. et visquia sonat ad D; gravibus [?] vero sonat diapente quia a acuta ad eandem D gravem sonat’ (‘From the lownotes, the diatessaron desires the diapente; to the low notes, it sounds the diapente because it sounds from higha to the same low D.’

29 Van de Klundert, Tractatus de tonis, vol. ii, pp. 3–137.


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they appear to improve upon what the author wanted to say.30 This level of editorialinterference bears the hallmarks of an apograph, a copy directed by an author who activelyengages in an editorial capacity with his or her text.31 That Guy of Saint-Denis collaboratedwith a pictor in the preparation of Harl. MS. 281 is indicated by the opening rubric to hisTractatus de tonis at the top of f. 58v: ‘Qui legis auctoris nomen per quinque priora Gramatapictoris, hoc scribi celitus ora’ (‘You who read the name of the author through the five firstletters of the pictor, pray for it to be written in heaven’). The name ‘GUIDO’ is formed bythe initial capitals of each of the five chapters of the Tractatus de tonis, indicating the nameof its author.32 As the copy of Guy’s Tractatus de tonis in Harl. MS. 281 was certainly


30 For example, on ff. 66v–67r, text is altered as follows, with bold type indicating the scholar’s corrections anddeletions: ‘Primus igitur tonus est, qui regulariter in .d. gravi idest in .dsolre. finitur/ cuiusque acuitas velascensus ab eadem finali littera computando usque ad octavam litteram seu vocem. scilicet .d. acutam. idest.dlasolre. regulariter se extendit vel etiam usque ad nonam. scilicet .e. acutam. idest secundum e-lamilicentialiter. eius vero gravitas et descensus ab eadem finali littera computando/ solummodo usque adsecundam litteram seu vocem. scilicet .c. gravem, idest .cfaut. licentialiter se extendit. et si inveniaturdescendere usque ad tertiam scilicet b mi valde raro hoc accidit tamen licentialiter sit Et si ultraquam dictum est se extenderit sub vel supra/ talis cantus irregularis a musicis iudicatur tamquam latitudinemsui toni et ipsius regulares terminos limitesque transcendens.’ This extract from book one, chapter three,describes the final and range of tone one and ends with a general comment that if any chant of this toneexceeds its range, it is ‘judged by musicians to be irregular’. The following paragraph (‘Volunt tamen quidam… dicetur naturam sapiant’) relates circumstances in which the range of this tone is exceeded, with thesubsequent two paragraphs (‘Si vero cantus … reducetur.’ ‘Est etiam notandum … finalem litteramfinirentur’) describing the use of affinals. This order of material — description of the final and rangeconcluding with comment as to when a range is considered irregular followed by description of the use ofaffinals, where applicable — is replicated in subsequent paragraphs for tones two through to eight. Thephrase ‘et si inveniatur descendere usque ad tertiam scilicet b mi valde raro hoc accidit tamen licentialiter sit’describes one circumstance in which the range of tone one is exceeded, material that may have beenconsidered out of place in this paragraph. The addition of ‘regulariter se extendit’ after ‘dlasolre’ replicatesa phraseology found in descriptions of tones two through to eight. Prior to the paragraph beginning ‘Si verocantus’ (f. 67r), an entire paragraph describing the use of ‘round or soft b’ (‘b rotundus vel mollis’) has beendeleted (corrections in this paragraph are in bold type): ‘Sciendum est autem quod si contingat cantus aliquoshuius toni finiri in .g. grave / idest in primo .gsolreut. causa videlicet necessitatis alicuius vel quia aliter notarinon possunt prout consueverunt cantari. tunc in fine cum .b. rotundo vel molli notari debent / ut sic videlicetnon in .ut. vel .sol. sed in .re. finiantur / et ita .g. gravis ad .d. gravem idest ad dsolre. reducetur. et talisreductio locum habere videtur in Responsorio Germanus plenus spiritu sancto et in antiphona illaOramus te. et in Responsorio. Pater insignis. Deus omnipotens. et quibusdam aliis cantibusquorum nonnullos si vera sunt. immo quia vero sunt que de tonis senserunt musici salva nostrorum pace nonsolum irregulares esse constat immo nec umquam ab expertis in musica prout apud nos cantantur ad presensfuisse compositos / Sed magis scriptorum vicio vel correctionis negligentia depravatos. de quorum sibi quiasimilium correctione alias forsitan erit locus.’ In subsequent paragraphs, the use of ‘soft b’ (‘b mollis’) isdescribed only in brief, suggesting that this extended description was deemed inappropriate. The relevantpassages are given in Guido von Saint-Denis, Tractatus de tonis 1.3.29–66, ed. van de Klundert, vol. ii, pp.28–29.

31 The term ‘apograph’ is evoked here to signify the copying of a work that lies between an author’s autographand a scribal exemplar, in particular, one that was made under the author’s supervision and includes theauthor’s own corrections. The term itself is lifted from Graham Pollard, who in turn borrowed it fromMonsignor Saffrey; Graham Pollard, ‘The Pecia System in the Medieval Universities’, in Medieval Scribes,Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London,1978), pp. 145–161 at p. 151.

32 This ‘GUIDO’ acrostic matches the acrostic verse that opens the Micrologus of Guido of Arezzo, given onf. 5r of Harl. MS. 281. Jacques of Liège is similarly identified (‘IACOBUS’) in an acrostic spanning the sevenbooks of his Speculum musicae.


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undertaken by a single scribe under the author’s direction, it can be concluded withreasonable confidence that the scholar who made corrections throughout the manuscriptwas Guy of Saint-Denis. The main scribe was also responsible for rubrics within the text,but the pictor, or painter, with whom Guy devised the acrostic initials, was probablyresponsible for the distinctly Parisian manuscript decoration in Harl. MS. 281.

We know that Guy was a monk at the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Denis from the explicitto his treatise: ‘Here ends the Tractatus de tonis gathered together by brother Guido, monkof the monastery of Saint-Denis in France’.33 Guy also comments that he had compiled thetreatise ‘at the praiseworthy request of certain of our brothers’.34 Guy organizes his Tractatusde tonis into two books, the first of which is concerned with theoretical issues, the secondwith practical examples. The driving concern in Guy’s treatise is provision of an accessibleintroduction to the tones. The term ‘tone’ (tonus) had a wide range of applications in music-theoretical writings, but as a general term it described sound (sonus) that had been regulatedin some way. Guy’s exposition on the tones is based firmly on the authority of monastictradition, primarily as established by Guido of Arezzo and Boethius,35 but combining theauthority of ancients with those of certain moderns. This echoes precisely the combinationof texts found in the Harley compilation as a whole. The fact that he shares the same nameas Guido makes this sense of identification with the ancients even more telling.

A possible explanation for the presence of an Italianate hand as responsible for copyingGuy’s manuscript might lie in the presence in France in the late thirteenth and earlyfourteenth centuries of Italian trained scribes, particularly from Bologna, where a thrivingbook trade prevailed in less-than-ideal political circumstances.36 As the account books ofSaint-Denis confirm, professional scribes were frequently employed between 1280 and 1342to copy manuscripts for the abbey.37 One of these was Guillaume Lescot, who produced inthe early decades of the fourteenth century a chronicle presented to Philippe V in 1317. Aprofessional scribe, his hand is also found in manuscripts prepared elsewhere in Paris.38 Inthe case of Harl. MS. 281, Guy did not just correct the work of the scribe but he also entered


33 ‘Explicit Tractatus de tonis a fratre guidone monacho monasterii sancti dionysii in francia compilatus’. Guido vonSaint-Denis, Tractatus de tonis 2.8.112–13, ed. van de Klundert, vol. ii, p. 137.

34 ‘… ad quorundam laudabilem fratrum nostrorum instantiam compilare temptavi’. Guido von Saint-Denis,Tractatus de tonis, prologue 9–10, ed. van de Klundert, vol. ii, p. 2.

35 ‘Oracii fiam obscurior sicque Scillam quodam modo evitare cupiens incidam in Caribdim, aliqua que de tonis tamex Musica Boecii quam venerabilis patris et monachi Guidonis Aretini …’ Guido von Saint-Denis, Tractatus detonis, prologue 5–6, ed. Van de Klundert, vol. ii, p. 2.

36 On scribal travelling in the late thirteenth century, see Rouse and Rouse, ‘Wandering Scribes and Traveling Artists’,pp. 32–67.

37 Donatella Nebbiai-Dalla Guarda edits those parts of the accounts relating to the copying of manuscripts in LaBibliothèque de l’abbaye de Saint-Denis en France du IXe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1985), pp. 336–55.

38 Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers, vol. ii, p. 42. This is mentioned by Nebbiai-Dalla Guarda, butnot specifically as a manuscript of Saint-Denis, La Bibliothèque, p. 47, n. 140. This chronicle was appended to theVie de saint Denis in Paris, BnF lat. 13836 ; see Charles Samaran and Robert Marichal, Catalogue des manuscrits enécriture latine: portant des indications de date, de lieu ou de copiste, 7 vols (Paris, 1974), vol. iii, p. 339. The Rousesconclude that the three-volume copy of the Vie in Paris, BnF fr. 2090–2092 was also copied at Saint-Denis,Manuscripts and Their Makers, vol. ii, p. 42, as does Nebbiai-Dalla Guarda, La Bibliothèque, pp. 296–7 . Similarly,Paris, BnF lat. 15131, dated to 1289–1292 and including Formulae litterarum et carmina of the abbey, was alsocompiled at Saint-Denis; Samaran and Marichal, Catalogue des manuscrits, vol. iii, p. 399, and Nebbiai-DallaGuarda, La Bibliothèque, pp. 306–7.


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musical illustrations, pitch names, text underlay and musical notation. This collaborationwould also explain how distinctly Parisian decorative work could be included in amanuscript copied in a distinctly Italianate hand. The custos is not used in Harl. MS. 281,which is consistent with the manuscript being a Benedictine production. The monasticcontext of the compilation of this manuscript is confirmed by the explicit to Guy’s Tractatus,which states that this treatise, and by implication the manuscript itself, was gatheredtogether (compilatus) in the monastery of Saint-Denis in France.39

The College of Saint-Denis

One place for which Harl. MS. 281 could have been intended is the house of study, or college,of the monks of Saint-Denis. The account books of Saint-Denis for 1229 record the presenceof a house of study for its monks in Paris, adjacent to the Dominican monastery of Saint-Jacques.40 The College was relocated by Matthew of Vendôme, abbot of Saint-Denis from 1258until his death in 1289, on land purchased in 1263 from the abbot of Saint-Germain (betweenwhat is now the Quai des Augustins, the rue des Augustins, the rue Christine and the rueDauphine). Matthew intended it to be both his official residence in Paris and a place ofadvanced study for a small group of monks. Given that Matthew had been entrustedgovernment of the kingdom in 1269 by Louis IX and would be senior adviser to his successorPhilip III, the residence and thus the college would have been at the hub of political activitythroughout these years. The abbey accounts show that between 1280 and 1342, a large numberof manuscripts were copied for the use of the college’s students, many of whom would go on tohold major offices at Saint-Denis. The account books report that the abbey always made anannual payment for a magister iuvenum, and from 1284, there was also a magister puerum (decantu).41 Because he was receiving a salary, this magister iuvenum does not seem to have been amonk of Saint-Denis, but rather someone employed to give instruction to the novices, perhapsbefore they became fully professed at the abbey. The fact that Harl. MS. 281 does not carry anyof the traditional shelf marks introduced at the library of Saint-Denis in both the late thirteenthand the late fifteenth century suggests that it may have been preserved at the College of Saint-Denis rather than at the abbey itself.

