"children's voices: singing and literacy in sixteenth-century france"

Children's Voices: Singing and Literacy in Sixteenth-Century FranceAuthor(s): Kate van OrdenSource: Early Music History, Vol. 25 (2006), pp. 209-256Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3874758 .

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Early Music History (2006) Volume 25. C Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0261127906000179 Printed in the United Kingdom

KATE VAN ORDEN

CHILDREN'S VOICES: SINGING AND LITERACY IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY

FRANCE

Around 1600, students in France learnt to read with printed primers.' They began with the letters of the alphabet, learning them by playing with little wooden or cardboard tablets or picking them out of books, and then moved on to syllables, which were learnt from syllabaries printed in large letters and containing the Pater noster, Ave Maria, Credo, Confiteor and the Benedicite. When they began to spell out whole words, children moved on to another syllabary containing the Magnificat, the Nunc Dimittis, Salve Regina, the Seven Penitential Psalms and the litanies of the Saints, all of them common prayers. Two pages from Jacques Cossard's Methodes pour apprendre a lire, a escripre, chanter le plain chant, et compter (Paris, 1633) can give us some idea of what these early modern primers looked like (see Figures 1-2).2 In the first lesson the text of the Pater noster is broken into syllables, whereas in the second lesson the students must discern the syllables of the Ave Maria themselves, a task aided by the small numbers Cossard has placed beneath the text to show how many letters should be read together as a syllable.

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the session on 'Music and the Cultures of Print in the Renaissance' at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society in Houston, Texas, November 2003, and in colloquia at All Souls College, Oxford, the University of California, Berkeley, and King's College, London. I would especially like to thank Jane Bernstein, Cristle CollinsJudd, Anthony Newcomb andJessie Ann Owens, who collaborated on the AMS session. For their reading of subsequent drafts, I am grateful to Bonnie Blackburn, Marie-Alexis Colin, Sean Curran, Frank Dobbins, Iain Fenlon,Joseph Kerman and Katelijne Schiltz. The research for this article was conducted during an unforgettable residency at the Centre d'Etudes Supbrieures de la Renaissance in Tours, France, with the support of the Studium Fellowship, Philippe Vendrix, and the wonderful team of the Programme Ricercar.

1 F. Furet andJ. Ozouf, Reading and Writing: Literacy in Francefrom Calvin to Jules Ferry (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 74-8. I paraphrase p. 75. Also see R. Chartier, D. Julia and M.-M. Compere, L'ducation en France du XVIe au XVIIIe silcle (Paris, 1976). For a full bibliography of textbooks see F. Buisson, Ripertoire des ouvrages pidagogiques du XVIe siecle (Paris, 1887).

2 Cossard's text, as can be observed from the directions in small type meant for the instructor, did double duty as a teacher's manual and a syllabary from which the examples in larger fonts could be read by students. At over 350 pages, it was not itself a book for beginners.

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Figure 1 'Pater noster', in Jacques Cossard, Methodes pour apprendre a lire, a escripre, chanter le plain chant, et compter (Paris, 1633), p. 101. Photo courtesy of the

Bibliothique nationale de France

Thus children were taught to read Latin first, and only later - if ever - progressed to reading French. One reason induction into vernacular letters was delayed was because pedagogues believed

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Singing and Literacy in Sixteenth-Century France

Figure 2 'Ave Maria', in Cossard, Methodes pour apprendre a lire, p. 103. Photo courtesy of the Bibliothdque nationale de France

that children vocalised truer sounds from Latin syllabaries. Far more orderly than vernacular tongues, Latin texts were believed to

project regular patterns of letters and words into the mind and onto the brain's sensus communis. Such attention to the physiology of

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reading and how the form of written signs encoded meaning contributed to the fundamental connection between learning to read and lessons in manners, for reading and repetition were believed to inculcate the tamed, artificial passions in children that were the essence of good habits.3 Primer texts were designed to discipline reading, limiting sensual perceptions and avoiding the irregular excitement of the body's passions.

Progress to the vernacular makes the connection between reading and the body explicit, for this second step towards literacy was accomplished with the aid of a 'civility' or book of manners. Many of these books were translations of Erasmus's manual on manners for children, De civilitate morum puerilium libellus (Basel, 1530), or Baldassar Castiglione's II cortegiano (1528), two books that contributed to the long-standing courtly preoccupation with manners a textual apparatus that, by the end of the century, sustained an educational agenda vesting physical habit with social import.4 Erasmus had envisaged the regularisation of manners throughout Europe as a great equaliser that would smooth interaction among people from different countries and social spheres - a common physical currency for cross-cultural exchange - whereas the Italian strain of civility promoted manners as a means of distinction. Yet in spite of these differences, both Erasmian and Italian courtesy used the book as an agent. These texts became primers of a second order, intertwining the processes of learning to read and write with socialisation.

Civilities printed in France often used a typeface approximating French script, the idea being that each language should be printed in its appropriate written form. Roman type was used for Latin, italics for Italian, and a font called caractires de civilite for French. Thus the upright characters of Latin syllabaries contrasted with the elegant type of vernacular civility books, hinting at the lessons in social grace contained therein. When the student could read civility

See A. Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998), ch. 6, 'The Physiology of Reading: Print and the Passions'.

4 See R. Chartier, 'From Texts to Manners: A Concept and its Books: Civiliti between Aristocratic Distinction and Popular Appropriation', in The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modem France, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Princeton, 1987), pp. 71-109, and J. Revel, 'The Uses of Civility', in R. Chartier (ed.), Passions of the Renaissance, trans. A. Goldhammer, vol. 3 of A

History of Private Life, gen. eds. P. Aries and G. Duby (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1989), pp. 167-205.

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type fluently, the time had come for lessons in writing. In this way, civility texts not only taught good behaviour - they laid a visual foundation for the writing lessons that counted among the student's first experiences of physical discipline.5

The segregation of reading and writing meant that many students left school barely able to sound out printed Latin prayers they already knew by heart; others could read print but not write, and still others were fully literate, being able to read various sorts of type and script as well as being able to write. Some primers even taught students to read musical notation and numbers. Cossard's treatise, as the title indicates, was a 'Method for Teaching Reading, Writing, Singing Plainchant, and Counting', and it took the student through a series of lessons beginning, as we saw, with syllabicating in Latin; then came lessons in reading vernacular texts printed in a cursive

typeface - including writing exercises such as model letters from a schoolboy to his father - and it concluded with the Guidonian

hand, the gamut, clefs, chant notation, an introduction to white mensural notation, and a brief section on numbers, counting, and

rudimentary arithmetic. Musical literacy was, for many, part of a

good education. And singing, as we shall see, played its role in

learning to read, something hinted at by catechisms containing music, broadsides with moralising ABCs meant to be sung to memorised timbres, and collections containing four-voice homo-

phonic settings of the Latin primer texts, often in vernacular translations.

The diverse kinds and levels of literacy resulting from these educational programmes complicate our understanding of what literature and music was destined for whom. After all, Latin prayers filled the role that Dick and Jane primers do today, whereas little collections of French poetry might have been beyond those same

readers; children whose Sunday school catechisms contained Latin

songs they sang in processions might not have been able to read the

superius part of Tant que vivray. The fact that some Latin pieces were for illiterates blurs the stylistic distinctions between high (mass), middle (motet) and low (chanson) that music historians have elaborated based in part on the definitions in Johannes Tinctoris's

5 See J. Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, 1990).

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Terminorum musicae difinitorium.6 These generic divisions have born directly upon our understanding of the cultures in which music circulated in the sixteenth century, framing it in terms of a highly literate tradition of church composers that reached its fullest expression in the large-scale forms of the cyclic mass, a middling para-liturgical culture of ritual and devotion in which motets were employed (again, by literati), and a popular culture of the chanson that intersected with oral traditions, memorised timbres, dance music and the repertories of illiterate minstrels.

By studying the process by which people learnt to read, I hope to revise our notions of the cleavages between oral and literate practices, where they fell, and what music straddled them. Yet I shall not concentrate solely on textual analysis. Rather, I follow the lead of historians of the book - scholars such as Henri-Jean Martin, Roger Chartier, D. F. Mackenzie and Adrian Johns - in suggesting that we pair textual analysis and cultural history with a thorough consideration of the material forms in which those same texts circulated.7 Study of the choice of typefaces, layout and format used for these texts can help us discover their intended audience.

Books and music for less accomplished readers made up the broadest market for print, and in the broadsheets, pamphlets and books designed to appeal to them, we can see how authors and printers attracted new readers for their wares by accommodating texts to the reading practices of the marginally literate. These are prints that appeal to oral culture. Their recognisable style caught the eyes of readers who depended on memory and familiarity in order to decipher new material, a style that implies specific ways of

" Available in facsimile, Terminorum musicae dfi/nitorium (Documenta musicologica, Erste Reihe, 37; Kassel, 1983). On Tinctoris and the stylistic concepts of high, medium and low that he borrowed from Cicero's Rhetorica see M. R. Erviti, 'The Motet as a Representation of Sociocultural Value Circa 1500' (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997). Finally, for several textbook definitions of the motet that take Tinctoris as a guide, see most recently A. W. Atlas, Renaissance Music: Music in Western Europe, I 400-1600 (New York, 1998), pp. 86-8, and R. Taruskin, The Oxfbrd History of Western Music, 6 vols. (New York, 2005), i, pp. 459-60.

7 The now-classic studies are L. Febvre and H.-J. Martin, Lapparition du livre (Paris, 1958, 1971), available in English as The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450 1800, trans. D. Gerard (London, 1984); H.-J. Martin and R. Chartier, Histoire de l'idition franfaise, 4 vols. (Paris, 1982-6); Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print; and D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (The Panizzi Lectures, 1985; London, 1986). The many studies that followed on from these are too numerous to list here, though I must mention one magisterial work: A.Johns, The Nature of the Book.

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reading that can be recovered from the verbal codes, visual patterns and standardised forms printers imposed on the texts that they replicated.8

My concern with novice readers also has a musical dimension. Studying music prints designed for broad diffusion reveals that many employ the same strategies used by those who printed poetry collections, little devotional texts, and other sorts of ephemeral material pitched to a grand public. The marginally literate seem to have relied to a significant degree on musical memory when 'reading', something evident from the primers that prompted students to syllabicate the Ave Maria, Pater noster, Salve Regina and other prayers they already knew as songs. We know that children who could barely talk sang the Ave Maria in their homes and the streets and that

huge numbers of the faithful sang litanies, the Salve Regina, hymns and Marian antiphons during processions.9 Boys led antiphons, girls sang the Ave Maria in alternation with men and women, and whole groups of pilgrims sang the Te Deum 'with great devotion and joy' when they arrived at their destinations.10 Hubert Meurier, a canon of Reims Cathedral, tells us that many laypersons - including women and small children - 'knew most of the office of the sacrament as if they had been brought up from the start among ecclesiastics'.ll And indeed, primers usually included the responses

8 See especially R. Chartier, 'Communities of Readers', in The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and

Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Stanford, 1994), pp. 1-23.

