Output details

The Complete Theoretical Works of Johannes Tinctoris: A New Digital Edition. Selected texts 2.

Continuing from Woodley_01, this output presents the first complete, collated text of the surviving portions of Tinctoris’s treatise _De inventione et usu musice_. This work was known for most of the twentieth century solely from extracts printed in Naples in the 1480s, while Tinctoris was employed at the Aragonese court as musician, chaplain and legal advisor. In a much earlier article (Early Music History, 1985) Woodley announced the discovery of new portions of the text in a manuscript in Cambrai; the present edition brings both manuscript and incunabulum texts together for the first time, along with the first complete English translation and pop-up citation notes. Tinctoris’s texts are acknowledged as important sources of information on musical instruments (especially stringed) and their performance, as well as more philosophically orientated material.

Woodley’s wider researches on Tinctoris’s life and career have also dealt with questions of dating and chronology of the treatises, including De inventione et usu musice, and this links with some of the material treated in Woodley_04 below. Crucial to the whole enterprise is a full understanding of the principal manuscript sources of the other treatises. One of the most important of these is Valencia, Biblioteca Històrica, MS 835; although it has been suggested for some time that this manuscript is of Neapolitan courtly origin, a new essay by Woodley embedded in the present project, ‘The Dating and Provenance of Valencia MS 835’, proposes a refinement to previous research, and enables a quite precise dating that has wider significance for our understanding of the pattern of Tinctoris sources. Also, a completely revised text and translation of the Liber imperfectionum notarum musicalium, within the new user interface, and brief biographical outline, are presented (previously available in draft form within the Stoa Consortium project, assessed in RAE 2008).