More research is needed to establish whether Guy of Saint-Denis can be identified with Guyof Châtres (d. 1351), abbot of Saint-Denis from 1326 until 1342, when he stepped down fromthe position, presumably because of age and ill-health.42 Abbot Guy took a lead in providing


39 ‘Explicit tractatus de tonis a fratre guidone monacho in monasterii sancti dionysii in francia compilatus’, Harl. MS.281, f. 96v; cf. Guido von Saint-Denis, Tractatus de tonis 2.8.111–12, ed. van de Klundert, vol. ii, p. 137. Thisexplicit, originally in the hand of the main scribe, is rewritten below the original text in a sixteenth-century hand(that of Jean Gosselin), with this text repeated in the same hand at the beginning of Guy’s Tractatus on f. 58v aswell as in the table of contents on f. 4r.

40 Donatella Nebbiai-Dalla Guarda, ‘Le Collège de Paris de l’abbaye de Saint-Denis-en-France (XIIIe–VIIIe siècle)’,in Sous la règle de Saint Benoît: Structures monastiques et sociétés en France du Moyen Age à l’époque moderne. Abbayebénédictine. Sainte Marie de Paris, 23–25 octobre 1980 (Genève, 1982), pp. 461–488 at p. 465 and Donatella Nebbiai-Dalla Guarda, ‘Des Rois et des moines: Livres et lecteurs à l’abbaye de Saint-Denis (XIIIe–XVe siècles)’, inFrançoise Autrand, Claude Gauvard, and Jean-Marie Moeglin (eds), Saint-Denis et la royauté. Etudes offerts àBernard Guenée (Paris, 1999), pp. 355–74, esp. p. 359. See the accounts edited by Nebbiai-Dalla Guarda, LaBibliothèque, p. 336.

41 Nebbiai-Dalla Guarda, La Bibliothèque, p. 339 (normally just magister puerum).42 The identification of Guy de Saint-Denis as Guy of Châtres was first suggested by Ulysse Chevalier, Répertoire

des sources historiques du Moyen Age: bio-bibliographie, 2 vols (Paris, 1877–1888; rev. 1905–1907), vol. i, p. 2013.Michel Huglo later dismissed this suggestion without disclosing reasons for doing so; Huglo, ‘Guy deSaint-Denis’.


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new buildings for the college in 1339 and was asked by Pope Benedict XII to draw up guidelinesfor reforming education within the entire Benedictine order.43 Guy also produced aSanctilogium, a massive anthology of the lives of the saints (preserved in BL, Royal MS. 13. D.IX), that builds on the structure of Usuard’s Martyrologium (the traditional monastic calendarof the martyrs), by extending it with passages from the Legenda aurea of Jacobus de Voragineand the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais.44 That Guy of Saint-Denis could be Guy ofChâtres is suggested by the former’s criticism in the Tractatus de tonis of composers of chantseeking to use each of the different tones mechanically within a series of nine readings, ratherthan choosing the tone appropriate to the subject matter of the chant in question.45 He says thathe will be discussing this subject matter ‘elsewhere’. In the Tractatus de tonis, Guy develops atheme elaborated in the Micrologus of Guido of Arezzo, that a chant, and hence the tone withwhich a chant is associated, be appropriate to its subject matter. In the Sanctilogium, Guyeffectively provides this subject matter, but organized much more accessibly than in theSpeculum historiale and Legenda aurea.

The Music Theory of Harl. MS. 281

The Transmission of Guido of Arezzo

The version of the Guidonian corpus in Harl. MS. 281 is unusual for its inclusion ofmultiple prologues and other interpolations not found in other sources, coupled with theexclusion of certain passages. While Guy made several large-scale corrections to his text (anexample of which is given in figure 6), there are no similar corrections outside of his ownTractatus de tonis. The interpolations made to the Guidonian corpus in Harl. MS. 281 mayhave been established before the main scribe entered the text.46

Guido of Arezzo’s Micrologus survives in nearly eighty manuscripts, and the worktypically opens with an acrostic verse beginning ‘Gymnasio musas placuit’ followed by adedicatory letter to Bishop Theodaldus, a prologue, a chapter listing and finally the workitself. In Harl. MS. 281, the initial acrostic is followed by two additional prologues: a Prefatioauctoris between the acrostic verse and the dedicatory letter and an Alius prologus before thechapter listing, both of which survive only in this manuscript. Both interpolationsextrapolate themes represented in the Micrologus from the perspective of a scholar ofadvanced age (Guido of Arezzo maintained that he was only thirty-four when he wrote theMicrologus).47 The Prefatio auctoris mentions being called back to the ‘loathsome toil ofstudy’ by Bishop Theodaldus, whom Guido of Arezzo addresses in the dedicatory letter, andthe Alius prologus speaks of finding the numerical truth in music and adapting that truth forthe ‘tender ears of singers’. This prologue specifically mentions Boethius, who is confirmedas an undisputed authority of music theory albeit one best read by philosophers, for he is


43 Nebbiai-Dalla Guarda, La Bibliothèque, p. 51.44 Henri Omont edits the prologue to the Sanctilogium in ‘Le Sanctilogium de Guy de Châtres, abbé de

Saint-Denis’, in Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes, lxxxvi (1925), pp. 407–10; see also his entry, ‘Gui de Châtres,abbé de saint-Denys, auteur d’un Sanctilogium’, Histoire littéraire de la France, xxxvi (Paris, 1927), pp. 627–30.

45 Guido von Saint-Denis, Tractatus de tonis 1.4.465–85, ed. van de Klundert, vol. ii, pp. 55–56; cf. Guido, Micrologus15, ed. Smits van Waesberghe, p. 174 and C. J. Mews, ‘Re-structuring the Golden Legend in the Early FourteenthCentury: The Sanctilogium of Guy of Châtres, abbot of Saint-Denis’, Revue bénédictine, cxx (2010), forthcoming.

46 Transcription of these unique passages is included in appendix one. It remains to be investigated whether Guy wasresponsible for the composition or compilation of the prologues.

47 Claude V. Palisca (ed., intro.), Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music: Three Medieval Treatises, trans. Warren Babb(New Haven and London, 1978), p. 50.



Fig. 6. Guy of Saint-Denis’s corrections to f. 67r.


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‘contrary and difficult’, thereby elaborating Guido of Arezzo’s comment on Boethius fromthe final chapter of the Micrologus.48 The author of the Alius prologus rejects the obscurematter of ancient music theory and concludes on a personal note: ‘I offer to you in friendlyfatherliness, for the clarity of this art, clearer and briefer rules insofar as I can explainthem.’49 Although the two prologues are apparently unique to Harl. MS. 281, there isanother interpolation into the Micrologus that is not. This interpolation, Hactenus invidielora, follows chapter seventeen and introduces the subject of diaphony, which is the focus ofchapters eighteen and nineteen. In this transmission, however, these two chapters arecondensed into a single chapter, and the examples of organum that form most of chapternineteen of the Micrologus are omitted. This transmission is replicated in Oxford, St John’sCollege MS. 150, although this is not acknowledged in Smits van Waesberghe’s 1955 editionof the Micrologus.50 The St John’s manuscript was prepared in Southern France, the foliosincluding the Guidonian texts (ff. 1–24) having been prepared either in the eleventh or earlytwelfth century.51 The final chapter of the Micrologus is complete in Guy’s edition.

What is presented as the second book, or trocaicus, of Guido gives a rationale for instillingthe rules of music to small boys in as painless a way as possible. It begins with Guido ofArezzo’s Regule rythmice, prefaced by a prologue ‘in which Guido himself responds to theharanguings of the Muse’ (Prologus in quo Guido muse ipsum alloquenti Respondet). This isfollowed by the rhyming Regule rythmice, which provide easy access to rote learning that isintended to be amplified with reason when the boys are older. Guido of Arezzo’s Prologus inAntiphonarium is then given in full. This leads into the Epistola ad Michahelem, introducedin Harl. MS. 281 as Epistola guidonis ad fratrem martinum (‘The Epistola of Guido to brotherMartin’) perhaps a muddled reference to ‘domnus Martinus’ mentioned in the preface tothe Epistola.52 The text is divided into two parts, the first part breaking off before a sectionon the location of notes on the monochord (this section is omitted in the Harl. MS. 281transmission).


48 ‘Hinc enim incipiens Boetius panditor huius artis, multam miramque et difficillimam huius artis cum numerorumproportione concordiam demonstravit.’ Guido Aretinus, Micrologus, ed. Smits van Waesberghe, p. 223.

49 ‘… vestreque paternitati benignis offero. huius artis ad evidenciam regulas lucidius et brevius quanto potuiexplicatus’, Harl. MS. 281, f. 5v.

50 Guido Aretinus, Micrologus, ed. Smits van Waesberghe, p. 87. The interpolation in question is not mentioned inthe description of St John’s College MS. 150 in Paul Merkley, Italian Tonaries (Ottawa, 1988), pp. 156–8.

51 There is some discrepancy as to the dating of the St John’s manuscript. Smits van Waesberghe and ChristianMeyer date the earlier section of the manuscript (ff. 1–24) to the eleventh century, Ralph Hanna dates it to the lateeleventh, early twelfth century and Dolores Pesce dates this section to the beginning of the twelfth century. GuidoAretinus, Micrologus, ed. Smits van Waesberghe, p. 44; Meyer, Manuscripts from the Carolingian Era up to c. 1500:Addenda, Corrigenda (Munich, 2003), p. 414; Hanna, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Western Medieval Manuscriptsof St John’s College Oxford (Oxford, 2002), p. 216; Pesce, Guido d’Arezzo’s Regule rithmice, Prologus inantiphonarium, and Epistola ad Michahelem: A Critical Text and Translation with an Introduction, Annotations,Indices, and New Manuscript Inventories (Ottawa, 1999), pp. 162–3. The manuscript later came into the collectionof John Erghome (1353–1386): ‘Iste liber est fratris Johannes di Erghom’. Cited in Pesce, Guido d’Arezzo’s Regulerithmice, Prologus in antiphonarium, and Epistola ad Michahelem, p. 162. On the manuscripts in Erghom’s collection,see K. W. Humphreys (ed.), The Friars’ Libraries (London, 1990), pp. 150–4.