9 See H. Meurier, Traict de l'institution et vray usage des processions tant ordinaires, qu'extraordinaires, qui sefont en l'Eglise Catholique, contenant ample discours de ce qui s'est passi pour ce regard en la Province de Champaigne, depuis le 22. deJuilletjusques au 25. d'Octobre, 1583 (Reims, 1584), esp. fols. 28' and 41v.

10 See N. Riquier, Recueil memorable d'aulcuns cas advenus depuis l'an du salut 1573 tant 8 Beauvais qu'ailleurs, ed. V. Leblond, vol. 2 of Documents pour servir a l'histoire de Beauvais et du Beauvaisis au XVIe siicle (Paris and Beauvais, 1909), p. 13. Also see the detailed descriptions of the singing in A.-E. Poquet, Histoire de Chateau-Thierry , 2 vols. (Chiteau-Thierry, 1839), i, pp. 354-9;J. Pussot, Journmalier ou mimoires de Jean Pussot, Maitre Charpentier en la Couture de Reims, ed. E. Henry (Reims, 1856), p. 18; and the pamphlet Le vray discours des grandes processions qui sefont depuis lesfrontires [sic] d'Allemagnejusques a la France, dontjamais n'en futfaicte de semblable, & comme plus amplement vous sera monstri dans le discours (Paris, 1583).

11 Meurier, Traicti de l'institution et vray usage des processions, fol. 43r. 'Car non seulement les gens d'Eglise & de Religion l'ont ador& [the host] teste nue & pieds nuds, & ont chanth infinies

louanges & de jour & de nuit, & A toute heure: mais aussi les personnes seculieres de toute

qualit6, jusques aux femmes, & petits enfans, qui sgavent la plus part de l'office du Sacrement, comme s'ils avoient esth tousjours nourris entre les Ecclesiastiques.

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A-ve Ma-ri - a gra-ti- a ple-na do-mi-nus te-cum Be-ne-di-cta tu in mu-li - er- i - bus

Example 1 'Ave Maria', Second antiphon of Second Vespers for the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 25 March, rhythmicised as in Certon's setting

of the Mass, as one English source put it, 'To helpe a prest to synge'.12

More recollection than true discovery, reading catechistic texts activated a matrix of background knowledge stored in musical forms. Let us take the Ave Maria chant as an example (see Example 1). The opening of this mode 1 antiphon is striking, both for its sudden drop to the c' below the final d' and the leap to the reciting tone a', which is stressed with a plangent ornament on the b ' a semitone above.13 It is memorable in the way that the openings of so many well-loved hymns and antiphons were - one need only think of the Pange lingua, Ave maris stella and the Salve Regina to see that the aural hooks of their extraordinary incipits gave them strong identities. From there, the melody unfolds with greater ease, dominated by conjunct motion and articulating a tonal move up and away from the final that is common to many hymns and monophonic songs reaching back to the troubadours: the second phrase circles around the reciting note, where the first phrase ended, matching the assonance of 'Ma-ri-a' and 'ple-na' with a musical rhyme on a'. The third phrase moves from a' down to the final, and the fourth begins ambiguously on g', moving on to press upon the e' above the final before settling upon d'. In this example, I preserve the rhythmic values and text underlay from Pierre Certon's polyphonic setting of the chant since they can give us some idea of the

1 See Horae Eboracenses, The Pymer of Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary, According to the Use of the Illustrious Church of 'York with Other Devotions as They were Used by the Lay-Folk in the Northern Province in the XVth and XVIth Centuries (Durham and London, 1920), p. 26.

" Second antiphon of Second Vespers for the Annuciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 25 March. The version I provide here is from the polyphonic setting by Pierre Certon discussed below. It varies slightly from the Roman version of the chant given in printed antiphoners, which contain more repeated notes and passing notes as ornaments and which begins on g instead of f (though continues similarly). See, for example, Antiphonarium proprium (Venice, 1523), fol. 68 and Antiphonarium Romanum ad Ritum Breviarii, ex decreto Sacros. Concilii Tridentini restituti (Venice, 1614), fol. 128". Certon's setting does have the same interval content as the intonation given in the setting by Richafort in Liber octavus. xx. musicales motetos quatuor quinque vel sex vocum modulos habet (Paris, 1534), fol. 2' of the superius part. The chant is transposed up a fourth. All transcriptions are my own.

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stress that was considered appropriate. Nonetheless, in most cases the melodic contour of the chant, with its high points on 'Ma-RI-a', 'DO-mi-nus TE-cum', 'Be-ne-DI-cta tu', better serves the cause of good declamation than rhythm. Accent is keyed to a logical melody, one constructed of aphoristic phrases that were memorable enough to stick in the mind.

Such melodies helped children keep their place in the dizzying jumble of letters and syllables that confronted them as they laboured through the Latin prayers in their abecddaires. The ebb and flow of the melody gave order to the letters printed in syllabaries such as Cossard's, where words are broken apart and often hyphenated at the ends of lines (see above, Figures 1 and 2). Indeed, the only visual devices that gave the phrases profile are the punctuation and accents that - happily - correspond to the comely lines of the chant.

If prayers and hymns made apt aides-memoires for children who were learning to sound out written texts, it was surely owing to the fact that their words and melodies had been conditioned by oral practices.'4 We might almost say that those children who left school only able to read their syllabary had not really learnt to read at all, in the sense of deciphering meaning from letters on a page, for their entire experience of the written was inflected by oral experience. Michel de Certeau captured this essential quality of reading - the oral source of its 'authority' - with an important definition that distinguishes reading from writing and deciphering written texts, a distinction particularly relevant to the sixteenth century, when reading and writing were learnt sequentially. Certeau maintains that the construction of meaning was linked to oral transmission. Students did not learn to read meaning by learning to decipher letters; rather, reading enlisted the authority of oral culture in the deciphering of a written text. Deciphering - sounding out, putting letters together, and syllabicating in the ways taught by Cossard - might be learnt in tandem with reading, but reading was 'preceded and made possible by oral communication'.15 'In other words, cultural memory (acquired through listening, through oral tradition) alone makes possible and gradually enriches the strategies of

14 M. de Certeau, The Practice ofEveyday Life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), pp. 165-76.

15 Ibid., 168.

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semantic questioning whose expectations the deciphering of a written text refines, clarifies, or corrects.' 16 Certeau argues that all reading mobilises expectations first shaped by oral culture, and here we need only think of the catechism lessons that preceded a child's first encounter with the Latin prayers in his or her abicidaire.

Against the belief that texts shaped and 'imprinted' readers with their messages, Certeau offers a new way of understanding reading that credits oral culture with greater power, which is of particular relevance to this study.I7 For the relationship between oral authority and scriptural authority examined by Certeau first began to be renegotiated during the sixteenth century with the acceleration of printing and the Reformation and Catholic Reform. As we know, Protestants encouraged direct access to Scripture, which brought with it a rise in literacy and the increasing production of texts, not only verbal but musical.'8 In Lyon and nearby Geneva, for example, the sheer number of vernacular translations of the Bible, catechisms, psalters and other books designed to support religious instruction and private devotion vastly outweighs the proportion of Huguenots in the general population, which historians have esti- mated at around 10 per cent during the peak years of the 1560s.'9 In response, Catholics produced their own catechisms, vernacular paraphrases of hymns and post-Tridentine editions of the book of hours. But despite their response in kind to the material dimension of Reformation ideology (spearheaded by the Jesuits), it would appear that on the whole, Catholics were nervous about placing sacred texts into the hands of children. As a result, they continued their long-standing traditions of oral instruction, and it is this insistence on the spoken word and its deep history, reaching back into the fifteenth century and forward into the seventeenth, that is

I Ibid.

C7 hartier is one of the foremost scholars to build upon Certcau's work. See The Order of Books, pp. 1-23.

I" Among the many studies on literacy, see especially N. Z. Davis, 'Printing and the People', in

Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), pp. 189 226 and, more recently, J.-F. Gilmont, The Refbrmation and the Book, trans. K. Maag (Aldershot and Brookfield, Vt., 1998). " See the summary in M. P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629 (Cambridge, 1995), 30-3. For music, one can get a general overview by comparing the output of Parisian presses (Attaingnant, Du Chcmin, and Le Roy & Ballard) with the large number of chansons spirituelles and harmonised psalters brought out in Lyon and Geneva. See S. F. Pogue, Jacques Moderne: Lyons Music Printer qf the Sixteenth Century (Geneva, 1969) and especially L. Guillo, Les iditions musicales de la Renaissance lonnaise (Paris, 1991).

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relevant here. Indeed, we might even see in Catholic educational programmes, which began with Latin prayers and only later moved to vernacular texts and instruction in writing, a desire to maintain a divide between reading and writing, between the passive consumption of Latin primers and the active production of knowledge in French. One outcome of such ambivalence towards literacy was greater exclusion - in the seventeenth century, Jesuit educators closed down their ABC classes for local children whenever possible, and government officials tried to reserve literacy for those born into the higher social orders.20

My larger intention, then, is not only to introduce singing and musical literacy in the history of reading in sixteenth-century France, but also to elucidate the doctrinal and social struggles in which music became embroiled when Catholics bound it more firmly to catechistic instruction. That is to say, a new history of literacy and music bears upon the broader history of Catholic indoctrination and upper-class socialisation in France, not least because singing remained an oral practice. Such a history of music restores to the history of scriptural authority triumphant a dimension of orality and draws our attention to an autonomous vocal culture that was not effaced by literacy.

Restoring the continuing importance of orality also counters erroneous theories of print culture developed by historians such as Robert Mandrou, who declared pamphlet literature to be the instrument of a victorious process of acculturation, and of Elisabeth Eisenstein, who insisted that the press imposed a new culture on humanity that transcended historical circumstances.21 Eisenstein's notion of print culture as monolithic and timeless has been particularly influential in Anglophone scholarship, and only recently has that influence been contested, most dramatically by the work of Adrian Johns.22 In this essay, I hope - in the same vein as Johns - to elaborate the ways in which print permitted multiple readings,

20 See G. Huppert, Public Schools in Renaissance France (Urbana and Chicago, 1984), p. 117. 21 E. L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations

in Early Modem Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge and New York, 1979). 22 In addition to A. Johns, The Nature of the Book, see the exchanges in the American Historical Review

Forum organised and introduced by A. Grafton: 'How Revolutionary Was the Print Revolution?', American Historical Review, 107 (2002), pp. 84-6, followed by A. Johns, 'How to Acknowledge a Revolution', pp. 106-25, and E. L. Eisenstein, 'An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited', pp. 87-105, 126-8.

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how musical texts met their readers halfway between the oral and the written, and how print was feared as an agent of piracy and unauthorised reading practices. Indeed, upon close examination it becomes clear that it was not the printing press that promised the standardisation of knowledge and imposition of moral behaviour, but the human technologies of the classroom, which relied on singing and speaking texts aloud. Singing and recitation gave texts body and - in the same way that civility disciplined the body - enabled educators to discipline reading itself.

