Output details

'Tinctoris’s Family Origins: Some New Clues'

The biographical and institutional contexts of Tinctoris’s career and writings have been at the centre of Woodley’s fifteenth-century research since his early publication of the first full documentary outline in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, 1981, and several subsequent articles.

Although a reasonable amount of information has been accruing over the past thirty years or so concerning Tinctoris’s life, especially in France and Italy, it has been difficult to root his musical and legal careers in terms of family background in fifteenth-century Brabant. A new repository of documents, recovered recently by Woodley after many years of searching, in Tinctoris’s home town of Braine-l’Alleud, along with others from the Belgian state archives, now enables some early context to be sketched for at least certain aspects of his later, multi-faceted working life, in particular as local background to his later law studies at the University of Orléans. These documents, mainly relating to the ‘échevinage’ of Braine-l’Alleud, show clearly that various members of the Tinctoris (Le Taintenier) family, including his father, had an established involvement with the local governance of both the ‘franchise’, or village itself, and its surrounding ‘foraineté’. As an indirect consequence of some of the detail suggested by this new archival material, we can also fill in a little more of the musicological context to the process and timeline underlying the compilation of Tinctoris’s treatise De inventione et usu musice; the article therefore articulates with the new text and translation of this treatise made available within Woodley_02 above.

The article forms part of a special issue of the Journal of the Alamire Foundation dedicated to Johannes Tinctoris, guest-edited by Woodley (see also Dean). This issue of the journal emerged directly, by invitation, from the 2011 Tinctoris quincentenary celebration sessions at the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference in Barcelona.