52 ‘De reliquo domnum Martinum priorem sacre congregationis nostrumque quam maximum adiutorem plurimumsaluto…’ (‘As for the rest, I greet Dom Martin, prior of the holy congregation and our very greatest helper…’);Guido of Arezzo, Epistola ad Michahelem, ed. Pesce, p. 456; trans. p. 457.


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The first part of what is presented as the third book of Guido of Arezzo is the anonymousDialogus de musica, commonly transmitted alongside the treatises of Guido of Arezzo from theeleventh century. Almost half of the fifty surviving manuscripts of the Dialogus include theGuido of Arezzo collection (Micrologus, Regule rythmice, Prologus in antiphonarium, Epistola). InHarl. MS. 281, the Dialogus contains several interpolated passages. It is preceded by a briefprologue on the dialogue mode and its abbreviating purpose, itself interrupted by aninterpolation that begins with the same question as the Dialogus itself: ‘Quid est musica?’ Thisinterpolated Quid est musica summarizes in dialogue form teachings about the monochordearlier omitted from the Epistola. After the complete Dialogus de musica, this so-called ‘thirdbook’ concludes with the remainder of the Epistola. This is framed by two short texts,Quantumcumque vero omnium and Ecce patet et non latet, both of which are partially cited in theSpeculum musicae of Jacques of Liège.53 This ‘third book’ concludes with the explicit, ‘Here endthe tones of Guido of Arezzo’ (‘Expliciunt toni guidonis aretini’) on f. 34r. This reference to thetones (toni) suggests a music-theoretical theme that unites the texts of Guido of Arezzo in Harl.MS. 281.

Tones and Tonaries in Harley 281

The various treatises on the tones in Harl. MS. 281 helped monks classify the various chantsthat they could be called on to sing, but they also lead up to the final treatise in thecollection, the Tractatus de tonis (‘Tract concerning the tones’) by Guy of Saint-Denis. Atheme common to all the treatises in Harl. MS. 281 is that they deal with the tones in someway, and the anthology includes several tonaries. A tonary is a collection of chants, chieflyantiphons, collated according to aspects contributing to the effective performance of thosechants. Such aspects include the melodic formulas known as ‘tones’ (toni) to which Psalmtexts and other verses are sung and from which the term ‘tonary’ ultimately derives. TheGuidonian texts on ff. 5r–34r are presented as the work of Guido of Arezzo on the tones inits explicit (‘Expliciunt toni guidonis aretini’). The Dialogus de musica incorporates a tonary,while the Tonale Beati Bernardi transmits a Cistercian tonary. Tonaries are also included inthe Tractatus de tonis of Petrus de Cruce and Guy de Saint-Denis. Even Johannes deGrocheio, although concerned with the nature of music more broadly, devotes a sizableportion of his treatise to the tones. This may suggest one reason as to why Grocheio’streatise is preserved in Harl. MS. 281.

An unusual feature of Harl. MS. 281 is the inclusion of the writings of Guido of Arezzoin the same manuscript as a treatise associated with the twelfth-century Cistercian chantreforms. The inclusion of a Cistercian tonary in a manuscript intended for Benedictinebrethren at Saint-Denis is also noteworthy.54 Cistercian reform treatises were, by and large,transmitted independently of those by Guido of Arezzo, despite the survival of the latter inwell over 100 manuscript sources. A survey of surviving music-theoretical sources from


53 ‘Sed temporibus nostris, multi et optimi sunt cantores in cantu tam plano quam mensurato valde certi, valde periti.Ipsa vero theorica iam videtur quasi sepulta et tradita oblivioni, quae longe perfectior exstat quam practica. Etiam,teste Guidone quae, inter alia, circa finem libri sui sic dicit: Quidam dicunt, qui ignorant, levem esse musicam, quiacito percipiunt canendi scientiam. Sed hoc dicunt sapientes, quia nulli plenarie haec ars patet; imo, latet, nisi philosopho.Jacobus Leodiensis, Speculum musicae 2.3, ed. Bragard, vol. ii, p. 13. Italics added.

54 The Tonale Beati Bernardi is one of a small number of music treatises associated with the liturgical reformsundertaken by the Cistercian order during the mid-twelfth century. These reforms emphasized a simplification ofliturgical practice. An obvious indication of Cistercian influence as far as tonaries are concerned is a markedreduction in the number of differentiae (psalm cadences) assigned to chants.


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Cistercian houses indicates that only Guido’s Micrologus found its way into Cistercianmanuscripts, but even then Guido of Arezzo was copied no more than any other authority.55

The inclusion of the Tonale in Harl. MS. 281 can be viewed in the light of the unifyingtheme of the manuscript: the tones. The Tonale offers a specific view of the tones, which aredefined therein as ‘rules defining the nature and form of regular chant’.56 Its opening line,‘Quid est tonus?’ also suggests a link from the ‘Quid est musica?’ dialogue that precedes it.Harl. MS. 281 is not the only manuscript in which these two very different theoreticaltraditions are brought together. Bologna, Peraro, Bibliotheca Comunale Oliveriana MS.1336 (late thirteenth century) preserves a collection of Guido of Arezzo’s treatises, togetherwith the prologue to the Cistercian Antiphonal (on f. 15r). Harl. MS. 281, however, includesthe earliest known pairing of a Guidonian collection with the so-called Tonale BeatiBernardi.

Michel Huglo identified twenty-six surviving copies of the Tonale Beati Bernardi, whichhe classified into three basic ‘forms’: the complete Tonale, the earliest copy of which,Cambridge, Jesus College MS. Q.B.17 (34), dates from around 1175,57 and two distinctabridged versions.58 Harl. MS. 281 is one of eleven copies of the Tonale that Huglo identifiesas ‘complete’. At the end of the Tonale, the author acknowledges that some readers may, afterreading through the work, seek further clarification of theoretical matters, for which theyare directed to the Musica of a certain Guido Augensis, who dedicated his treatise toGuillaume (d. 1143), ‘first abbot of Rievaulx’ (founded 1132).59 The identification of thisGuido at the end of the Tonale with Guy of Eu, the author of the Cistercian Regule de artemusica occurs in the library catalogue of Richard of Fournival (c. 1190–1260), who waschancellor of the cathedral of Amiens during the mid-thirteenth century.60 Richard’scatalogue also lists one of the so-called ‘complete’ copies of the Tonale, Paris, BnF lat. 16662from 1240–1250, later donated to the Sorbonne by Gerard of Abbeville.61 The Tonale wastherefore available in Paris by this date.62

55 This survey is based on Christian Meyer’s online catalogue, Les Sources manuscrites de la théorie de la musique<http:www.lml.badw.de/info/rism.htm>.

56 ‘Discipulus. Quid est tonus? Magister. Regula, naturam et formam cantuum regularium determinans.’ TonaleCisterciense, ed. Christian Meyer, ‘Le tonaire cistercien et sa tradition’, Revue de Musicologie, lxxxix (2003), pp.77–91 at p. 77.

57 Michel Huglo, Les Tonaires: Inventaire, Analyse, Comparaison (Paris, 1971), p. 360.58 Huglo, Les Tonaires, pp. 360–2. Twelfth-century copies of Huglo’s second and third versions of the Tonale also

survive.59 ‘Quod queris non est presentis negotii. cum prohibente sancto cisterciensi capitulo. nec in guidonis nec in

antiphonario quidquam mutari iam liceat. Quere tamen musicam Guidonis augensis, quam scribit adsanctissimum magistrum suum domini Guillelmum primum rievallis abbatem. Ibi de talibus sufficienter doceripoteris.’ Harl. MS. 281, f. 38v; cf. Tonale Cisterciense, ed. Meyer, p. 87.

60 ‘Guidonis Augensis liber de musica ad Willermum Rievallis abbatem.’ Richard de Fournival, Biblionomie, ed. L. Delisle, Le Cabinet des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale, 3 vols (Paris, 1874; repr. New York, 1973), vol. ii, p. 527.

61 ‘Item tonale eiusdem per modum dyalogi. Quid est tonus? Regula naturam et formam cantuum regulariumdeterminans.’ Catalogue général de la Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, ed. L. Delisle, Le Cabinet des manuscrits, vol. iii, p. 90.

62 Meyer’s edition of the Tonale indicates that Harl. MS. 281 includes a number of variants that are particular to thissource. This may indicate that the source from which Guy derived his copy of the Tonale is now lost.



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Another peculiarity of Harl. MS. 281 is its inclusion of the only surviving copy of theTractatus de tonis attributed to Petrus de Cruce. This Tractatus is a short tonary prefaced bya brief summary of the eight tones and mnemonic verses for psalm-tone incipits andmediants (middle sections of a psalm tone). Contemporaries of Petrus extol him as a composer of mensural music and an innovative theorist of measure,63 but only Guy ofSaint-Denis refers to him as an authority on plainchant,64 although it is known that he wascommissioned to compose an Office (historia) for the canonization of Louis IX.65 It mayhave been during Petrus’s time in Paris in 1298 that Guy was able to procure Petrus’sTractatus. Not only does Guy comment that Petrus based his tonary on the practice atAmiens, but Guy himself seems to be responsible for adding the word Ambianensi after‘Expliciunt toni a magistro petro de cruce’ (fig. 7). There are certain correlations betweenthe tonary elements of each of the three ‘modern’ treatises in Guy’s manuscript: Grocheio,Petrus and Guy each include a definition of tone (tonus) and provide mnemonics for theretention of psalm tones, and each cites examples of invitatory antiphons for the first andeighth tones. An unusual correlation occurs between Grocheio’s and Petrus’s tracts, withseven of the eight introits named by Grocheio among the twenty-four introits in Petrus’stonary, the mode two antiphon O sapientia being the only other chant named by boththeorists.66

The works that Guy of Saint-Denis put together with his own Tractatus for the brethrenat the Abbey of Saint-Denis convey a wide variety of teachings on plainchant music theory,but the specific emphasis that unites the collection is teaching about the tones (toni). Theseteachings would have lent themselves to the performance of plainchant at an abbey that isknown not to have embraced the multi-voiced mensural music practised elsewhere in Paris,most famously at Notre Dame.67 The physical aspects of Harl. MS. 281 tell us much aboutits origins and the music-theoretical preferences of the compiler. There are, however, manyareas that need further research, including the precise origins of the texts included in Guy’santhology, the relationship between Guy and other theorists in Paris, and the impact ofHarl. MS. 281 on the music-theoretical community in Paris and beyond. It is hoped that thisinitial survey will provide a point of reference for such further enquiry.

63 Jacques of Liège, for example, wrote: ‘Nam ille valens cantor, Petrus de Cruce, qui tot pulchros et bonos cantuscomposuit mensurabiles et artem Franconis secutus est, quandoque plures tribus pro perfecta brevi semibrevesposuit.’ Jacobus Leodiensis, Speculum musicae 7.17, ed. Bragard, vol. vii, p. 36.