LATIN PRIMERS

The rudiments of reading had long been taught using sacred texts found in the Psalter and books of hours, the latter by far the most ubiquitous book of the sixteenth century. Parisian presses churned out vast quantities of Heures - at least 395 editions were published between 1501 and 1535, which meant that around 400,000 copies were produced in a city with a population of approximately 300,000.23 Paris served the European market with hours designed for local usage (Paris, Rome, Rouen, Verdun and so forth). They were printed in Latin, sometimes with French prayers at the end, or in side-by-side translations. Although it is difficult to be certain who bought these books and when and how they used them, the small formats in which they often appeared suggest the broadest possible audience, as do estate inventories, which show the prevalence of Heures among the belongings of merchants and artisans. Even if people owned no other books, they often had a book of hours.24 And far from diminishing in popularity as the century wore on, production continued apace. For example, between 1555 and 1589, Christopher Plantin published sixty-three editions of hours, most in smaller formats such as 120, 24' and even 320, presumably in large print runs of well over 1,000 copies.25

The connection between basic literacy and the Horae is evident in the word 'primer' itself, which some believe derives from the

23 See J.-P. Babelon, Paris au XVIe siicle (Paris, 1986), pp. 159-66. 24 For an account of books of hours in inventaires apris di?es, see K. L. Bowen, Christopher Plantin's

Books of Hours: Illustration and Production (Nieuwkoop, 1997), pp. 41-52 and A. Labarre, Le livre dans la vie amihnoise du seiziime siicle (Louvain and Paris, 1971).

25 See Bowen, Christopher Plantin's Books of Hours.

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canonical hour of Prime.26 Whether or not this etymology is correct, it is certainly the case that sixteenth-century books of hours often included the ABCs.27 That ABCs and the Heures de Notre Dame went together is clear from the colporteur's cry in a well-known sixteenth- century woodcut: 'Beaulx ABC, Belles Heures' (see Figure 3). His basket undoubtedly included pamphlets like the 'Croix de par Dieu' in Figure 4 that began with the cross (hence the name), the alphabet, the Pater noster, Ave Maria and Credo, and continued with a traditional Latin grace, prayers and responses for Mass, and then a series of French texts: translations of the Pater noster, Ave Maria and Credo, the last often in the rhyming quatrains that were a longtime favourite of

pedagogues. The Ten Commandments and the Commandments of the Church usually appeared in similar form.

Alphabets and these catechistic prayers were printed in little eight-folio pamphlets many of which survive bound into books of hours at or near the beginning.28 These little catechisms were the parents of syllabaries, which began the same way and contained many of the same Latin texts. Thus although they were largely in Latin, Horae promoted both Catholic piety and general literacy, at least enough to sound out the Word of God.

Like an ABC song, the melodies of the Pater noster and Ave Maria were among the first ones a child learnt; conversely, these 'songs' were just as closely associated with the alphabet as were the 'Croix de par Dieu' or the alphabetic series of moralising quatrains that children regularly learnt to recite and sing.29 The pride of place given to these two prayers in books of hours, catechisms, abecedaires

26 Though this has not been proved. See Horae Eboracenses, pp. xxxvii-xliv. 27 On English hours see ibid., pp. xliii-xliv, 25. 28 See P. Lacombe, Livres d'heures imprimds au XVe et au XVIe siicle conservis dans les bibliothiques

publiques de Paris (Paris, 1906). The consistency of the material included in these pamphlets across a span of fifty years is quite impressive. Among the hours I examined in Parisian

libraries, such ABC pamphlets can be found bound in Heures de Nostre Dame a l'usage de Chartres (Paris: Jacques Kerver, 1581), Bibliotheque nationale de France (hereafter BNF) B-27833, Lacombe, Livres d'heures, p. 471; Heures de Nostre Dame, a l'usage de Paris (Paris: Jacques Kerver, 1575), Bibliothbque historique de la ville de Paris, Res. 550542, Lacombe, p. 468; Heures a l'usage de Rome (Paris: Thielman Kerver, 1539), Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve, Res. BB-1492, Inv. 1650, Lacombe, p. 412; [Heures a l'usage de Paris] [Paris: Jacques Kerver, 1572?], Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevibve, R&s. BB-1516. Inv. 1669, Lacombe, p. 465; Heures de Nostre Dame, a l'usage de Amyens (Paris: Guillaume de La Noue, 1589), BNF B-27949, Lacombe, p. 492.

29 See the examples in T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge, 1991) and the moralising recueils by Y. Rouspeau, Quatrains spirituels de l'honneste amour, nouvellement mis en lumiere (Paris: pourJean Houze, 1584) and Quatrains spirituels de l'honneste amour, avec les Stances des louanges du saint mariage opposis celles de Philippes Desportes (Pons: T. Portau, 1593).

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Figure 3 Engraving of a colporteur from the series entitled Les cris de Paris

(16th c.), Arsenal Estampes Res. 24, fol. I'. Photo courtesy of the Bibliotheique nationale de France

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Figure 4 'Le ABC des Chrestiens', bound into Heures de Nostre Dame a l'usage de Chartres (Paris, 1581), sig. Ci'. Photo courtesy of the Bibliothdque nationale de

France

and syllabaries seems to have inspired composers and printers to place them at the beginning of music books as well. To mention just a few prints, Adrian Willaert's first book of motets for four voices

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opens with a charming Ave that sets the chant most clearly in the top voice (Scotto, 1539), and his first book of motets for six voices (Gardane, 1542) begins with a Pater noster and an Ave Maria, both based on the chant melodies. Jacques Moderne's third book of Motteti del Fiore for four voices opened with a Pater noster and an Ave Maria by Francesco de Layolle in its 1539 edition; Pierre Certon began his Institutoris Symphoniacorum Puerorum ... modulorum editio (Attaingnant, 1542) with a six-voice Pater noster in which the canonic quinta and sexta parts contain the Ave Maria chant cited above; Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina opened his third book of motets (Venice: Scotto, 1575) with a Pater noster and an Ave Maria for five voices that paraphrase the chant melodies, and Pietro Cerone opened his music theory treatise, El melopeo y maestro (Naples: Juan Bautista Gargano y Lucrecio Nucci, 1613), with a magnificent engraving of the Virgin surrounded by the parts to a canonic Ave Maria for twenty voices. For the best example of all, we need only turn to Ottaviano Petrucci's Odhecaton, for the very first book of printed polyphony begins with a four-voice Ave Maria by de Orto, its text underlaid in all the voices."' One can imagine that the familiar texts and melodies of all of these settings enticed more than a few shoppers to purchase these collections as they scanned the opening folios. At the very least, their place of honour in printed books of polyphony reflected their primacy in the other books and lay culture generally. Indeed, Petrucci's second motet print, Motetti depassione, de cruce, de sacramento, de beata virgine et huiusmodi B of 1503 clearly seems to have taken the Horae as a model. Loosely organised to reflect a suite of votive services, it mirrors the standard cycle of offices that gave the book of hours its name - the Hours for the feasts of the

:" Other examples include Willaert's four-voice Paler noster/Ave Malaria opening the Motteti delfiore (Lyon: Moderne, 1537);Jacquet of Mantua's flive-voice Pater noster/Ave Maria in that composer's Primo libro de i motetti a cinque voci (Venice: Scotto, 1539); Claude Goudimel's Pater noster that

opens the Modulorum ternis vocibus . . . volumen primum (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1565); Antoine de Mornable's Paler noster at the opening of MAodulorum ternis vocibus . .. volumen secundum (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1565); the Ave Maria byJacquet of Mantua that fcllows it in that print,Jacob de Kerle's four-voice Pater noster in his Liber modulorum quaternis, quinis, et senis vocibus (Paris: Le

Roy & Ballard, 1572); and the Pater noster settings a 4 and a 6 that open Orlande de Lassus, Patrocinium musices. . . cantionum ... prima pars- (Munich: Adam Berg, 1573) and id., Cantica Sacra sex et octo vocibus (Munich: Adam Berg, 1585) respectively. For a full list of Pater noster and Ave Maria settings from the time, see D. E. Freeman, 'On the Origins of the Pater noster-Ave Maria

ofJosquin des Prez', Musica Disciplina, 45 (1991), pp. 169-219. On the economic dimension of Petrucci's decisions, seeJ. Kmetz, 'Petrucci's Alphabet Series: The ABC's of Music, Memory, and Marketing', Basler Jahrbuchfir historische Musikpraxis, 25 (2001), pp. 127-42.

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Blessed Virgin, the Cross, and the Holy Spirit.3' In similar fashion, the 'ABC' designations Petrucci gave his Motetti and Canti volumes associated them with other sorts of primers.

The foundational nature of the Pater noster and Ave Maria invite the question of how polyphonic settings of these texts might have been intended as musical primers. For the moment, let us leave aside the motets I have just cited (to which we shall return) and turn instead to a polyphonic primer explicitly designed for catechism classes, the Jesuit Father Michel Coyssard's Paraphrase des Hymnes et Cantiques spirituelz pour chanter avecque la Doctrine chrestienne (Lyon: Jean Pillehotte, 1592). Coyssard (b. 1547) served as rector at Tournon, Le Puy and Vienne, and died in 1623 while vice-provincial in Lyon.32 The college of Tournon was especially renowned for its music-making, in which Coyssard surely had a hand. Students there participated in liturgical services, sang 'figured' music, performed in lavish plays and the occasional entry, and probably also studied the lute and other instruments.33

As the title indicates, the Paraphrase des Hymnes contains French paraphrases to sing 'with the Christian Doctrine', and, indeed, the texts it glosses are precisely those of the catechism:

Le Credo Le Pater noster L'Ave Maria Le Veni Creator Veni Sancte Spiritus Vexilla Regis Le Salve Regina L'Ave Maris stella Stabat Mater Les commandemens de Dieu Les commandemens de l'Eglise Conditor alme siderum

31 See especially H. M. Brown, 'The Mirror of Man's Salvation: Music in Devotional Life about 1500', Renaissance Quarterly, 43 (1990), pp. 744-73, at p. 764, where he argues that all of Petrucci's motet anthologies 'might almost be described as the musical equivalent of one of these devotional books' (i.e. a book of hours).

32 On his life and works see D. Launay, La musique religieuse en France du Concile de Trente a 1804 (Paris, 1993), pp. 119-36. Also see J.-C. Dhotel, Origines du catichisme moderne d'apris les premiers manuels imprimis en France (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1967), pp. 133-36, 142-4.

33 See Kate van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modem France (Chicago, 2005), pp. 224-5; T. F. Kennedy, Jesuits and Music: Reconsidering the Early Years', Studi musicali, 17 (1988), pp. 71-100, and T. Culley, 'Musical Activity in Some Sixteenth-Century Jesuit Colleges, with Special Reference to the Venerable English College in Rome from 1579 to

1589', Analecta Musicologica, 19 (1980), pp. 1-29.

