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Languishing for provenance: Zelo tui langueo and the search for women's polyphony in England

This article was an invited contribution to a special issue of Early Music based on the theme ‘Women and the Sacred’, and originated as an invited conference contribution for the Annual Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference at the University of Bangor in 2008, organised by the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the Universities of Bangor and Aberystwyth. The article takes the 14th-century English motet Zelo tui langueo as a stimulus for reconsidering the role that women played in the musical life of medieval England. Drawing on historical musicology and palaeography, my work revisits the provenance of one of the sources of the motet, linking it with the Gilbertine priory of Shouldham in Norfolk, an institution that housed both male canons and nuns. I also examine the historiographical record relating to whether women sang polyphony in England. This debate has often hinged on Zelo tui langueo, and as such the article reveals strong agenda on the part of several previous writers on the subject, notably an aim to exclude women from the history of polyphonic music even on the basis of this song. The discussion is therefore based on a methodology that looks at all evidence afresh, allowing a revised picture of polyphonic practice in England.