64 ‘Et nota quod iste modus cantandi in responsoriis non solum predictam Gloriam huius toni, immo etiamceterorum tonorum, sicut infra in suo ordine notantur, communiter a monachis observatur, licet ab aliisecclesiasticis viris aliter habeantur in usu. Ambianensis tamen ecclesia secundum tonos magistri Petri de Cruce etexempla, que ponit ibidem nostro potius et ceterorum monachorum usi quoad hoc conformari videtur et nos ipsi.’Guido von Saint-Denis, Tractatus de tonis 2.1.98–104, ed. van de Klundert, vol. ii, p. 78.

65 The accounts concerning the payment of Petrus de Cruce for the Saint Louis Office are listed in Gaposchkin,‘Philip the Fair’, pp. 55–56, n. 94–95.

66 O sapientia is the only antiphon named by Grocheio and only one of two for the second mode named by Petrus.67 On the liturgy at Saint-Denis, see Robertson, The Service Books of the Royal Abbey. On Notre Dame, see Craig

Wright, Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame of Paris 500–1500 (Cambridge, 1989).


Fig. 7. F. 58r showing the addition of ‘Ambianensi’ by Guy of Saint-Denis.


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The Later History of Harley 281: Jean Gosselin and Christopher Wren, Jr

Sometime in the sixteenth century Harl. MS. 281 came into the possession of a certain JeanGosselin, who added his signature at the bottom of f. 4r (fig. 8), the original parchmentflyleaf, as well as table of contents.68 The handwriting of this Jean Gosselin varies, thoughthis may be because he added various notes as marginalia throughout the manuscript over aperiod of time.69 Gosselin’s notes on ff. 1–4 include verses on harmonic intervals, anastrological note concerned with the physical effects of a solar eclipse (f. 2v) and aGuidonian Hand (f. 3r).70 Details concerning the dating of Guido of Arezzo’s life and workappear on f. 4r–v along with acrostic verses extracted from Guido’s Regule rythmice andMicrologus.

The same Gosselin’s signature exists in a twelfth-century manuscript of Boethius’s Deinstitutione musica (Paris, BnF lat. 7203),71 which is thought to have belonged to JeanGosselin (c. 1505–1604), the Guardian of the Royal Library of France (later theBibliothèque nationale) from 1560 until his death in 1604 at the age of almost 100.72 JeanGosselin was a remarkably long-lived scholar who did not pass unnoticed by hiscontemporaries. Guy le Fèvre de la Boderie (1541–1598) includes a reference to Gosselin inhis idiosyncratic poetic epic La Galliade (1578) as one to whom ‘is due the honour of the re-establishment of the sciences and disciplines in our part of Europe’:73

GOSSELIN ornement de sa ville de Vire,Qui le Globe de Cieux si bien vire & reuire,Et qui a sous sa garde, & commis sa foyAinsi que Sacrestain, tous les liures de Roy.74

68 The first name Jean is very faded but is discernable from the microfilm copy of the manuscript. Gosselin’s accountof the contents is given in appendix one.

69 The marginalia in this hand are: f. 7v (‘Enchiridii musici reprehensio’), f. 19r (‘In vetustissimo codice nullæ sanctenotæ sed literie fautum’), f. 19v (‘varii colores’), f. 22v (‘In alio veteri exemplari ita scriptum repexi Incipit epistolaDomini Guidonis monachi ad Michaelem monachum Monasterum Sanctæ Mariæ Pomposia.’), f. 25r (‘quidMusica’), f. 34r (‘Incipit alia ars de tonis per modum dyalogi: quæ a quibusdam intitulatur sub nomine beatiBernardi Dyalogus.’), f. 39r (‘Nota quod id est, significat es’/‘ordo disciplinæ’), f. 46v (‘id est significat es, motetusquid/organum quid’) and f. 96v (‘Explicit tractus de tonis a fatre guidone monacho monasterii sancti dionysii infrancia compilatus’). A neater version of this hand appears in the top right-hand margin on f. 5r (‘brevis sermoGymnasio’), the word Ambianensi is inserted in this hand below ‘petro de cruce’ on f. 52v, and the attribution onf. 58v is also in this hand (‘a Guidone monacho Monasterii Sancti Dyonisii in Francia’). Because of the similarityin form (although not in neatness) between the two scripts, it is assumed that both are examples of handwritingfrom the same person, but perhaps writing at different times.

70 This mnemonic device is traditionally attributed to Guido of Arezzo but appears only in the manuscript traditionof later centuries.

71 This manuscript later became part of the collection of Jacques Auguste de Thou (1553–1617), who was thesuperior to Jean Gosselin. Like Harl. MS. 281, the main material of Paris, BnF lat. 7203 is prefaced bymiscellaneous notes on music, including a verse on the influence of the planets on music, as well as someGuidonian hands (mains guidoniennes). It is unclear if any of these non-Boethian writings are in Gosselin’s hand;see L. Royer, ‘Catalogue d’écrits des théoriciens de la Musique, conservés dans le fonds latin des manuscrits de laBibliothèque nationale’, in L’Année Musicale, iii (1913), pp. 206–41 at p. 213.

72 For a general account of Gosselin, see Firmin Didot Frères (ed.), Nouvelle Biographie Générale (Paris, 1857), vol.xxi, cols 325–6, and Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon (Oxford, 1892), pp. 173–180.

73 Guy le Fèvre de la Boderie, La Galliade, ou de la Révolution des Arts et Sciences (Paris, 1578), p. 32.74 Boderie, La Galliade, p. xiv.




Fig. 8. F. 4r including the signature of Jean Gosselin.


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Gosselin shares this honour in Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s poem with such slightly earlierluminaries as Desiderius Erasmus and Guillaume Budé, as well as the classicist andtranslator of Plutarch, Jacques Amyot (1514–1593), abbot of Bellozane, teacher of FrançoisII, Charles IX and Henri III, and bishop of Auxerre from 1570 until his death (and Masterof the Royal Library from 1560 to 1593).75 The epitaph indicates that Gosselin had a largerintellectual standing in his own time than has been accorded him by later generations.

In the copy of the Statutes of the College of Master Gervais that Gosselin presented to theRoyal Library in 1600, he reports: ‘I, Gosselin, who was then the principal of the College ofGervais, was made Guardian of this Royal Library, namely, in the year of Christ 1560.’76

The College of Gervais was founded in 1370 by the royal physician, Master GervaisChretien, and had traditionally been devoted to the study of medicine, as well as its then-attendant science of astrology.77 With his Norman background and scholarly interest inastrology, Gosselin may have originally been a student there. In the early 1560s, the RoyalLibrary was transferred to an unknown location in Paris before being taken to the Collegeof Clermont in 1594.78 He held the position of Guardian of the Royal Library throughoutthe wars of religion, with no successor formally appointed until 1601.

A native of Vire in the Norman region of Calvados, Jean Gosselin was uncle of theyounger mathematician Guillaume Gosselin de Caen (d. c. 1590).79 Often described as amathematician himself, Jean Gosselin’s interest in music led him to publish in 1571 a work(no copy of which has yet been identified) entitled La Main harmonique, Ou les principes deMusique antique et moderne. Et les proprietez que la moderne reçoit des sept Planettes.80

A striking feature of Gosselin’s notes in Harl. MS. 281 is that they include just such a mainharmonique on f. 3r (fig. 9). Moreover, the antiquarianism evident in Gosselin’s interest inthe dating of Guido of Arezzo, along with the brief astrological passage that otherwise sitsincongruously in a manuscript devoted to music, links this material with the intellectualinterests of Jean Gosselin. These close correspondences with the intellectual preoccupations

75 Fortunes de Jacques Amyot: actes du colloque international (Melun, 18–20 avril 1985) (Paris, 1986).76 Statuta collegii magistri Gervasii, hic data a Joanne Gosselin, anno Domini 1600, Paris BnF lat. 4397A. Quoted by

Alfred Franklin, Les Anciennes Bibliothèques de Paris: églises, monastères, collèges, séminaires, institutions, fondations,hôpitaux des origines au moyen âge jusqu’au XIXe siècle, 3 vols (Paris, 1870 ; repr. Amsterdam, 1968), vol. ii, p. 226.

77 Master Gervais was also, amongst other things, the canon of Notre Dame Cathedral at Bayeux in Gosselin’s nativeCalvados, and the college had traditionally been a place of study in Paris for young men who had been born in thatdiocese. For the history of this college, see Franklin, Les Anciennes Bibliothèques, vol. ii, p. 225–227. Its alternativename was the Collège de Notre-Dame de Bayeux: Franklin, Les Anciennes Bibliothèques, vol. ii, p. 225, n. 5.

78 Simone Balayé in Claude Jolly (ed.), Histoire des bibliothèques françaises. Les Bibliothèques sous l’Ancien Régime1530–1789 (Paris, 1988), p. 80.

79 Simone Balaye, La Bibliothèque Nationale des origines à 1800 (Geneve, 1988), p. 46, n. 192. For an account ofGuillaume Gosselin, see Giovanna Cleonice Cifoletti, ‘Mathematics and Rhetoric: Peletier and Gosselin and theMaking of the French Algebraic Tradition’ (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1992).

80 Antoine du Verdier, La Bibliothèque d’Antoine du Verdier (Lyon, 1585), p. 708. Of this volume Verdier notes: ‘impr.à Paris en vne grande feuille par Nicolas du Chemin, 1571’. The French scholars F. Lesure and G. Thibault havecompiled an exhaustive catalogue of the hundred or so music-themed works printed by Nicolas de Chemin. In theentry for La Main harmonique they simply state: ‘On n’en connaît aucun exemplaire’. F. Lesure and G. Thibault,‘Bibliographie des éditions musicales publiées par Nicolas du Chemin (1549–1576)’, Annales Musicologiques, i(1953), p. 346.



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evinced in Gosselin’s notes in Harl. MS. 281 suggest that this manuscript was indeed partof his collection.81 The year 1570 had seen the establishment of Jacques Baïf ’s Académie depoésie et de musique under the patronage of King Charles IX, which declared in its statutesits mission of studying and performing ‘ancient’ music and song with the aim of reformingand cleansing the moral nature of the auditors of the Academy’s musicians.82 Although theywere aiming to reach back to an imagined primordial purity believed to have beenexemplified by the musicians of ancient Greece, they also looked back to the best of medievaltradition.83 Gosselin’s notes in Harl. MS. 281 would seem contribute to that movement.