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Pange lingua gloriosi Te Deum laudamus Kyrie pro litaniis

Coyssard's polyphonic catechism was not meant to replace the Latin one, but supplemented it with French paraphrases of the articles of faith that children learnt by rote. This turn to the vernacular was less radical than it might seem given the strong Catholic resistance to the Huguenot psalter, for the Jesuits had a substantial tradition of proselytising with vernacular songs. Francis Xavier taught his congregations in Ternate to sing the Credo, Pater Joster, Ave Maria, Confiteor and the Commandments, perhaps in Malay, though probably in Portuguese, and he composed in verse a long Portuguese explanation of the Credo drawn from the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola, which he taught the Portuguese and natives to sing by heart.34 In Brazil as well, Jesuit converts sang a catechism in Tupi (1577).35 With tuneful melodies, familiar language and the charm of rhyme, missionaries 'spiced up' the catechism and made it more palatable for children, whose souls would thereby receive the imprint of the doctrine more readily.36

These missionary efforts were not so different from the (contro- versial) methods of the Jesuits in France, who hoped that French translations of hymns and other chants could be used as a 'contrepoison' to the spread of heresy via the Huguenot psalter. At the outset of the first War of Religion in 1563, Edmond Auger wrote from Lyon to his general in Rome to recommend that Pierre de Ronsard write chansons spirituelles in French to quench the psalms of Clement Marot, which had taken over the city. The idea was to provide faithful Catholics with a repertoire they could sing 'at home, in shops, and while traveling'.37 'For the French love singing very much', Auger said, 'and with this would be a battle like that in the time of St Chrysostom against the songs of the Arians.' Ronsard wrote a paraphrase of the Te Deum, which he dedicated to Jean de

34 See G. Schurhammer, Francis Xavier: His Life, his Times, trans. M. J. Costelloe, 4 vols. (Rome, 1973-82), iii, pp. 31, 153.

31 See P. Castagna, 'The Jesuits, Music, and Conversion in Brazil' in J. W. O'Malley, SJ et al. (eds.), The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773 (Toronto, 1999), pp. 641-58, at p. 649.

31 I gloss Michel Coyssard, Traicti du profit que toute Personne tire de chanter en la Doctrine Chrestienne, & ailleurs, Les Hymnes, & Chansons spirituelles en vulgaire: & du Mal qu'apportent les Lascives, & Heretiques (Lyon: Jean Pillehotte, 1608), pp. 20, 38-40.

37 Cited in Kennedy, 'Jesuits and Music', p. 82.

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Monluc, Bishop of Valence, 'pour chanter en son 6glise', and the French delegation to the Council of Trent even proposed that Catholics sing vernacular canticles during Mass.38 But the Council rejected the idea, and it was abandoned until the end of the century.

Inside the Jesuit colleges, music was used early on in a variety of ways. The best-known accounts are of the splendid year-end ceremonies, at which motets were sung, and the annual cycle of theatrical events on Twelfth Night, Carnival, SaintJohn's Night and other feast days during which the students performed plays larded with song and dance.39 But in the very lowest classes, too, students learning their ABCs were taught to sing antiphons and prayers. This last form of music-making was hardly unique to the Jesuits, for singing sacred song in the classroom was nothing other than a continuation of the traditional Latin schooling originally intended for choirboys. Already in the fifteenth century, the average grammar school employed one master to teach singing and the rudiments of grammar and a second one to teach the liberal arts, and into the seventeenth century, music maintained its role in elementary schooling in even the smaller villages, where schoolmasters regularly doubled as choirmaster of the local church.40 Much has been made of Luther's insistence that a schoolmaster must know how to sing, but, in fact, singing was a regular part of Catholic education as well. Whether we are talking about Sunday school classes (in which the poorest children were taught a small catechism by rote and learnt to sing responses at Mass), the ecoles primaires (where local children learnt a little church Latin, to sing their Pater noster and Ave Maria and to sound them out from a book of hours or syllabary such as Cossard's, which included musical notation), or the abicidaire classes managed by the Jesuits later in the sixteenth century, singing in Latin was part of elementary education.41 Moreover, Huguenot

38 On Monluc and this proposition, see M. Jeanneret, Poisie et tradition biblique au XVIe siicle (Paris, 1969), pp. 201-3.

39 On music and ballet in the colleges of La Flkche and Tournon (where Coyssard was rector), see van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms, ch. 5. In many Jesuit colleges, liturgical singing was not allowed, but in Lyon and Tournon it was preserved during a review in 1571, because it had become a tradition in those colleges. See Culley, 'Musical Activity in Some Sixteenth-Century Jesuit Colleges', p. 6, and on Jesuit attitudes towards training students to sing liturgical music see Kennedy, Jesuits and Music', pp. 73-81.

40 See P. Ariis, L'enfant et la viefamiliale sous l'Ancien Rigime (Paris, 1960), p. 7. 41 On the different sorts of schooling available to children at the time see especially ibid.; Huppert,

Public Schools in Renaissance France; C. Cappliez, L'icole dominicale de Valenciennes au seiziime siicle

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children in France often ended up being instructed by Jesuits, who were in some places required to accept students of the Protestant faith.42 This was especially true in those places where they had been brought in as hired hands to take over local colleges formerly managed by civic authorities.43

What the Jesuits did was to furnish such educational programmes with musical texts. Coyssard was at the centre of efforts to enlist song in Christian education, and his books would be reprinted until as late as 1657.44 The Paraphrase des Hymnes, published by the Jesuit press of Lyon in 1592, was re-edited in 1600, 1623 and 1655. Although it contains only songs, it is really a supplement to the Latin catechism, in an upright octavo format that was very uncommon for French music prints but perfect for binding with a catechism manual.

Given that the Latin prosody translated badly into French, it was difficult to retain the original chant melodies in the settings, so the paraphrased texts are set to newly composed melodies that were probably written and harmonised for four voices by Virgile Le Blanc.45 The tunes, as the title page advertises, were written in such a way that those who did not wish to sing the songs in four parts could sing the Superius alone ('Qui ne les voudra chanter ia quatre parties se pourra servir du Superius seul'). The Te Deum paraphrase is shown in Figure 5. It is not hard to imagine that this memorable tune would please the young pupils in Coyssard's

(Geneva, 1971); and Dhotel, Origines du catichisme moderne. Latin song was certainly used in German schools as well, even under Luther. See B. A. Bellingham, 'The Bicinium in the Lutheran Latin Schools during the Reformation Period' (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1971), as well as the music associated with German grammarians written by Ludwig Senfl

(among others) and published by Georg Rhau and, in the earlier period, Petrus Tritonius. 12 In Tournon, for example, the college was forced to accept Huguenot students in 1576, at the

height of the religious wars. See H. Fouqueray, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jfsus en France des origines a la suppression, 1528-1762, 5 vols. (Paris, 1910-25), ii, p. 31.

1.1 See Huppert, Public Schools in Renaissance France, pp. 104-15. * In addition to the Paraphrase des Hymnes, Coyssard's publications include Les Hymnes sacrez et Odes

spirituelles pour chanter devant, et apris la lefon du catichisme (Antwerp: J. Trognese, 1600); Sommaire de la doctrine chrestienne, mis en vers Franfois. Avec les Hymnes, & Odes spirituelles, qu'on chante devant, & apris la lefon d'icelle, which is followed by the Traicti du profit que toute Personne tire de chanter en la Doctrine Chrestienne mentioned above (1608); Airs sur les Hymnes sacrez, Odes et Noils pour chanter au catichisme (Paris: Pierre Ballard, 1623); and - among the many re-editions, Chansons et cantiques spirituels ... (Fribourg: David Irrbisch, 1657). For a full bibliography see Launay, Musique religieuse en France, pp. 131-2.

15 Only the 'Conditor alme siderum' ('O des astres grand cr6ateur Divine clart6 des croyants') employs the metre of the original Latin.

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charge. The triple time is catchy and the changes of metre break each five-line strophe into small segments. Parsed thus, the melody is especially aphoristic. It is easy to memorise, and it has a certain eloquence: the alternation of triple and duple metre suggests a pairing of dance and procession, or even of the great joy and reverence expressed by the Te Deum text, in which opening cries of praise lead on to the eucharistic Sanctus. But no matter how one

interprets them, the rhythms are very vivid. They attract the attention, much like the delightful triple metre and cadential hemiolas of galliards that many of the same children would have learnt in their dance lessons, which also began around the age of 5.

Coyssard explained his designs in the Traictd du profit que toute Personne tire de chanter en la Doctrine Christienne, published in 1608.46 Quoting St Basil, he says that spiritual song imprints itself more profoundly on the spirit ('celle s'imprime plus profondement en l'esprit'). 'For it is natural', he continues, 'that that which one has learnt by force ... is quickly forgotten, where, to the contrary - I know not how- that which is insinuated by a pleasant delectation ... is captured more strongly in the memory.'47 True to this theory of musical pleasure, Coyssard's collections are full of hetero- metric verse and strong metres, as though he believed that rhythm initiated a pleasant form of cognitive conditioning. Classes could march through the texts in simultaneous declamation, the basic technique of verbatim memorisation. And, like the water that softens the paper before it is run through the press, music helped words, like ink, adhere to the memory. For singing externalised reading, subjected it to surveillance, and rhythmically imposed song texts upon students. Singing incorporated texts, enticing students with musical pleasures and the physicality of music, which initiated an irresistible form of education beginning in the muscles and the breath. Singing before and after catechism was a double-impression

46 See J.-M. Vaccaro, 'Le livre d'airs spirituels d'Anthoine de Bertrand', Revue de musicologie, 56

(1970), pp. 35 53, at pp. 43-4, and G. Pau, 'DI)e l'usage de la chanson spirituelle par lesJesuites au temps de la contrc-r6forme', inJ.-M. Vaccaro (ed.), La chanson aI la Renaissance (Tours, 1981), pp. 15-34.

47 Coyssard, Traicti du profit, p. 21. 'Parce que celle, qui est comprinse en vers & Poemes Musicaux, s'imprime plus profondement en l'esprit. Car nous voyons que c'est une chose naturelle, que ce qu'on A apprins par force, & contre son gre, ne dure guiere, mais s'oublie

incontinent; oui au contraire je ne sgay comment s'arreste plus fort en la memoire, ce que par une plaisante delectation & grace s'insinue, ou glisse en nostre esprit.'

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method that reinforced memorised Latin prayers with French paraphrases and used music to help students learn to read long printed texts. Thus music was part of an educational technology linking print, sacred texts, reading and memory. In some sense, those students who sang submitted to a form of indoctrination that was more suited to the goals of Counter-Reformation orthodoxy than books that tried to preserve scriptural authority in a world of rampant piracy, printed heresy and misreading.

