All Souls Seminars in Medieval and Renaissance Music

This long-running series of seminars, convened by Dr Margaret Bent, considers all aspects of medieval and renaissance music. It runs on Zoom in Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and generally attracts a large international audience. Usually, a presenter speaks for around 30 minutes and then engages with invited discussants for another half an hour. The floor is then open for questions and lively general discussion. Each term’s seminars are announced in advance on this page and attendees are asked to register via the button below. 

For each seminar, those who have registered will receive an email with the Zoom invitation and any further materials a couple of days before the seminar. If you have questions, please send an email to Joseph Mason, who is dealing with the practicalities of holding these seminars via Zoom.

Margaret Bent (Convener, All Souls College)

Joseph W. Mason (University of Cambridge)

Hilary Term 2025

6 February 2025, 5pm–7pm GMT

Presenter: James Tomlinson (University of Oslo)
Title: A reassessment of Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 512/543 and its Implications for the Production and Transmission of Polyphony in Late Medieval England  
Discussants: Peter Lefferts (University of Nebraska) and Karen Desmond (Maynooth University)

Around half of the surviving sources of late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English polyphony have been attributed to specific institutions in scholarly literature. Those attributions, the evidence for which varies greatly from source to source, seem to suggest that the production and transmission of polyphony before the later fourteenth century was dominated by large Benedictine and Augustinian monasteries. Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 512/543, is one such source, which is traditionally thought to have its origins in the Benedictine cathedral priory of Norwich. Yet the evidence instead suggests that it was compiled within a medieval university. Caius 512/543 is, in fact, one of several sources whose previous provenance attributions have obscured their connections to the medieval university. These manuscripts have never been considered together from this perspective. 

This paper re-evaluates Caius MS 512/543 and contextualises it among other sources of polyphony that challenge monastic musical hegemony in the period. Foregrounding issues of ownership, mobility, and the mechanics of musical transmission, Caius 512/543 prompts new understandings of the circulation of polyphony among medieval England’s many diverse and interconnected centres of intellectual and artistic engagement.

27 February 2025, 5pm–7pm GMT

Presenter: Helen Coffey (The Open University)
Title: Music for Dancing in the Empire of Maximilian I
Discussants: Christiane Wiesenfeldt (University of Heidelberg) and Martin Kirnbauer (Schola Cantorum, Basel)

The sketches for the illustrated tale of Freydal — one of several pictorial works commissioned by Maximilian I to commemorate the cultural significance of his court — have long been of interest to music historians due to their depiction of diverse forms of dancing accompanied by various combinations of instruments. This paper will explore the extent to which the musicians depicted in Freydal might be regarded as representative of the instrumental ensembles that accompanied dances both at Maximilian’s court and across his Empire. It will consider the degree to which court and civic society engaged with a shared repertoire of dance music and steps, and how instrumental music for dancing thereby contributed to the representation and interaction of members of the social elite across Maximilian’s realm.

13 March 2025, 5pm–7pm GMT

Presenter: Paul Kolb (University of Leuven)
Title: Contextuality and Irregularity in Late-Medieval Mensural Notation
Discussants: Emily Zazulia (University of California, Berkeley) and Antonio Chemotti (University of Leuven)

While theorists from Johannes de Muris to Johannes Tinctoris insisted that imperfection and alteration could be at work at multiple mensural levels (modus, tempus, prolation) simultaneously, requiring a complex balancing of different rules in context, in practice most mensural usage from the mid-fifteenth century to the early sixteenth century was both simpler and messier. In most cases, there is no more than one level at which musicians need to discern imperfection and alteration, and yet even so notational devices—dots, ligatures, rests, coloration, spacing—were optimized so that singers could rely on local notational context without having to analyze the overall mensural context. By extension, the standard signs of mensuration are not the only indications of mensural structure; sometimes the musical or notational context might lead us to override what we think the signs should mean. Drawing on theoretical and practical examples, this paper examines some of the conflicts and contradictions between mensural theory and notational and compositional practice. For example, irregular bar lengths bear witness to the mensurations holding less force as a structural unifier. Confusion between the concepts of mensuration and proportion lead to instances where a single sign could be followed by music in different mensurations, or a single mensuration could follow multiple signs (or none). Overall, I argue for a more context-dependent understanding of rhythm in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century music.