Gosselin did not publish any more on music, suggesting that he may have acquired Harl.MS. 281 before 1571, the year he published La Main harmonique. In that year he alsopublished a volume of astronomical tables. He subsequently published an account of theconstellations (1577), on various games (1579, reprinted in 1582), a perpetual Gregoriancalendar (1583), a history of the fleur-de-lis (1593), and a study of human physiognomy(1599).84 There were historical opportunities for Jean Gosselin to acquire Harl. MS. 281 inthe 1560s. In 1567, the Abbey of Saint-Denis was sacked by Protestant forces amid theconflict between Catholics and Protestants that raged throughout France during the secondhalf of the sixteenth century. Some of the monks at Saint-Denis were also known to havesold off the contents of its library.85 While it is possible that Harl. MS. 281 found its wayinto the hands of Gosselin amid the chaos that physically engulfed the library at the Abbeyof Saint-Denis during this period, it is more likely that he found the manuscript in theCollege of Saint-Denis in Paris (as the absence of a standard fifteenth-century Saint-Denisshelf mark would suggest).86

81 Another piece of circumstantial evidence pointing towards the identity of the Harley Gosselin as JeanGosselin ‘de Vire’ is contained in a 1546 edition of Boethius’s Opera now housed in the State Conservatoryof St Petersburg. The book is inscribed with the name and date ‘I. Gosselinus, 1558’, and, according to theRussian scholar O. N. Bleskina, Gosselin made ‘additions with mathematical examples and references to theworks of other authors’ in the texts of the De arithmetica, De musica, and the pseudo-Boethian treatise ongeometry. O. N. Bleskina, XV-XVI-Century Rare Editions in the Collection of the St Petersburg ConservatoryLibrary, available at <biblio.conservatory.ru/Today/Public/Bleskina2.htm>. Bleskina’s short description ofGosselin’s annotations also refers to a passage where he identifies himself as ‘Ioannes Gosselinus RegiaeBibliothecae custos’, suggesting that he undertook a protracted study of Boethius’s mathematical works thatcontinued after his appointment to the Royal Library in 1560.

82 Frances Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1947), p. 28.83 Yates, The French Academies, p. 44.84 The Bibliothèque nationale de France records the following items of Jean Gosselin: Ephemérides, ou Almanach

du jour et la nuict pour cent ans, lequel donne à cognoistre par chacun jour de l’an le lie du soleil au zodiac, l’instantqu’il se lève et se couche (Paris, 1571); Historia imaginum caelestium nostro seculo accomodata (Paris, 1577);Déclaration de deux doubtes qui si trouvent en comptant le jeu de la paume, lesquelles méritent d’estre entenduës parles hommes de bon esprit (s.l., 1579), reprinted as La signification de l’ancien jeu des chartes pythagorique et ladéclaration de deux doubtes qui se trouvent en comptant le jeu de la paume (Paris, 1582); Kalendrier grégorienperpetuel, traduit de latin en françois (Paris, 1583); Discours de la dignité et précellence des fleurs de lys et des armesdes rois de France (Melun, 1593), also published in this year in Tours and in 1613–1615 at Nantes by L.Gobert; La phisionomie, c’est à dire la science de cognoistre le naturel et les complexions des personnes. Avecquesl’industrie de cognoistre les bon chevaux … Le tout recueilly d’anciens livres escrits à la main, estans en la Librairieroyale, et mis en lumière par Jean Gosselin (Paris, 1599). The Nouvelle Biographie Générale mentions besides LaMain harmonique Gosselin’s Table de la reformation de l’an (Paris, 1582); Frères (ed.), Nouvelle BiographieGénérale, vol. xxi, cols 325–6.

85 L. Carolus-Barré, ‘Pillage et dispersion de la bibliothèque de l’abbaye de Saint-Denis, 1er octobre–10novembre 1567’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, cxxxviii (1980), pp. 97–101.

86 There are no known shelf marks for the College of Saint-Denis, indeed, no identified manuscripts of thecollege. Nebbiai-Dalla Guarda, ‘Le Collège de Paris’, pp. 467–8.




Fig. 9. Gosselin’s Guidonian Hand on f. 3r.


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In 1563, Pierre Ramus urged Catherine de Medici to imitate her illustrious Florentineforbears in locating the Royal Library in the city of Paris as part of the royal college that hewished to see established in his effort to reform the university, reminding her that he hadsuggested a possible location for it.87 The onset of physical violence after the massacre of StBartholomew (in which Ramus lost his life) meant that the Royal Library had to be keptunder lock and key in a secure location. Given that the treasure of Saint-Denis wasperiodically brought to the College of Saint-Denis during the 1550s and 1560s, it seemsquite plausible that Catherine de Medici brought the Royal Library to the College, as aphysically secure site in Paris, potentially accessible to scholars.88

In 1595 Gosselin published A remonstrance follows concerning the Guardian of the Libraryof the King, addressed to all persons who love literature, outlining his recent troublesfollowing the outbreak of civil war in Paris in 1593 (a translation of the Remonstrance isgiven in appendix two).89 He reports that he had protected the Royal Library against theLeague, taking refuge at the Abbey of Saint-Denis when the city was besieged. Hecomplained that members of the League nonetheless forced their way into the collection,and that they had also stolen all his property in his house, reducing him to penury. Gosselin,then almost ninety years old, was anxious to let the world know about his role in protectingthe library and the poverty to which he was reduced. Although the League had been incontrol of Paris since 1588, Gosselin had managed to oppose their attempts to gain access tothe Royal Library. Henri IV had gained access to Saint-Denis in July 1590, while Paris wasstill under the control of the League, and formerly embraced Catholicism at Saint-Denis on25 July 1593, where the newly appointed abbot of Saint-Denis formally accepted hisabjuration of Protestantism.90 Gosselin subsequently went with Henri IV to Melun, wherehe composed his account of the fleur-de-lis, demonstrating his commitment to the historyof the French crown. His signature is preserved on a document requesting that he resignfrom his post as Guardian of the Royal Library, dated 14 October 1593.91 If Harl. MS. 281was already in Gosselin’s possession, his claim of having been plundered of everything in1593 suggests that the manuscript was lost to him at this point.

87 Petrus Ramus, Collectaneae Praefationes, Epistolae, Orationes (1599; repr. Hildesheim, 1969), pp. 128–34(reprint of a preface to Prooemium mathematicum (Paris, 1567)), esp. pp. 131–2: ‘Cosimus et Laurentius inHetruria amoenas villas habuere: earum nulla bibliothecam condiderunt, quia agris et sylvis ista nequaquampraeparaenter. in media patriae luce collocarunt, ubi civibus ingenuis fructus ingenii longe gratissimus inpromptu esset. et de Bellaquei fontis bibliotheca, te ipsam idem mihi respondere memini. Ergo bibliothecamconstituito in urbe regni, cujus regina es, urbium reliquarum principe, et in Academia omnium Academiarumantiquissima celeberrimaque … Situm Gymnasii in medio Academiae tanquam centro, quo facillimusundique e tot Gymnasiis sit accessus, tibi designavi, ubi auditoria professionibus variis separentur, domiciliadoctoribus et discipulis regiae liberalitatis alumnis assignentur.’ See also his proposal for reforming theuniversity (Ramus, Collectaneae, pp. 362–87 at p. 366), in which he mentions the help that would be given byhouses of religious orders.

88 Blaise de Montesquiou-Fezensac and Danielle Gaborit-Chopin, Le Trésor de Saint-Denis, 3 vols (Paris,1973–1977), vol. i, p. 17, n. 3.

89 Jean Gosselin, ‘Ensuit une remonstrance touchant la garde la la libraire du roy, addressée toutes personnesqui ayment les lettres’ (s.l., 1595), reprinted in Edouard Fournier, Variétés historiques et littéraires (Paris,,1855), vol. i, pp. 1–8.

90 Montesquiou-Fezensac and Gaborit-Chopin, Le Trésor de Saint-Denis, vol. i, pp. 28–30.91 Discours de la dignité et précellence des fleurs de lys et des armes des rois de France, au roy de France et de Navarre

Henry IIII (Melun, 1593). A facsimile is reproduced of the signature of Gosselin, from 14 October 1593 inan unsigned article, ‘Jehan Gosselin. Bibliothécaire du roi au XVIe siècle’, L’Amateur d’autographes, cclxix(1876), pp. 17–20.



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Gosselin remained Guardian of the Royal Library after its relocation to the former JesuitCollege of Clermont in 1595. In November 1601, Henri IV issued a patent appointing IsaacCasaubon (1559–1614) to Gosselin’s position but with the proviso that the old librarian wasnot to be disturbed, Casaubon only being able to officially assume the post of Guardian onceit had become vacant.92 Gosselin died suddenly and bizarrely on 20 November 1604.According to the diarist L’Estoile, Gosselin was found by the fire sitting in his chaircompletely burnt and already turning green.93 Had Harl. MS. 281 not been stolen by theLeague, it would most likely have gone up in flames with its owner. Although Gosselin’ssuccessor at the Royal Library, Casaubon, would himself flee to England in the earlyseventeenth century to avoid religious persecution, there is no firm evidence that he tookHarl. MS. 281 to England with him. It is quite possible that the manuscript was taken bythose who raided Gosselin’s house in 1593 but was subsequently acquired by ChristopherWren the younger (1675–1747) in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century.Sometime before 1709, Sir Robert Harley (1661–1724), the great book collector, politician,and future Tory Prime Minister to Queen Anne, received a gift from Wren the younger ofan old French manuscript on music theory.94 When his librarian, Humfrey Wanley(1672–1726), catalogued this manuscript, he assigned it the number 281 on the openingflyleaf (now f. 4r), below his earlier shelf mark, 37.A.20.95 He also used the summarydescription written out by Gosselin on that flyleaf as the basis for his own catalogue entry.96

Harl. MS. 281 itself offers no obvious clues as to its fate in the years before Gosselin’sdeath in 1604 and Wren the younger’s presenting it to Harley in around 1709. It probablydid not belong to Sir Christopher Wren the elder (1632–1723), as he was still alive when hisson donated it to Robert Harley. The manuscript may be one of those that Wren the youngerpurchased during his extensive travels in Europe, having been in France in 1698 and in 1705in the Netherlands, ‘where he bought a number of books’.97 It was in the years shortly afterhis trip to the Netherlands that he gave the manuscript to Robert Harley. Although thescholarly interests of Wren the younger could broadly be described as antiquarian, they weremore concerned with numismatics and the history of his own family than with music theory.Likewise, apart from Tory politics, there seems to have been little connecting the Wren andHarley families, with Harl. MS. 281 being the only manuscript in the vast Harleiancatalogue known to have come from any of the Wrens.98 The reason why Wren the younger

92 Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, pp. 173–4. In 1605 Jean Juste Scaliger wrote in commiseration to his friendCasaubon about Gosselin, stating with customary sourness that: ‘I knew his way forty-four years ago; tooignorant to use the library himself, too jealous to allow others to use it.’ Scaligeri Epistolae, p. 273, quoted inPattison, Isaac Casaubon, p. 174.

93 His servant was nowhere to be found, and an autopsy revealed that the old man had suffered a blow to thehead. Foul play was at first suspected, but when it was discovered that nothing had been stolen it was putdown to a bizarre accident, the servant having fled because he did not want to be falsely blamed for hismaster’s death. ‘P. de L’Estoile’, Collection complète des mémoires relatif à l’histoire de France, vol. iii, p. 478.

94 Cyril Ernest Wright, Fontes Harleiani: A Study of the Sources of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts in theDepartment of Manuscripts in the British Museum (London, 1972), p. 363.