Coyssard was not alone in his pedagogical efforts. In Valenciennes, the Jesuit Father Guillaume Marci abandoned the Tridentine catechism because 'these sweet little idiots are not capable of such a large catechism'.48 Rather, he taught them to sing, 'some simply, some in music' (polyphony), and says that 'some time later I found it good to have them sing the Pater, Ave, Credo and the commandments of God and the Church; this took up all the time with things that the catechist should teach - it is the work of the schoolmasters and mistresses to teach these little things to their students that I call catechistic rudiments or firmium artis.'49 That is, catechism lessons were taken up with song. Shortly thereafter, Marci developed and had printed a small catechism in dialogue format that was distributed for free and in quantity throughout the town, a catechism that the children found so delightful that they reportedly amused themselves with it night and day.50

But here we should also note that Marci's plans backfired. Not only were local book vendors unhappy that he undercut their sales of primers by distributing them for free, when the conflict moved

48 See C. Cappliez, L'cole dominicale de Valenciennes, p. 55: 'Ces petits idiots ne sont pas capables de si grand catechisme comme est celui de Parme.' Edmond Auger was another early supporter of a small catechism in France. For a bibliography of French catechisms (Huguenot and Catholic) from Calvin to Bellarmine and a good history of the subject, see Dhotel, Les origins du catichisme moderne, esp. pp. 98-148. Marci subsequently issued a song collection titled Les rossignols spirituels (Valenciennes:J. Vervliet, 1616), on which see M. Desmet, 'La paraphrase des psaumes de Philippe Desportes et ses diff6rentes versions musicales: Contribution A l'histoire du psautier frangais de Henry IV et de Louis XIII (1593-1643)', 4 vols. (Ph.D diss., Tours, 1994), ii, pp. 424-32.

49 Cappliez, L'cole dominicale, pp. 54-5: 'Ce fut alors queje tirai tous les registres de mon industrie, tant6t en formant des chansons spirituelles, tant6t repr6sentant quelque actionnette. Je m'estudiais A former aucuns A chanter simplement, aucuns en musique. Quelque temps apris, je trouvais bon de faire chanter le Pater, Ave, Credo, les commandements de Dieu et de l'Eglise, mais cela emportait tout le temps en choses que le catechiste doit exposer, c'est le fait des maitres et des maitresses d'enseigner ces petites choses A leurs escoliers que j'appelle rudiments

cat6chistiques ou firmium artis.' 50 Ibid., p. 56.

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from the courts to the Bishop of Cambrai, the bishop objected as well. For the catechism was meant to be taught orally, not in tandem with reading, and these little books subverted the process, placing the written word of God into the hands of children deemed not yet ready to receive it:

One finds it good that one teaches no one to read and write and that one gives no book of any sort to schoolchildren who do not first know the beliefs, the points of the faith and the obligations of a Christian. One finds it good that the schoolchildren know by heart the little catechism and should by this know the things necessary for salvation, fearing that these artisans should go running about (as they often do) and working without knowing that which is necessary.51

In these two points of the acts drawn up by the magistrates and approved by the bishop, we find spelled out quite clearly the priority of oral instruction in the face of Marci's successful printed primers, which he was ordered to burn. We should not underestimate the importance of the booksellers' privileges in this matter, but more was at stake. For by giving direct access to the text of the catechism, Marci's chapbooks subverted oral instruction, circumvented the physicality of simultaneous declamation in class and, we might posit, removed the catechism from the context of classes in which the Jesuits oversaw the comportment of the children, their acts, words and deeds. They threatened a scriptural culture protective of its fixed texts and authority, in which priests were the guardians and exegetes of the Word of God. Classroom performances, by contrast, were understood to regulate the inner life of the children, who, with books in hand, might otherwise end up running through the streets (like the artisans), playing with the articles of the faith day and night.

THE CATECHISTS AND THE CANONS

The culture of oral indoctrination makes itself felt in Coyssard's Paraphrase des Hymnes with its detachable Superius part, which could have been taught by rote to the children, and also in the strophic form and the page layout, in which subsequent strophes of lengthy texts are on the pages following the music. Much if not all of this

5 Ibid., p. 58. 'On trouve bon qu'on enseigne personne A lire et A 6crire et qu'on ne donne livre quelconque aux 6coliers qui ne sachent premibrement les cr6ances, les points de foi et les devoirs d'un chr6tien. On trouve bon que les 6coliers sachent par coeur le petit catbchisme et soient par ainsi pourvus des choses necessaires au salut, craignant que ces artisans ne s'en aillent courir les champs (comme ils font souvent) et travailler sans connaitre l'obligatoire.'

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might have been learnt by ear in classes that operated using the dialogic methods typical of catechistic teaching: succinct questions, memorised responses and oral instruction. Like the sung responses at Mass that all children were expected to learn, these songs seem designed to be taught by rote and sung from memory.

At the same time, we also know that many texts were being put into the hands of children. Reading was being taught as well. Though they were not always happy to be involved in the business of the primaires, which taught basic reading and writing to children of lesser means, the Jesuit colleges did run abecidaire classes. The separation between oral and written practices was not complete, and, just like the catechisms they accompanied, books such as Coyssard's Paraphrase des Hymnes were perfect primers from which to pick out notes to sing, learn to read in duple or triple time and wrestle with rhythmic values. They led towards more complex forms of musical notation and more complex music. They also offer clues as to how students learnt to read music.

The leap from Coyssard's homophonic Te Deum to Palestrina's six-voice Pater noster seems vast, but we do have some written evidence of how it was made. Figure 6 reproduces a page from the exemplar of Coyssard's Paraphrase des Hymnes at the Bibliotheque nationale de France, Res Vmd 14. This folio (21' ) contains a printed canon for four high voices at the unison that sets a paraphrase of the Commandments of the Church, and on the empty staves below it, a sure hand has written out a canon for seven voices at the unison. Canons might seem fairly advanced for schoolchildren who could not yet read music - it would seem that readers had trouble resolving the canons in Petrucci's Canti series, for example - yet imitation canons at the unison are nothing more than 'rounds', and a surprising number of musical primers contain them.52 In one of the first polyphonic catechisms, Mattheus Le Maistre's Catechesis

52 See B.J. Blackburn, 'Canonic Conundrums: The Singer's Petrucci', BaslerJahrbuchfiir historische Musikpraxis, 25 (2001), pp. 53-69;James Haar likewise observes that in Petrucci's Canti prints, the canons are not resolved. On that basis, he argues that the audience for the chanson

anthologies was largely professional musicians. See J. Haar, 'Petrucci as Bookman', in Giulio Cattin and Patrizia Dalla Vecchia (eds.), Venezia 1501: Petrucci e la stampa musicale (Venice, 2005), pp. 155-74. For a discussion of the didactic purpose of some canons, see R. Lorenz, 'Canon as a Pedagogical Tool: Applications from Sixteenth-Century Wittenberg', Indiana Theosy Review, 16 (1995), pp. 83-104. Many German theory treatises for children contain canons; see Cristle Collins Judd, Reading Renaissance Music History: Hearing with the Eyes (Cambridge, 2000), p. 95.

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Figure 6 Four-voice canon on the Commandments of the Church, in Coyssard, Paraphrase des Hymnes et Cantiques spirituelz, fol. 21V. Photo courtesy of the Bibliothdque

nationale de France

numeris musicis inclusa (Nuremberg: Montanus and Neuber, 1559), we find homophonic settings for high voices of the Ten Command- ments, the Apostle's Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and so forth - though not the Ave Maria - paired with canonic settings of two traditional

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mealtime prayers originating in Catholic usage.53 These last two include canons for the high ranges that suggest children's voices - the first is at the unison in the middle voice and the second is at the lower fifth in the middle voice - with the parts resolved in the print. And in a Parisian catechism from 1589, Bref sommaire de la doctrine chrestienne, we find, among others, a little three-voice canon meant to be sung at the end of catechism lessons, Te coeli tum parens.54 Finally, the Jesuit collection Amphion sacre (Lyons: Louis Muguet, 1615) is full of imbecilic canons at the unison that use catchy Parisian chanson rhythms and repeat ad infinitum brief morals such as 'Qui bien fait bien trouvera' ('Who does good will find goodness'), 'Tout avecque le temps' ('Everything with time') and 'L'experience apprend plusieurs choses' ('Experience teaches many things'). In short, canons at the unison are children's 'rounds' by which they could sing their first imitative polyphony. And for this reason, here we should also note how many of the motets setting the Pater noster and Ave Maria employ canons (the Certon cited above and Richafort's Pater noster a 5) or are canons (Layolle's three-voice Ave Maria, a canon at the unison published in the Contrapunctus [Lyon: Bernard Garnier et Guillaume Gobert pour Etienne Gueynard, 1528], an eight-in- four canonic Ave Maria by Prioris published in the Motetti novi e

chanzoni franciose a quatro sopra doi [Antico, 1520], and the Cerone twenty-part canonic Ave Maria cited above).55

53 Mattheus Le Maistre, Catechesis numeris musicis inclusa (Nuremberg: Montanus and Neuber, 1559); modern edition in Catechesis and Gesenge, ed. D. Gresch (Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, 39; Madison, 1982). The texts of the catechism set here - in Latin - are not those of the orthodox Lutheran catechism, but are Philippist. See the introduction, ibid.

54 Bref sommaire de la doctrine chrestienne (Paris: Marc Locqueneulx, 1589), fol. 33r. Locqueneulx seems to have made a speciality of prints that included monophonic musical notation. His output also includes Heures canoniales a l'usage de Paris, notties, revues, corrigies et augmenties de nouveau, en beaucoup d'endroicts, de plusieurs suffrages, entiennes [sic] et Messes solennelles from 1582 (Lacombe, Livres d'heures, p. 472), and in the year before the Brefsommaire he published a large collection titled Le recueil des plus belles et excellentes chansons enforme de voix de ville, tires de divers autheurs & Poetes Franfois, tant anciens que modernes (Paris, 1588), a fairly standard recueil in content, with the exception that, as the subtitle indicates, the book included musical notation: 'Ausquelles a estb nouvellement adapt6 la Musique de leur chant commun, A fin que chacun les puisse chanter en tout endroit qu'il se trouvera, tant de voix que sur les instruments.' Significantly, each of these prints uses a different style of notation - black neumes for the Heures, white mensural notation for the Brefsommaire (as shown in Figure 7), and white mensural notation in smaller note values for Le recueil des plus belles et excellentes chansons.

5 This list is not exhaustive. The Prioris had been believed to be a four-in-two canon (Heartz was

working with a fragment at Eichstatt - see his 'A New Attaingnant Book and the Beginnings of French Music Printing', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 14 (1961), pp. 9-23 - and Ludwig Finscher is unspecific about the nature of the canon in his article 'Attaingnantdrucke

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Of all the polyphonic texts left to us, the Briefsommaire de la doctrine chrestienne is probably the best witness to the kinds of singing that went on in Sunday school classes and the abc~daires. As its full title makes clear - Brief sommaire de la doctrine chrestienne: Ensemble les Prieres & oraisons & les Letanies que l'on chante es processions par les Eglises, Reveu & augmenti de plusieurs Hymnes, & Antiennes, le tout mis en chants de Musique - it is a small catechism (twelve folios in question-and- answer form) to which is appended a polyphonic supplement of the most useful prayers, litanies, hymns and antiphons ('Musique' indicates 'figured music' or polyphony). Printed in a tiny in-24 format, its material form situates it with post-Tridentine texts of the broadest diffusion, such as the diminutive Horae printed by Plantin.

