Early Sources of Identity: Makers, Owners and Users of Music Sources before 1600 ed. by Lisa Colton, Tim Shephard (review)

[Erratum]

In recent years, cultural, social, and economic historians of the Middle Ages and Renaissance have engaged in considerable debate about the production, consumption, circulation, and cultural significance of art and material objects. Following the pioneering work of scholars like Arjun Appadurai (The Social Life of Things (Cambridge, 1988)), historians now take it as a given that human beings exist and understand who they are not just in relation to other people, belief systems, and physical spaces, but also through contact and engagement with material objects. Humans invest objects with meaning (household items, clothes, books, paintings and art works, and many other things besides), as material artefacts powerfully reflect and reinforce beliefs, signify social status, mediate relationships, and act as repositories for memories and information. Shifting the historical gaze towards material culture therefore does more than simply increase our understanding about historical objects themselves: it provides a richly coloured prism through which to study people and the ways in which the myriad individuals connected to material objects understood themselves.

The present volume represents a much-needed step towards bringing these concerns to bear on material sources of medieval and Renaissance music. The volume’s sixteen chapters, originating from a conference held in 2013 at the University of Sheffield, seek to leave aside ‘the traditionally dominant view of early music sources as a means of access to medieval and Renaissance repertoires, focussing instead on the people who commissioned, made, owned and used music books, and on their reasons for doing so’ (p. 19).

In order to facilitate this shift in focus, the editors construct a two-part methodological framework of identity and materiality, because recent thinking on identity—by Lawrence Grossberg and others—‘furnishes useful conceptual tools and terms for thinking about what makers, owners and users achieved’ (p. 19) and what ‘payoff’ they enjoyed through their involvement not simply with the performance of music, but with tangible, material music sources. Moreover, identity and materiality exhibit important similarities. Neither human identities nor material objects are fixed. Just as identities are inherently fluid and always ‘under construction’, music sources contain evidence that illustrates how their construction often took place over time (years, decades, and sometimes centuries), while also yielding considerable insight into the actions, mentalities, mistakes, and priorities of the people related to a source’s emergence and existence.

Julie Cumming elaborates the editors’ twin concerns of identity and materiality by discussing Robert Darnton’s ‘communications circuit’ of people involved in the creation of eighteenth-century printed books; and Cumming, for the first time, adapts this circuit for medieval and Renaissance vocal music sources. In addition to presenting two graphic representations of communication circuits for manuscript and printed vocal music, she also identifies two fundamental questions which help to expose ‘the whole range of individuals connected to music sources’: namely, ‘who was the source created by? and who was the source created for?’ For Cumming, these questions ‘then lead to additional questions: who initiated the creation of the source? who owned the source? how was it used?’ (pp. 27–8).

Following the two essays by the editors and Cumming, the fourteen remaining chapters are arranged chronologically, beginning with an examination of manuscripts from the eleventh century and concluding with printed music around 1600. However, as Cumming observes, the two fundamental questions of ‘created by?’ and ‘created for?’, in combination with the editors’ emphasis on identity and materiality, highlight threads that run through the various chapters and link essays across the still-prevalent period division of medieval and Renaissance.

The question of ‘created by?’ is addressed in reference to both manuscript and printed sources. Helen Deeming’s essay on Latin and vernacular songs in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Britain examines the types of non-musical documents with which songs were bound, suggesting the possibility that cantors and other clerics created and recorded such music for...