95 The earlier foliation (ff. 1–93) is in the same hand as Wanley’s shelf mark, as are the folio references to workslisted in the table of contents on f. 4r.

96 For the entry in Wanley’s catalogue, see A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts, vol. i, p. 104.97 Kerry Downes, ‘Wren, Sir Christopher (1632–1723)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (accessed 16

February 2006) <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30019>.98 See Wright, Fontes Harleiani, p. 363. Only Harl. MS. 396 (the statutes of Hereford Cathedral) possibly came

from Sir Christopher’s uncle, Matthew Wren.



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presented the manuscript to Harley may lie with his librarian, Humfrey Wanley. Beforeentering into full-time service with the Harleys in 1708, Wanley had been an assistant toHans Sloane, the Secretary of the Royal Society, and was elected a fellow in 1706.99 Thiswould have put him in the same London scholarly and scientific milieu as the Wrens. TheBritish Library’s catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts describes Wanley as ‘not only agreat Judge of Music, but a very able Composer’,100 and, in addition, he was considered thegreatest medievalist and palaeographer of his generation. It may be that Wren the youngerpresented Lord Harley with the manuscript with a view to its being placed under Wanley’scare, the entire collection passing to the British Museum in 1753.101

The name ‘Mr Wren’ occurs in a late eighteenth or nineteenth-century hand at the top off. 4r (fig. 8). This hand is responsible for cross-referencing the works in Harl. MS. 281 withMartin Gerbert’s three-volume Latin editions of medieval music theory first published in1784.102 Comparison of the figures in the Gerbert cross-references with those of the modernfoliation of the manuscript suggests that the same hand was responsible for both. It ispossible that these cross-references were entered by Augustus Hughes-Hughes, one-timeassistant in the British Museum’s Department of manuscripts, as the same cross-referencesare included in his Catalogue of Manuscript Music in the British Museum published between1906 and 1909.103

The persistence of scholarly interest across the centuries in the music anthology thatsurvives as Harl. MS. 218 testifies to the remarkable significance of this manuscript. As amanual of music theory, commissioned and corrected by Guy of Saint-Denis, it introducesus to the instruction he wished to give monks of his monastery. Some of the treatises werefor those satisfied with only basic musical instruction. Others, however, like the Ars musiceof Grocheio, and the first book of Guy’s own treatise on the tones, were for those with anadvanced education. It seems quite likely that the manuscript was compiled at the Abbey ofSaint-Denis for the College of Saint-Denis, where it stayed until it came into the possessionof Jean Gosselin during the 1560s. The manuscript provides a precious clue to thewhereabouts of the French Royal Library during the wars of religion, when it was Gosselin’sduty to be its Guardian. That the manuscript survived that turbulence and finally enteredthe Harleian collection, and thus as part of the British Library, is a minor miracle. Ratherthan simply focusing on single treatises within the manuscript, it is important that weappreciate the manuscript as a unified whole.

99 Peter Heyworth, ‘Wanley, Humfrey (1672–1726)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (accessed 16February 2006) <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28664>.

100 A Catalogue of Harleian Manuscripts, vol. i, p. 26.101 On the sale of the Harleian collection to the British Museum, see David Stoker, ‘Harley, Edward, second earl

of Oxford and Mortimer (1689–1741)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (accessed 16 February 2006)<http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12337>.

102 Martin Gerbert, Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra potissium, 3 vols (St Blaise, 1784). The cross-referencesin Harl. MS. 281 to Gerbert’s editions are on ff. 5r, 17r, 21r, 25v and 34r.

103 In his catalogue, Hughes–Hughes uses the modern foliation and a similar phraseology to that in Harl. MS.281 for the Gerbert cross-references. The catalogue entries read: ‘Printed by Gerbert’ followed by a volumenumber using Roman numerals and a page reference in Hindu-Arabic numerals. The entries in Harl. MS.281 read: ‘Pr. in Gerbert’ followed by the same numbering system as the catalogue. Gerbert cross-referencesare given for the Micrologus, Regule rythmice, Prologus in Antiphonarium and Tonale Beati Bernardi in Harl.MS. 281. Hughes–Hughes also includes Gerbert/Coussemaker cross-references for the Dialogus de musicaand the Tractatus de tonis of Petrus de Cruce in his catalogue. The authors would like to express theirgratitude to the British Library reviewer for raising the possibility that the pencil annotations in Harl. MS.281 were made by Hughes-Hughes. Hughes-Hughes, Catalogue of Manuscript Music, vol. iii, pp. 298, 300 and302.



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Appendix one: Inventory of Harl. MS. 281

Notes by Jean Gosselin et al.F. 1r: Semitonium maius est differentia | Diatessaron et Dytoni vel Hexachordi minoris etDyapente | Semitonum minus est differentia | Ditoni et Semiditoni vel Hexachordi maioriset Hexachordi minoris | In quinque unguibus | Tuae levae manus | Hexachordum maius |Hexachordum minus | Eorumque partes modernae musice | Si bene numeres | Dignoscerepotes. | [Illustration of Harmonic Intervals] F. 1v [Blank] F. 2r: De semitono maiore, etsemitono minore | ut re mi | re mi fa | mi fa | re mi | Semitonium maius est differentiami fa | ut E F G a | mi fa sol la | fa sol la | Diatessaron et Ditoni vel Hexachordi minoriset Diapente | Semitonium minus est differentia inter b # | Ditoni et Semiditoni velHexachordi maioris et Hexachordi minoris. F. 2v: Eclipsis solis In decano | primo Aeremperturbat magna que exagitat varietas | secundo, fluvios et fontes exsul[tat] | tertio peruniversam armeni[am] et africam caeterasque regione[s] Cancro subiectas morbosseditio[ne] et lues alias immittit. F. 3r: [Guidonian Hand] Hæc Manus singula vocumdiatona Intervalla harmonica et moderna, quæ usitata sunt in uno quo que diapason rationenumerorum ab sola forum proprius indicat. F. 3v [Blank] F. 4r: Mr Wren | In hoc librocontinentur | Musicae Quinque Tractatus | Guidonis Augentii, sive Aretini {Micrologusfol. 1 | Trochaicus 12 | Dialogus f. 21 | et Aliorum: scilicet | Alia ars de tonis per modumdyalogi quae intitulatur Dialogus beati Bernardi de tonis. f. 30 | Tractatus musicae, aquodam innominato. f. 35 | Tractatus musicae, a Petro di cruce ambiensi folio 49 | Tractatusmusicae, frater Guido monacho monasterii sancti dionysii in francia f. 54 | [Shelf marks] |Hic Guido Aretinus composuit Gamma Ut. Vixit quem circa annum Domini 1020 |Fasciculus temporum narrat Guidonem musicam floruisse in Italia circa anno Domini 1034.| Gosselin F. 4v: Guido aretinus et Petrus de cruce | Gliscunt corda hominum nostrismollita canemus | Tua mihi vinctus numeratos contulit ictus | In caelis summo gratissimacarmina fundo | Dans aulae Christi munus cum voce ministri | Ordine me scripsi primoqui carmina finxi (cf. Guido of Arezzo, Regule rythmice) | et Gimnasio musas placuitrevocare solutas | Ut pateant parvis habitae vix hactenus altis | Invidiae telum perimatdilectio caecum | Dira quidem pestis tulit omnia commoda terris | Ordine me scripsi primoqui carmina finxi | Gymnasio musas placuit revocare solutes et cetera (cf. Guido of Arezzo,Micrologus). | [Illustration of Harmonic Intervals] | In quinque unguibus | Tuae levaemaioris | Hexachordum maius | Hexachordum minus | Modis moderne musices | Si benenumeres | Cognoscere potes. | Arbitror Guidonem vixisse anno 1020. Fasciculustemporum tradit hunc authorem vixisse circa annum Domini 1034 certius anno 1028 Sedsecundum Salignas anno 1020.

1.1 Guido of Arezzo, Micrologus <Versus sequentis operis>F. 5r: Incipit micrologus guidonis aretini monachi in planam musicam. Versus sequentis operis.Gingnasio musas placuit revocare solutas…Ordine me scripsi primo qui carmina finxi.[Brevis sermo Gymnasio in marg.]. (Guido Aretinus, Micrologus, ed. Joseph Smits vanWaesberghe, Corpus scriptorum de musica, iv ([s.l.]: American Institute of Musicology,1955), p. 80.)

1.2 Prefatio auctorisF. 5r: prefatio auctoris Cum iam etatis nostre cana series multis anfractibus laborata requieitempus exposceret, ut expositis secularium curis mens spe retributionis eterne omnino deiservitio libera vacaret, placuit auctoritati autentice persone theodaldi pontificis sibi tantoobnoxium beneficio ad laborem revocare studii ut quicquid musice utilitatis articis finibusper varia tempora adquirendo laborassem, regulis neumatibusque figuratis zelo communisin commune communiter expenderem. (Cf. D. Germain Morin, ‘Guy d’Arezzo, ou deSaint-Maur des Fossés (d’après plusieurs textes inédits)’, Revue de l’Art chrétien, iii (1888),pp. 333–8 at p. 336; P. Ambrosius Kienle, ‘Neueste Forschungen über Guido von Arezzo’,



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Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft, iii (1889), pp. 491–3 at p. 493; Guido Aretinus,Micrologus, ed. Smits van Waesberghe, p. 80 n. 6.)

1.3 Guido of Arezzo, Micrologus <Epistola Guidonis ad Theodaldum; Prologus>F. 5r–v: Epistola guidonis ad theodaldum aretine civitatis episcopum. Divini timoris totiusqueprudentie fulgore…utilitate et intentione perpaucis absolvam. Prologus. Cum me etnaturalis conditio…dum quorundam proficiat discplina. (Guido Aretinus, Micrologus, ed.Smits van Waesberghe, pp. 81–6.)

1.4 Alius prologusF. 5v: Alius prologus. Sepe et multum graviter elaborare perstudui, antiqua grecorumvolumina revolvens si simplex huius artis ratio numerorum proportionibus omninoposthabitis teneris auribus cantorum plenarie posset accomodari, multorum itaqueconsideratis tractatibus ad hoc boetium inveni meliorem, que et quanta sit coniunctio vocumper modos per tropos per species inter se consonantium ostendentem, quo vero nititur solisintendere philosophis vim et naturam vocum armonice querentibus contrarius est etdifficilis. Senior enim philosophie tractatus nimia obscuritate perplexus gravitate verborumargumenta proferentium improvectis tendit insidias auribus. Hoc aut abinde percepi ubitholomeus. Duo inquit cromonis capita utriusque phebi collateralia mediocris armoniedulcedine ducta, difficili habentium inquistione siderum mercurio mediante, mirabilimeloditate asserimus resonare. Hec et hiis similia speculo enigmatis vix considerata, veteresphilosophie sectatores oculo cordis diverso corporis naturas rerum interius perscrutantes,numero, pondere, mensura, omnia constare prosequentes phisice potuerunt cognoscere. ¶Ex supradictis itaque ad bene modulandum utiliora queque eligo, nunc minus obscuriora velad hoc nihil valentia respuo, vestreque paternitati benignus offero, huius artis ad evidentiamregulas lucidius, et brevius quanto potui explicatas. Explicit Prologus. (Cf. Guido Aretinus,Micrologus, ed. Smits van Waesberghe, p. 87 n. 44.)