It contains a number of plainchant melodies for 'Letanies romaines et du concile de Trente' (in mensural notation); four-voice fauxbourdon timbres for the penitential psalms 'Miserere mei, Deus' and 'De profundis clamavi', as well as one for the Litany of the Virgin, 'Regina Virginum'; canonic litanies for three voices at the unison such as another Litany of the Virgin, 'O Sancta Maria, O dei genetrix precare pro nobis'; and a four-voice canonic timbre for singing any octosyllabic hymn followed by a year's worth of texts (see Figure 7). Monophonic tunes, fauxbourdon harmonisations and canons at the unison share the pages of this primer, verifying not only that polyphony was a fundament of catechism classes, but that imitative counterpoint remained part of the alphabet of Catholic practices learnt by the devout in the post-Tridentine era. For, as the book makes clear, these are pieces for processions and should be learnt while a child. Here, then, we have the stock repertoire for the great general processions in which Catholics participated on the feasts of the Purification, Palm Sunday, Easter, Corpus Christi, Saint Mark and Rogation Days. The pieces, furthermore, match those sung during the penitential fervour of the 1580s, when pilgrims crisscrossed the countryside of northern France in processions blanches designed to rid the country of heresy.56 For the children, the

aus einer schlesischen Adelsbibliothek', in Axel Beer and Laurenz Lutteken (cds.), Festschrift Klaus Hortschansky zum 60. Geburtstag (Tutzing, 1995), pp. 33-42). But the canon was also published by Georg Rhau in 1545. See the critical edition in Georg Rhau, Bicinia gallica, Latina, germanica, Tomus I, II, 1545, ed. B. Bellingham (Musikdrucke aus den Jahren 1538-1545 in praktischer Neuausgabe, 6; Kassel, 1980), pp. 342-7.

56 See the list of pieces sung by the pilgrims in the appendix 'Ensuivent les litanies, hymnes' in Meurier, Traicti de l'institution et vray usage des processions.

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Figure 7 Advent hymn 'Conditor alme siderum' in Brefsommaire de la doctrine chrestienne (Paris, 1589), fol. 34'. Photo courtesy of the Bibliothdque nationale de

France

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Brefsommaire recommends that the catechism classes process in front of the clergy on ordinary days, lining up two by two and singing 'modestly' in groups of twelve lead by a 'douzinier'.57 Their visible

participation in Sunday Mass promoted good behaviour and

displayed the self-discipline that would prove so key to Catholic

ideology in the seventeenth century. We have already observed that the special status of the Ave Maria

and Pater noster chants as primer texts often gave them pride of place in motet prints. By correlating the settings in the Brefsommaire de la doctrine chrestienne with those in motet prints, we can add to this

repertoire another set of pieces that enjoyed similar prominence in both catechisms and motet collections: those setting the words 'Sancta Maria ... ora pro nobis'. The Bref sommaire includes this refrain in several litanies to the Virgin, and it is set as a self-standing litany as well, the canonic 'O Sancta Maria' cited above. Coyssard's polyphonic catechism ends with a similar Kyrie pro litaniis, a four- voice homophonic timbre with the text 'Kyrie eleison, Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis'. Such Marian litanies appear in other prints as well, often at the end, where they stand as a closing prayer.58 For

example, Attaingnant's Liber septimus. xxiij'. trium, quatuor, quinque, sex ve vocum modulos dominici adventus nativitatisque eius ac sanctorum eo tempore occurrentium habet of 1534 ends with a slight three-voice Sancta Maria, mater Dei, ora pro nobis by one Maistre Gosse in which the Superius part could not be simpler- it opens in imitation of the contratenor at the unison, virtually every phrase begins on c', and all the cadences are on a, the last of which are formulaic suspension cadences typical of the Parisian chanson.5" Similarly, Attaingnant's Liber decimustertius. xvii'. musicales habet modulos of 1535 ends with an

anonymous Sancta Maria, mater Dei, ora pro peccatis nostris for four

'7 Brefsommaire de la doctrine chrestienne, fol. 13'. * The list I give is not exhaustive, but only those settings that are canonic or placed at the ends

of prints. Among the very many other settings, a few deserve mention here, namely Bartolomeo Tromboncino and Marchetto Cara, Sancta Maria ora pro nobis, in Laude libro secondo (Petrucci: Venice, 1508), which reappears with the text 'Me stesso incolpo' in Strambotti, ode,

f/ottole, sonetti, et modo de cantar versi latini e capituli, libro quarto (Petrucci: Venice, 1505). The contrafact shows how close these little motets were to the secular repertoire (it is only twenty breves long). And Monteverdi's very famous setting likewise deserves mention, if only to place it in a tradition with extremely popular roots. The lines 'Sancta Maria, mater Dei, Ora pro nobis peccatoribus. Amen' were also often joined to the Ave Maria. See Freeman, 'On the

Origins of the Pater noster-Ave Maria', pp. 187 fl "' For a modern edition see Treize livres de motels parus (chez Pierre Attaingnant en 1534 et 1535, ed. A.

Smijers and A. T. Merritt, 13 vols. (Monaco, 1934 63), vii, pp. 194 5.

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voices in canon.60 The posthumously published Magnum Opus Musicum of Orlande de Lassus, moreover, includes three four-in-two canons on Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis at the end of the section of four-voice motets.61 In the first two settings, not only are the two parts from which the canons are generated virtually identical, the two settings are themselves variations on the same themes. At just seventeen and thirteen breves respectively, they are little 'extras' like the anonymous canon Attaingnant stuck in at the end of his Liber decimustertius, the sort of piece that just as often probably did not make it into print at all. Over a century later, this litany had lost none of its allure, for Giovanni Battista Martini published a four-in-one canon Sancta Maria ora pro nobis on the title page of Litaniae atque antiphonae finales B. Virginis Mariae, op. 1 (Bologna: Laelii a Vulpe, 1734). These works are one step along from canons at the unison, and they point the way towards the more firmly text- oriented music represented by the other motets in the collections containing them. Taken together, settings of these little prayers delineate the range of musical means by which students took their first steps towards learning to read written polyphony.

POLYPHONY FOR CHILDREN

Now we can return to the large number of polyphonic Ave Maria and Pater noster settings introduced earlier in this article with a greater appreciation of how they might have functioned as musical primers. For if these two prayers were songs that children knew by heart, and singing canons was a regular part of catechism classes even before reading was, then canons for high voices based on these tunes may well have been sung by young children, even those who could barely read music. The didactic potential of even the largest polyphonic settings is beautifully illustrated by a collection from 1542, Pierre Certon's Institutoris Symphoniacorum puerorum ... modulorum editio (Paris: Pierre Attaingnant, 1542). Certon directed the school for the choirboys at the Sainte-Chapelle, and it is surely with his charges in

60 Grove attributes this setting to Sermisy. 61 Lassus, Magnum Opus Musicum (Munich: Nicolai Henrici, 1604), sig. K4 in the cantus book.

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mind that he composed the pieces in this book.62 My attention was first drawn to this print by its title and the series of five trios at its end, including an Ave Maria in the high clefs indicating soprano or children's voices (g2, g2, c 1l). This trio. I thought, would certainly have been a real beginner's piece, and indeed it is faithful to the chant melody the children would have known so well, particularly in the top part (see Example 2). But each phrase of the chant is elaborated at its end, which demanded real reading from the singers, not just recollection. That is to say, the trio glosses the Ave Maria in the literate style typical of church polyphony. It has some hallmarks of music for novices, for example the use of the familiar melody and its epigrammatic disposition phrase by phrase. Even the elaborations could be construed in the context of music education, for we know that writing exercises for students of polyphony usually began by constructing points of imitation based on well-known tunes or composing out phrases of polyphony using the work of others or a cantus prius factus as a starting point.63 But these trios nonetheless direct the student towards the world of polyphonic literacy that was the common coin for church musicians.

The real beginner's piece in the collection, however, is the first one, the big Pater noster for six voices, in which the second and third voices sing an Ave Maria in canon (these are the Quinta and Sexta pars, cleffed c2 and, when realised, in the ranges b b-bb' andf-f') (see Example 3 and Figure 8). The canon is based on an almost literal presentation of the Ave Maria melody, divided into phrases separated by rests of three to five breves in length. Indeed, counting the rests would have presented a far greater problem for the children than singing their parts, but they could have been cued in by one of the other singers, who were used to giving each other visual and tactile indications during performances, not only of the beat but, for example, of where to sing musicaficta, which they cued by tapping on their colleagues' shoulders.

Most beginners' canons are at the unison, which might make this one at the lower fifth seem more difficult until we consider that this

"2 On Certon's appointment see C. Cazaux, La musique a la cour de Francois ler (Paris, 2002), pp. 152, 154, 156. For a discussion and transcription of some of the motets see S. van Solkema, 'The Liturgical Music of Pierre Certon', 2 vols. (Ph.D diss., University of Michigan, 1962).

63 See H. M. Brown, 'Emulation, Competition, and Homage: Imitation and Theories of Imitation in the Renaissance', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 35 (1982), pp. 1-48.

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Superius

Contratenor

A ve Ma Bassus

A - vce Ma - - ri - a

I I

ve Ma ri a

Aw F :j ri a

a - - - ve Ma - ri - a gra -

gra - ti - a pie - a_

gra ti - a pe na gra

ti- a pie - - na

do - i - nus te - curm

Example 2 Pierre Certon, Ave Maria, in Institutoris ... modulorum editio (Paris, 1542), bb. 1-20

is a canon that works by the ear sooner than by the eye. The singers of the sexta pars take their pitch from the quinta pars in order to sing a part they may hardly have 'read' at all.

What the examples of the catechisms and Certon's Pater noster/Ave Maria show is that the spheres of the monophonic and imitative, of

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Kate van Orden

Superius

Quinta pars Pa ter pa ter

Sexta pars

Contratenor

Pa tcr no - stcr

Bassus Pa ter no -

ster qui es in

Pa - ter no - ster qui

no ster ui es in ce - lis .S.

ce lis qui es __ in ce - lis, sanc- ti - fi -

es in ce - - - is

Example 3 Pierre Certon, Pater noster/Ave Maria, in Institutoris . . . modulorum editio (Paris, 1542), bb. 1-16

oral and textual, or, to use Tinctoris's distinctions, of low and middle styles are not so distant from one another. Children might participate in a six-voice motet without being able to read much music at all. Certainly such motets allowed the most junior members of the maitrise to sing along with the rest of the Sainte-Chapelle and the chapelle du roi when, as in the procession against heresy of 1535, these massed forces turned out to sing polyphonic motets in the streets of Paris.64 But I would also argue that Certon composed his

64 On the procession seeJ. T. Brobeck, 'Musical Patronage in the Royal Chapel of France under Francis I (r. 1515-1547)', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 48 (1995), pp. 187-239, at

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11

sanc ti fl ce

-ti fi - - - ce - tur 110

-ce tur 11o meen tu .. u- m

sanc - - - ti fi cc - - tur no -

14 A

-tur 110 -lllell 1 tu u1

I ry

- llmen tu - - um Ad - ve

Ad ve - ni

- Inc tut - - - - u

Example 3 continued

Figure 8 Pater noster/Ave Maria, Quinta and Sexta Pars, in Pierre Certon, Institutoris ... modulorum editio (Paris, 1542), Contratenor, fol. 2r

p. 220; on the procession and the children in the royal chapel see Cazaux, La musique i la cour de Franfois ler, pp. 88-92, 175-9.