1.5 Guido of Arezzo, Micrologus <Capitula 1–17>Ff. 5v–14v: Incipit tractatus in quo sunt .xix. capitula. Capitulum primum. Capitulum primum.Quid faciat que se ad disciplinam musice parat … De inventione musice. Capitulum .xix.Capitulum primum. Quid faciat qui se ad disciplinam musice parat. Igitur qui nostramdisciplinam … cum ex his plura valeant colligi decanendo ista sufficiant. (Guido Aretinus,Micrologus, ed. Smits van Waesberghe, pp. 88–195.)

1.6 Hactenus invidie loraFf. 14v–15r: Capitulum .xviij. De diaphonia id est organo. Hactenus invidie lora patientersustinuimus, cuius tela ab obtrectatoribus sepe nobis illata perpessi sumus, inter hecomnem, vim et modum totius modulationis in commune di[f. 15r]ligenter exposuimus. Sedetsi quid affabilitatis amore[?] nimia vetustate obsolevisse videbatur ad memoriamreduximus patrumque monitum[?] priorum dulci simphonia revocate studuimus, huiusetiam artis ad evidentiam quicquid convenientius erat in lucem prodidimus, primiquelaboris adiutorio dei ad metam fere pervenimus. Igitur quia ad speciem modulandi predictadebent sufficere proponita namque brevitas non exposcit in longum procedere. Iam nuncdiaphonie precepta breviter exequamur. ¶ Non est autem dubitandum antiquis temporibushuius artis veritatem aliquanta obscuritate fuisse perplexam. Si quis enim varietatem vocumaliqua argumentatione colligere poterat, hac omnes parva excellentia et ut ita dicam ferenulla superare se posse credebat. At ille ut aiunt pentagonum cum tetragono duplum cumtriplo quamvis nimis lascive se habens armonicali dulcedine, unde illud fabulosum,‘commovit pectine manes’, [cf. Ecloga Theoduli 341] primitus orpheus adinvenit. Et quiahuius multorumque auctoritate diaphonie requirende causam habemus, proferendum estquid de eo didicimus. ¶ Diaphonia disiunctio vocum sonat consonanter dissonans, etdissonanter consonans, nam in ea disiunctione ab invicem voces et concorditer dissonant, etdissonanter concordant. Hanc vero frugalitate vocum in superioribus armoniam



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triplicantium, tripartitam dicere possumus. Primam a natura remotam. Secundamnaturalem. Tertiam planissimam. Remota quando aliquis nimis lascive organizans voces etvoces subtilitate arteriarum, quasi, quadam superfluitate multiplicat. Naturalis, quearmonicali mediocritate ducitur in ecclesia habetur autentica. Planissima, si cantus organorespondeat equali simphonia. ¶ Diaphonia interpretatur organum, organon grece duplexmodulatio latine. Sciendum est autem quod in omni diaphonia tria principaliter suntconsideranda. Que si bene considerentur facilior transitus fiet ad subsequentia, hec tria suntdyapason diapente et unisonantia. (Cf. Guido Aretinus, Micrologus, ed. Smits vanWaesberghe, p. 196 n. 2 and p. 197 n. 4.)

1.7 Guido of Arezzo, Micrologus <Capitulum 18.4–50; Capitulum 19.26–27;Capitulum 20 (= capitulum xix)>Ff. 15r–16v: Hac autem diaphonia quidam ita utuntur ut cantenti semper quarta cordasuccendat…Diaphonie precepta donata sunt. que si exemplo probes perfecte cognosces.Curiosus itaque existas et in usum exercitando vertas si simphoniam habeas satis tibi heregule diaphoniam dabunt. De origine autem musice artis quia rudem lectorem vidimus inprimis tacuimus quod iam exercitato magisque scienti in finem tribuimus. Capitulum .xix.De inventione musice. Erant antiquitus instrumenta incerta…cuius summa sapientia. vigetper secula seculorum. Amen. Explicit micrologus guidonis in planam musicam. (GuidoAretinus, Micrologus, ed. Smits van Waesberghe, pp. 197–208, 214, 228–233.)

2.1 Prologus in quo Guido muse ipsum alloquenti RespondetFf. 16v–17r: Incipit liber secundus eiusdem in planam musicam quem appelat trocaicum. Prologusin quo guido muse ipsum alloquenti. Respondet. Musa. Nequaquam inquit tibi reor essecongruum musa, nullaque rationis auctoritas hoc probatur exigere, eadem viaphilosophorum, vel eisdem insistendo vestigiis, duris numerorum proportionibus, rudibusatque novis cantoribus musicam tradere. Si quis enim naturaliter balbutientem conaturreddere recte loquentem, quod est impossibile, haut illius dispar potest reputari, qui partemadamantis ferro putat posse secari, propterea meis consiliis sapienter aquiesce, quantoquesubtiliori poteris, puerili stilo utere. Oportet enim parvos levioribus ad studium revocare.Guido. Quod me doces benigne, valde gratulor, scio enim quod aures tenere, senioresphilosophie tractatus plenarie non possunt percipere. Unde obmissa gravitateargumentorum regularum subtilitates et ut ita dicam fere vulgales satis evidenter omnibusin commune tradidimus. Talesque neumarum certitudines lineis vel spatiis faciledinoscendas, sensatis et studiosis, ut in [f. 17r] solo anno omnem usualitatem superent,curiose subiecimus. Igitur quia hec nullatenus possunt redargui, cur nos livor edax rodit?Leo papie decanus, vir magne scientie miror quia obtrectator habetur. Inter quem etmusicum que et quanta sit differentia trocaico demonstrabitur. Explicit prologus. (Cf. Morin,‘Guy d’Arezzo’, pp. 336–7; Kienle, ‘Neueste Forschungen über Guido von Arezzo’, p. 493.)

2.2 Guido of Arezzo, Regule rythmiceFf. 17r–20v: Incipit trocaicus. Musicorum et cantorum magna est distantia isti dicunt illisciunt. que componit musica … Auctor indiget et scriptor. gloria sit domino. Amen. Ff. 20v–21r: Omnibus ecce modis descripta relatio vocis. In hoc capitulo per versus exametrosbreviter omnium proportio consonantiorum et quasi tota ars musice. Est tonus in numerissuperantur ut octo novenis…Refert alterius cum suscipit altera vires. (Guido d’Arezzo,Regule rythmice, ed. Dolores Pesce, Guido d’Arezzo’s Regule rithmice, Prologus inantiphonarium, and Epistola ad Michahelem: A Critical Text and Translation with anIntroduction, Annotations, Indices, and New Manuscript Inventories (Ottawa, 1999), pp.330–402 (even).)

2.3 Guido of Arezzo, Prologus in AntiphonariumFf. 21r–22v: In hoc capitulo docet guido prosaice qualiter antiphonarium neumari debeat vel notari.Temporibus nostris super omnes homines fatui sunt cantores … si ut debent ex industriacomponantur. (Guido d’Arezzo, Prologus in Antiphonarium, ed. Pesce, pp. 406–34 (even).)



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2.4 Guido of Arezzo, Epistola ad Martinum [pro Michaelem]Ff. 22v–23v: Epistola guidonis ad fratrem martinum discipulum suum in qua ponit argumentumquoddam ad inveniendum novum cantum. Beatissimo atque dulcissimo fratri martino Guido… et post aurea pocula vini confusum bibit acetum. Ff. 23v–24v: Hic incipit argumentumpredictum. Ad inveniendum igitur ignotum cantum beatissime frater … cum vix litterisutcumque significemus facili tantum colloquio denudamus. Explicit trocaicus. (Guidod’Arezzo, Epistola ad Michahelem, ed. Pesce, pp. 438–72 (even).)

3.1 PrologusF. 24v: Incipit tercius liber eiusdem guidonis in musicam sub dialogo. Prologus. Quicquid igiturauctoritate philosophorum imitando modernos de natura modorum tertius absque falsitatisadditamento colligere potuimus, sublato omni invido, nostris auditoribus magna facilitatisprovidentia sub dialogo contulimus. Quod enim supradicto volumine, aut negligentieregula, vel quia longo tempore latuit musica, non intelligitur, in ultimo, puerili aure faciliregularum compendio utiliter percipitur. Verumtamen si quis hoc opus redarguit negligensaudire, quia tante rei seriem breviori stilo videat transcurrisse, quid ad rem? Omnis nonnesapiens compendium appetens, rerum prolixitates evitat? Igitur breviter et perfecteconsiderandum est, quid arte canendi sibi velit musica. Explicit prologus.

3.2 Pseudo Odo, Dialogus de musica <Incipit dyalogus>Ff. 24v–25r: Incipit dyalogus. Discipulus. Quid est musica? Magister. Veraciter canendiscientia. et facilis via. ad perfectionem canendi. ([Pseudo] Odo, Dialogus, ed. MartinGerbert, Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra potissimum, 3 vols (St Blaise, 1784; repr.Hildesheim, 1963), vol. i, p. 251.)

3.3 Quid est musica?Ff. 25r–25v: Quid est musica? ars liberalis subministrans copiam perite canendi. Quid estmusica, nisi quedam rerum pax et concordia? Unde auctoritas. ‘Omnia pace vigent’, sinequa discordia rerum. Et alibi. Qui numeris elementa ligas. Omnis enim fabrica minor,musicis proportionibus ab summo artifice constituta est, que sunt: frigidum, siccum,calidum, humidum, et reliqua. Discipulus. Si horum concordiam viribus numerorum mihiintimare ceperis, timeo ne tante sim capacitatis ut intelligam. Ideoque frustrato labore,incassum desudabis. Sed quadam obsecro rationis simplicitate voces earumqueconiunctiones facili colloquio denudare perstude. Magister. Petitio tua satis est congrua, nectamen promisi me velle dicere obscuriora, nimio subtiliora et leviora. Igitur .vij. percipelitteras, quibus utuntur musici, in monocordo figuratas, secundum ordinemconsonantiarum dispositas. Discipulus. Monocordum, vel ordinem litterarum in ipsoappositum penitus ignoro. Magister. Monocordum est lignum quadratum in modum citharecavatum, et in spatio unius uncie ab utraque parte relicto capitello, corde desuper appositesubducitur magada id est modulus. Quod curtando vel elongando cordam omnemarmoniam mirabiliter constituit. Discipulus. Quo ordine ponuntur littere? Magister. Bisnovenaria divisione cum .Γ. iuguntur .A. et .B. Quaternaria vero .C. Ternaria vero .D. Perdiplasiam cum .A. a. Cum .B. #. et reliqua. Discipulus. Semper breviloquus, etcompendiosus, ita soles me beare, de divisione novi. De consonantiis prosequere. Magister.Prima est tonus, que si .b. rotunda bis cum putatur .xv. locis in monocordo tonus numeratur.Septem vero locis semitonium ditonus novem. Semiditonus .xij. Diathessaron .xvi.Diapente .xiiij. Diapason vero equisonat, preter secundam ad primam nonam. Discipulus.Miror valde cum per duplum voces resonent, cur inferiores sint quasi viriles, altiores veroquasi pueriles. Magister. Omnis vox in pondere probatur consistere, quia musica fuitponderata cum malleis pitagora investigante. Sicut enim duodenarius continet in sesenarium bis, sic pondus aliud quando duplus habetur. Discipulus. Unde vocabula traxerit?Magister. Tonus ab intonando. Semitonum a tono. Ditonus, geminatus tonus. Semiditonusab ditono. Diathessaron de .iiijor. Diapente [f. 25v] de .vque. Diapason de octo vel de omnibus.



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Discipulus. Quoddam adhuc dubium verso sub pectore. Cum .A. sit prima vox in omnilingua, quare .Γ. ponitur ante eam, quam dicis esse .viimam? Magister. Moderni armoniarumvarietatem considerantes apposuere .Γ. ut redderent tonum ad .A. et ad alteram .G.diapason. Et ut secundus tonus haberet diapente sub fine. Et hac de causa potuis, uthaberemus diatonicum genus. Tria enim sunt genera musice artis. Enarmonicum.Cromaticum. Diatonicum. Enarmos grece dulcissimus latine, quo utuntur angeli. Cromosgrece coloratus, quo utuntur planete, quia ducit colorem ab inferiori et superiori, id estconficitur ab utroque. Diatonos, de duobus tonis dicitur, quo nos utimur. Discipulus.Resipisco. Sed inter primam nonam et secundam nascitur mihi quedam confusio, quia valdeinter se dissident. Magister. Una ad aliam apotome facit scilicet maiorem partem toni, quenullatenus potest concordari, remanet enim pars minor diesis scilicet minus semitonium quoutimur. Sed ideo addita fuit .b. ut gravior et acutior .f. f. ad ipsam per diathessaron, etdiapente resonarent. Altera enim propter duritatem tritoni dissonando recessit. A principiodialogi usque hic alia littera sic habet.

3.4 Pseudo Odo, Dialogus de musicaFf. 25v–32r: Discipulus. Quid est musica? Magister. Veraciter canendi scientia…tam detonis quam de reliquis consonantiis habens artu regulam subtilitate ingenii clare discernet.([Pseudo] Odo, Dialogus, ed. Gerbert, vol. i, pp. 251–64.)

3.5 Quantumcumque vero omniumF.f 32r: Quantumcumque vero omnium modorum atque consonantiarum similis similitudoconsideratur, tanto similior omnis armoniarum constitutio equiperatur. Namque sonusquisque gravis ad sibi consimilem diapason reddit. Igitur voces similes similes consonantias,et similes neumas et concordes constituunt. (Cf. Jacobus Leodiensis, Speculum musicae,6.54, ed. Roger Bragard, Corpus scriptorum de musica, vi, 6 vols ([Rome]: AmericanInstitute of Musicology, 1973), vol. vi, p. 142.)

3.6 Guido of Arezzo, Epistola ad Martinum <excerptum>Ff. 32r–33v: Omnes autem voces in tantum sunt similes. sonosque similes et neumasconcordes faciunt … cuius liber non cantoribus sed solis philosophis utilis est. (Guidod’Arezzo, Epistola ad Michahelem, ed. Pesce, pp. 490–530 (even).)

3.7 Ecce patet et non latetFf. 33v–34r: Ecce patet, et non latet, modulandi species. | Argumento musicali designatasepties. | Vim qui novit huius artis, atque moderamina. | Cito sentit, et cognoscit, quidvaleat musica. | Si quis tamen nondum novit, et velit addiscere. | Quali modo disponatur,numero et pondere. | Predictarum regularum formas querat sapere. | Ibi claredemonstratur vocali concordia. | Quare dupla denotetur de omni simphonia. | [f. 34r]Quidam dicunt qui ignorant levem esse musicam. | Quia cito percipiunt canendi scientiam.| Sed hoc dicunt sapientes quod nulli plenarie. | Hec ars patet, immo latet, nisi philosophie.| Verumptamen quia per hanc iunxerint elementa. | Et coniunctis elementis, ac etiamtempora. | Ratione numerorum est rerum concordia. | Quicquid sursum vel deorsumcontinetur aere. | Concordatur et ligatur musicali pondere. Expliciunt toni guidonis aretini.(Cf. Jacobus Leodiensis, Speculum musicae 2.3, ed. Bragard, vol. ii, p. 13.)

4 Tonale Beati BernardiFf. 34r–38v: Incipit alia ars de tonis per modus dyalogi que a quibusdam intitulatur sub nominebeati bernardi. Discipulus. Quid est tonus? Magister. Regula naturam et formamcantuum…Ibi de talibus sufficienter doceri poteris. Explicit (Tonale Cisterciense, ed.Christian Meyer, ‘Le Tonaire cistercien et sa tradition’, Revue de Musicologie, lxxxix (2003),pp. 77–91.)



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5. Johannes de Grocheio, Ars musiceFf. 39r–52r: Incipit prologus in arte musice. Quoniam quidam iuvenum amici mei … insempiterna secula seculorum. Amen. Explicit tractatus musice. (Johannes de Grocheio, Arsmusice, ed. Constant Mews et al. (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, forthcoming). Cf. Ernst Rohloff.Die Quellenhandschriften zum Musiktraktat des Johannes de Grocheio: Im Faksimileherausgegeben nebst Übertragung des Textes und Übersetzung ins Deutsche, dazu Bericht,Literaturschau, Tabellen und Indices (Leipzig, 1967), pp. 110–68 (even).)

6. Petrus de Cruce, Tractatus de tonisFf. 52v–58r: Incipit tractatus de tonis a magistro petro de cruce. Dicturi de tonis primovidendum est…Et ea que dicta sunt de tonis sufficiant. Expliciunt toni a magistro petro decruce Ambianensi. (Petrus de Cruce Ambianensi, Tractatus de tonis, ed. Denis Harbinson,Corpus Scriptorum de Musica, xxix ([Rome]: American Institute of Musicology, 1976), pp.vi–xxv.)

7. Guy of Saint-Denis, Tractatus de tonisFf. 58v–96v: Qui legis auctoris nomen per qunque priora Gramata pictoris hoc scribi celitusora. Incipit prologus in tractatu de tonis. Gaudere sciens breviate modernos … cui est honoret gloria in secula seculorum. Amen. Explicit tractatus de tonis a fratre guidone monachomonasterii sancti dyonisii compilatus. (Guido von Saint-Denis, Tractatus de tonis, ed. Sieglindevan de Klundert, 2 vols (Bubenreuth, 1998), vol. ii, pp. 1–137.)

Appendix two: A remonstrance follows concerning the Guardian ofthe Library of the King, addressed to all persons who love literature

Translated by Leigh McKinnon104

You, my lords, and other persons who have the honour to love literature, and those who treatof it, I, Jean Gosselin, Guardian of the Royal Library, pray you to attend to the briefdiscourse which follows:

It has been 34 years, and more, that I have had the charge to guard the Library of theKing, which is one of the most beautiful treasures of this realm. During this time I guardedit for many years inside the chateau of Fontainebleau, and then, by the command of KingCharles IX, I undertook to bring it into this city of Paris; and although, since the time thatI have had the responsibility of guarding the said library, the sciences and arts have hadmany travails and adversities, so it is that God has given me the grace to have faithfullyguarded this library, and to have prevented many times its dispersal or ruin, and especiallysince the commencement of the last troubles, as some of the henchmen of the Leaguewanted to enter it, to interfere, under the pretext of wanting to give order to it according totheir fashion. This I prevented by the grace of God and through the aid of my lords andfriends, and, seeing that I could not resist the force of such henchmen, estimating also thatin my presence they would more have the audacity to enter the library (they would constrainme, to make their opening of it [the library], by the imprisonment of my person, which theywould not have in my absence), I closed the door of the said library securely with a good lockand a good chain, and on the inside with a strong bar, and I absented myself from this cityof Paris two months before it was besieged, and I retired to Saint-Denis, where was HisMajesty, and afterwards took refuge in the city of Melun, which was loyal to the King. I wasthere up until the last truce, during which President de Nully, who at that time had much


104 Gosselin, Ensuit une remonstrance in Fournier, Variétés historiques, vol. i, pp. 1–8.


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authority in this city of Paris, had, moved by a particular affection, gone to see the saidlibrary so as to pick the lock and chain by which its door was shut; and they being unable toopen that door because it had been closed at the back with a strong bar, he broke throughthe wall to open the said door, entered the library with such a company as he wished, andwent there many times with his fellows, who were seen to go away with him carrying quitelarge parcels under their cloaks, and possessed the said library as he wished, until the timethat this city was reduced into obedience to the King, and that His Majesty summoned himto render to me the keys of this library, and to return to the said library its books if any ofthem were taken, and the aforesaid president returned only the keys to me, saying that hehad not taken anything from inside the said library. I do not want to speak of it further; butI come back to my intention, more necessary to me: it is that you, my lords and otherpersons who love literature and those who treat of it, I beseech you to understand thecalamitous state to which the henchmen of the League have reduced me. Some of those whowere in this city of Paris, ill-disposed to the servants of the King, being informed that I hadwithdrawn to a city that was in obedience to the King, come into my home next to Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs where I had left my late wife, and steal all my property, so much thatnothing is left to me, and if they had found me, they would not have left me behind. This ishow the said henchmen of the League have reduced me to a very great penury. But HisMajesty, full of kindness, having understood the faithful services which I have done in thepast, and which I do still at present, and also the great necessity in which I have been andam still now, has arranged and commanded very expressly by the advice of his council itselfto Master Balthasar Gobelin, treasurer of savings, that he had to pay me cash, with thebrightest coins in his charge, the sum of sixteen hundred and sixty-six escus, due to me formany years of my wages, and for coins paid out by me for the maintenance of the said library,with which the order was duly dispatched, of which a copy follows after this.

And as much as monsieur the treasurer does not want me to give me my due, necessityconstrains me to beseech humbly you, my lords and other honourable persons who loveliterature, that it please each of you (when the occasion presents itself) to reprimand andpersuade the aforesaid treasurer, that he would acquire honour with the grace of God andmen, following the will of the King, by pleasing those persons who treat of the arts, doservice to the King and to the public, and especially in paying me that which is my due andhas been commanded by his said Majesty so that I can acquit myself to those good peoplewho lent me money during the bad times which have passed and so that I have the means tohave bread and clothes at the age I am. For otherwise (to my very great regret) I will beconstrained, after I have served four great kings in the space of thirty-four years, to beg andask for alms (with great shame) from all persons whom I will know to love the arts, soonerthan to die, languishing, of hunger.


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