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Ave Maria for children everywhere, for in both the three-voice setting and the Pater noster/Ave Maria a 6 he chose to set the most common version of the chant, the one everyone learnt. The choirboys, by contrast, would have known another 'Ave Maria', one with the text 'Ave Maria, gratia dei plena per secula', which they were expected to sing in polyphony after Matins. So, for example, Antoine Brumel, master of the choirboys at Notre Dame from 1498 to 1500, set this liturgical chant, and when Jean Mouton, Jean Prioris and Claudin de Sermisy wrote 'Ave Maria' settings, they also used this versicle from the sequence Hac clara die.65 Sermisy, who was a clerk at the Sainte-Chapelle early in his career, scored his motet for three high voices, just as Brumel had done. But Certon, who served as master of the children at the Sainte-Chapelle, nonetheless chose to publish settings of the 'popular' prayer. Despite the false advertising by which prints so often recommended themselves to buyers, in this case I believe we should take the prominence of Certon's title - Institutoris Symphoniacorum puerorum - as significant, hinting at the potential of the collection to aid in teaching children polyphony. When, in the early years of the century, printing separated motets from their frequent context in manuscript anthologies of Vespers music, it liberated the motet from its paraliturgical moorings and gave it - in the form of such printed anthologies - the potential to become a genre of broad diffusion as cantiones sacrae.66 Motets would soon be joined by chansons spirituelles and polyphonic settings of Marot's psalms- indeed, Certon was one of the first to set the French psalter (Attaingnant, 1546)67 - but for their time, motets seem to have been popular as musical primers.

In sum, then, the precious accounts we have of choirboys participating in the ceremonies of cathedral and chapel mirror the activities of children in catechism classes, who sang litanies to the Virgin in plainchant or simple canons while marching in penitential

1" See C. Wright, Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame of Paris, 500-1500 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 185-9. Mouton's motet a 4 appears to have been scored for boys on the upper three parts and their master on the lowest; Prioris's setting, according to Wright, is designed for adults alone.

•" On Vespers anthologies in manuscript see J. E. Cumming, The Motet in the Age of Du Fay (Cambridge, 1999). More recently, she has argued that the motet anthology is a phenomenon of print ('From Chapel Choirbook to Print Partbook and Back Again', paper presented at the Thirtieth Annual Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, Tours, France, July 2005).

67 See Daniel Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, Royal Printer of Music: A Historical Study and Bibliographic Catalogue (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), pp. 346-7.

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processions, parish rituals, feast-day processions and in processions of their catechism classes. If reading itself doubled as education in manners and learning to sing was part of this basic education, then it was also in singing that the outward signs of civility and the moral elevation it was designed to produce came together. And while

homophonic songs taught children to speak together in time and constrained their diction to the norms, canons taught them to hold their place in more complex circumstances, to concentrate, and to contribute a unique voice to the harmony.

MOTETS AND BROAD READERSHIP

Our investigation of Latin syllabaries, singing in catechism classes, and 'primer' pieces such as Certon's has cast the motet repertoire in a significantly different light, suggesting that we should see motets as music of the broadest consumption. Yet how closely do the material forms of motet prints approximate those of the vernacular genres we

usually take to be examples of polyphony for a grand public? Pierre Attaingnant, whose chanson prints represent the first

large-scale marketing of polyphony, chose identical formats for his

very first motet prints. They were anthologies with French titles, sixteen folios in length and in the same octavo format as his chansonniers. Indeed, one of the first prints to come off his presses was the book of Chansons et motetz en canon that contains the Ave Maria 'in diapenthe' cited above. It was an affordable octavo print that mixed the two genres together in just one volume.68 Nor was Attaingnant alone in conceiving of the motet as a genre with the diverse appeal of chansons and other vernacular songs. Indeed, the Chansons et motetz en canon was copied from an Antico print of 1520, the Motetti novi e chanzoni franciose a quatro sopra doi.69 Other prints likewise mixed chansons and motets; a number of titles from those years attributed to Antico and Giunta have the same complexion.70 Moreover, Petrucci's first chanson anthologies, Harmonice musices Odhecaton A (1501), Canti B. numero cinquanta B (1502) and Canti C. No. centi cinquanta (1504) each included a few Latin-texted numbers, many of which are placed at the opening of the volume or begin the

68 Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, catalogue no. 3; id., 'A New Attaingnant Book'. 69 See Finscher, 'Attaingnantdrucke'. 70 RISM [1521]6, [c.1521]7, [c.1526]5.

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section of trios in the middle of the book." Like the little canonic motets Attaingnant and Antico mixed together with chansons, the well-known Latin prayers and Marian antiphons in Petrucci's chansonniers show that such pieces were in some sense part of the vernacular repertoire.72 In a similar spirit, Scotto and Gardano often titled their motet prints in the vernacular- Primo libro de i Motetti, Motetti del Frutto, AMotetti del Laberinto and so forth - or added the formula 'vulgo motecta nuncupatur' parenthetically to their Latin titles.

How were all these distinctions received by the public for printed polyphony? One source of information is binder's volumes (books comprised of several editions bound together in sets of partbooks according to voice type). They reveal the collecting habits of bibliophiles and institutional libraries, how they organised their books and whether they separated parts according to genre for

binding.7• Oftentimes collectors followed the lead of publishers, buying and binding according to publisher's series and keeping genres apart. This is certainly true for binder's volumes that preserve music printed in Paris and Lyon, where printers such as Attaingnant, Moderne, Du Chemin and Le Roy & Ballard pre- ferred distinctive formats for masses, motets and chansons. But just as often, when formats permitted, like-sized partbooks were bound together no matter what the genre. The binder's volumes that mix motets and chansons are far too numerous to list here, but in order to limit our survey, we can take as an example the binder's volumes containing surviving copies of Attaingnant's first motet prints cited above (see App. 1), which, as we noted, were of the same size and format as the chansonniers he was printing at the time. (This would

7 The Odhecaton opens with de Orto's Ave Maria and the first trio is Brumel's Materpatris; Canti B

opens with Josquin's L'homme anni followed by Compare's Virgo celesti and the trios begin with Ave Ancilla trinitatis (Brumel) and Si sumpsero (Obrecht); Canti C opens with Obrecht's Ave Regina celorum. On the style of the pieces in the (Canti series, including these motets, see D. Fallows, 'Petrucci's Canti Volumes: Scope and Repertory', Basler Jahrbuch fir historische Musikpraxis, 25 (2001), pp. 39-52.

72 Canti C also includes an anonymous Alma Redemptoris mater setting. 7 See the binder's volumes listed, for example, in J. A. Bernstein, Music Printing in Renaissance

Venice: The Scotto Press, 1539-1572 (New York, 1998) and M. S. Lewis, Antonio Gardano, Venetian Music Printer, 1538-1569: A Descriptive Bibliography and Historical Study, 3 vols. (New York, 1988-2005) and the discussion of early collectors of printed polyphony in I. Fenlon, Music, Print and Culture in Early Sixteenth-Century Italy (The Panizzi Lectures, 1994; London, 1995).

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change, as he switched to a two-in-one or all-in-one layout for his chansonniers in 1536.74)

The largest volume listed, in Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, was first owned by Henry of Castell (1525-95), who purchased it in Paris in 1539.75 Like the Contratenor partbook in Eichstatt and the set of partbooks in Wolfenbiittel, it combines most of what Attaingnant had for sale at the time of purchase in roughly the order the prints came off the presses, with the exception that the motets are grouped at the end of the volumes. These prints seem either to have been sold bound or bound immediately upon purchase, and they preserve a sense of order and genre close to that of the print shop. Of a more idiosyncratic nature are the books now at Versailles and Munich, the latter once owned by the great sixteenth-century bibliophile Hans Heinrich Herwart, whose music library forms the core of that at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. The Versailles volume is faithful to Attaingnant, but binds a

Superius-Tenor partbook printed in a two-in-one layout with the Superius parts of the Chansons de maistre Clement Janequin and the

Motetz nouvellement composez, both of which were printed in four volumes. Unlike the 'pret t porter' binder's volumes in Eichstatt, Wolfenbtittel and Paris, the Versailles book evinces more directly the habits of its owner, who mixed chansons and motets and added a couple of chansons by hand at the end.76 Herwart's volumes also reveal something of his personal sense of order - chansons, madrigals and motets are all bound together in volumes that mixed the publications of Attaingnant with those of Gardano and Scotto. International in style and provenance, they situate the four-voice motets being printed by Attaingnant close to the Parisian chanson and the first wave of madrigals (predominately a 4) by Verdelot, Festa and Willaert.77

Binder's volumes are of interest not only because they confirm the freedom with which collectors jumbled together chanson and motet

74 See Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, pp. 73-6. 75 Ibid., pp. 133-4. 76 Although the binding appears to date from the eighteenth century, I believe it is safe to assume

that the partbooks were purchased as a set and that the manuscript additions are contemporary ones. The paper used for the manuscript gathering is similar to that of the prints, as is the style of the chansons (Je suis desheritie, for instance, was first published by Attaingnant in 1534).

77 In this respect, they resemble the Newberry partbooks (presented to Henry VIII c. 1527-9) studied by H. C. Slim; see A Gift of Madrigals and Motets (Chicago, [1972]).

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prints, but because - as we have already seen- they sometimes preserve a gathering or two of music in manuscript. Even more

telling than binder's volumes, the manuscript additions in early printed books occasionally cross the generic boundaries established by the print or prints they accompany. In Appendix 2 I list a few volumes with manuscript additions that help advance my claim that Latin-texted pieces made fine music for beginners. The first volume on the list, Paris BNF Res. 419-421, contains three books of chansons printed in Lyon. On the blank staves of the last page of Le II livre du Jardin de musique is a brief fauxbourdon a 4 setting the text 'Et cum spiritu tuo, Amen' ('And with Thy spirit, Amen'). Written in a sure hand, this was one of the formulaic responses for

singing at Mass that children would have learnt in their Sunday school classes. It is a pedagogical text, a Latin primer piece in which the essential musical practices that went along with catechism

happened to be written into a book of chansons. That one owner of the book was just learning to read and write music is further witnessed by the shaky additions on the endpaper at the back of the book: ruled rather badly with three staves, it includes just five ill-penned notes following a rather elegant C-clef on the second line. Did the teacher plan a homework assignment here like those

Christoph Piperinus gave to the young Basilius Amerbach in

Basel?78 Amerbach's education commenced with writing exercises, with copying out pieces into partbooks he was instructed to make himself, and with learning solmisation syllables. Though far more fleeting than these music lessons studied by John Kmetz, BNF Res. 419-421 shows evidence of a common phenomenon - a Superius partbook being used for added instruction, literally 'on the side'. Many are the volumes that include the gamut or other teaching aids on a flyleaf or even the cover.79

Of an equally didactic nature are the manuscript additions to Paris BNF Res. 623-623bis. On a blank folio at the end of this Quintus book is written out what appears to be the Superius part of

17 See J. Kmetz, 'The Piperinus-Amerbach Partbooks: Six Months of Music Lessons in Renaissance Basle', in id. (ed.). Music in the German Renaissance (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 215-34.

79 To mention just one such volume, see BNF R6s. Vmf 13 (1-17), owned by the royal harpsichordist under Henry II, Louis Cramoisy. This well-worn volume contains the Superius parts of Le Roy & Ballard's first to fifteenth books of chansons, bound in plain vellum. Into the flyleaf of the back binding was copied a hexachord chart that suggests Cramoisy used the book for tutoring.

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a fauxbourdon setting of Psalm 116, 'Laudate Dominum omnes

gentes', its psalm tone in F replete with doxology. If there is any doubt that this was a teaching piece, we need only turn the page - on the last folio of endpapers is written a four-in-one canon for high voices at the unison and the soft hexachord onf' with mnemonics for the solmisation syllables (see App. 2). Here we might note that 'Laudate Dominum' elsewhere inspired Sixt Dietrich to construct a canon that could be resolved four different ways and have it printed on a broadside (Augsburg: Philippus Ulhardus, 1547).80 It is one of the precious few surviving musical broadsides from the time destined for the classroom, and it serves to remind us that even the most ephemeral forms of print - arguably those with the broadest reach - were part of the system by which Latin motets reached their audiences.

Finally, the Mazarine chansonnier - a volume otherwise contain-

ing only chansons - includes a motet among the chansons and dances in manuscript tucked in at its end. It is a setting by Sermisy or Arcadelt of a morning prayer, Domine Deus omnipotens.81 Scholars have argued it is the duo arrangements of precisely the sort of Parisian chansons contained in the Mazarine chansonnier that constituted the era's musical primers.82 In fact, some canny mar- keteers of the time even declared collections of vernacular duos to be

8o See M. H. Lamla, 'Musical Canons on Artistic Prints from the 16th to the 18th Centuries', in Music Fragments and Manuscripts in the Low Countries; Alta Capella; Music Printing in Antwerp and Europe in the 16th Century (Yearbook of the Alamire Foundation, 2; Leuven, 1997), pp. 479-510 and T.

R6der, 'Artistic Messages: Canons from Augsburg', forthcoming in K. Schiltz, B.J. Blackburn and I. Bossuyt (eds.), Canons and Canonic Techniques, 14th-1 6th Century: Proceedings of the International Conference, Leuven, 4-6 October 2005 (Leuven, forthcoming). I am also grateful to Katelijne Schiltz for sharing with me her copies of a collection of early canonic broadsides in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (signature: 2 Mus.pr. 156). Another broadside that should be mentioned here is the one reproducing Jacques Cossard's Methodes pour apprendre a lire, p. 266 (depicting the Guidonian hand, note values, the gamut and solmisation exercises), bound into the manuscript BNF n.a.f. 4671, fol. 51.

81 This piece is attributed to Sermisy in Claudii de Sermisy, regii sacelli Submagistri, Nova & Prima motettorum editio (Paris: Attaingnant, 1542), but to Arcadelt in Liber cantus (vocum quatuor) triginta novem motetos habet ... (Ferrara: J. de Buglhat, 1538) and Hortus Musarum (Louvain: Phalhse, 1552); Grove assigns it to Arcadelt on the basis of style. See I. Cazeaux and J. T. Brobeck, 'Sermisy, Claudin de', New Grove II, xxiii, p. 133.

82 For example, Antonio Gardane, Canzonifrancese a due voce (Venice: Gardane, 1539) and Tielman Susato, Premier livre des chansons a deux ou a troix parties (Antwerp: Susato, 1544) and Tiers livre contenant xxx nouvelles Chansons a deux ou a trois (Antwerp: Susato, 1552). For the secondary literature see, among others, D. Heartz, '"Au pres de vous": Claudin's Chanson and the Commerce of Publishers' Arrangements', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 24 (1971), pp. 193-225, and L. F. Bernstein, 'French Duos in the First Half of the Sixteenth Century', in

J. W. Hill (ed.), Studies in Musicology in Honor of Otto E. Albrecht (Kassel, 1980), pp. 43-87.

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an 'alphabet in music'.83 Yet without denying the didactic potential of duos, I should like to suggest that four-voice works stood alongside duos as primer pieces, not just chansons a 4, but motets as well. Prints such as Tylman Susato's Premier livre des chansons a deux ou a troix parties (Antwerp, 1544) might have pitched themselves to readers with avertissements claiming that they were designed for 'amateurs de la science de musique', but, after all, it was motet prints a 4 that actually bore titles such as the best-known example, Symphoniae Jucundae (Wittenberg: Georg Rhau, 1538), the print that included Luther's famous preface on music.84 Modest motets such as Domine Deus omnipotens were written in the SATB harmonies we find time and again in the catechisms, and their imitative textures would have been familiar to rank beginners from singing canons. Indeed, I would argue that it is precisely the fairly schematic imitation of duos that recommended them, and not necessarily their smaller scoring, for it was in this respect that they advanced the student gently 'ad Parnassum' from the little canonic motets like Conditor alme siderum sung in catechism classes.

The material and musical evidence situates at least some motets much further down the scale of artistic hierarchy than many scholars have imagined. And why not? If children learnt to vocalise nonsense Latin syllables as their first exercises in reading, why shouldn't they later sing a motet quite happily? Even if they set the texts of the Bible - the fundamental text of literate culture in the West - motets are not fully part of written culture. Rather, the oral practices I have recovered here reveal that Catholic culture was still largely vocal at the time. The Word was learnt by ear; it was something spoken and heard, and even large-scale polyphonic works did not wholly depend on writing for meaning, but relied on the authority of the ear, the voice and the memory.

All this having been said, a fuller understanding of literacy has not been the only obstacle to identifying motets as a repertoire with the broad appeal of vernacular song. Print itself has been one culprit. Publishing formulae, mass marketing and the stylistic genericism that went along with the transformation of music into an object of

83 Agostino Licino, Secondo libro di duo cromatici (Venice: Gardano, 1546). 84 See the introduction to Georg Rhau, Symphoniae Jucundae, ed. H. Albrecht (Musikdrucke aus denJahren 1538-1545 in praktischer Neuausgabe, 3; Kassel, 1959).

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commercial exchange all contradict the Romantic value of indi- viduality inherited by modern musicology. One result is that - with the exception of research into vernacular genres - historians of Renaissance music have evinced ambivalence towards printed sources. Following the lead of early modern composers, who griped that printers mangled their work and printing devalued it, source studies privileged manuscripts over prints. Moreover, manuscript studies- especially of the high-art genre of the cyclic mass in the large folio choirbooks that came into style in the late fifteenth century - better sustained prevailing notions of the masterwork.

Studies of the motet have tended, likewise, to frame analysis in the terms established by cyclic masses and their forms of musical elaboration. To take but two examples, John Brobeck defined sixteenth-century French 'liturgical motets' as '"motetlike" in the sense that they are contrapuntally complex works of moderate length that make use of such standard compositional techniques as canon, cantus firmus, and melodic imitation'; and Anthony M. Cummings, in his foundational study of Italian motets, concluded that 'the use of complex polyphonic procedures inappropriate to some liturgical contexts' was one of the defining hallmarks of the genre.85 Yet printing added another dimension outside matters of liturgical context that have preoccupied scholars. For print made of the motet a new genre responsive to a greater variety of readers. The material likeness of motet prints to books of hours and chansonniers argues that many sixteenth-century readers did not consider motets to be exclusively paraliturgical. Rather, they were part of a culture of print in which the tastes of a grand public began

85 J. T. Brobeck, 'Some "Liturgical Motets" for the French Royal Court: A Reconsideration of Genre in the Sixteenth-Century Motet', Musica Disciplina, 48 (1993), pp. 123-57, at p. 142. Brobeck is describing a repertoire of contrapuntally complex pieces designed to substitute for

plainchant in the liturgy. He responds here to Anthony M. Cummings, who used ritual function as a means of discerning two distinct sorts of motets c. 1500: liturgical pieces in a

simple fauxbourdon style and the more elaborate non- or paraliturgical motets used by the

Papal Chapel for ceremonies and moments in the liturgy such as the Elevation and Communion. See A. M. Cummings, 'Toward an Interpretation of the Sixteenth-Century Motet', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 34 (1981), pp. 43-59. Thus Brobeck argues that the pieces he is considering might be termed 'liturgical motets', using 'motet' to mean a work of some contrapuntal complexity. Howard Mayer Brown also concentrated on the matter of liturgical use for Petrucci's motet prints, even while observing the similarity of Petrucci's Motetti books to books of hours. See his 'The Mirror of Man's Salvation'. On whether motets should be considered liturgical at all, see Bonnie J. Blackburn, Music for Treviso Cathedral in the Late Sixteenth Centu~: A Reconstruction of the Lost Manuscripts 29 and 30 (Royal Musical Association Monographs, 3; London, 1987), pp. 19-33.

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to shape the cultural objects it consumed. Furthermore, the fact that canons had such a firm place in the curriculum of the schoolroom and catechism classes likewise suggests that motets had the broadest

appeal. According to the motet the same stylistic priorities that defined polyphonic mass cycles may have preserved the motet from the filthy ink of the press and the more popular cultural spheres into which print delivered written works, but in the process some of its

history was lost, and with it a valuable perspective on who enjoyed this so-called middling genre during the first age of music printing.

University of California, Berkeley

APPENDIX 1

Binder's Volumes Containing Attaingnant Motet Prints from before 1534

The volumes in Eichstatt, Wolfenbtittel and Paris - each of which contains most of what Attaingnant had for sale in the early 1530s - were all in Germany in the sixteenth century. Whether or not they were bound in Paris or abroad, they appear to have been sold in similar sets.1

EICHSTATT, STAATLICHE BIBLIOTHEK, LIT O NO. 38,

CONTRATENOR

Sixteenth-century leather-covered boards, stamped in gold: 'Contratenor'. Music printed in oblong octavo, 15 x 10 cm.

Chansons et motets en canon a quatre parties sur Paris: Attaingnant, [1528] deux (fragment)

Chansons de maistre Clement Janequin Paris: Attaingnant, [1528] Trente et quatre chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [153 1?] Trente et cinq chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [1529] Trente et deux chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [1529] Trente chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [1529] Trente et sept chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1532 Trente et une chanson musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1529 Trente et huyt chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1530

On the relationships among the volumes see Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, pp. 133-5, and L. Finscher, 'Attaingnantdrucke', pp. 37-9.

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Six Gaillardes et six Pavanes avec Treze chansons Paris: Attaingnant, 1530 musicales

Vingt et neuf chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1530 Trente et six chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1530 Aeuf basses dances deux branles vingt et cinq Paris: Attaingnant, 1530

Pavennes . .. Trente et troys chansons nouvelles en musique Paris: Attaingnant, 1532 Vingt et huit chansons nouvelles en musique Paris: Attaingnant, 1532 Motetz nouvellement composez Paris: Attaingnant, [1529] xii

Motetz Paris: Attaingnant, 1529

VERSAILLES, BIBLIOTHEQUE MUNICIPALE, FONDS GOUJET, 8 32 SUPERIUS

Eighteenth-century brown calfskin binding with gold tooling and 'chansons tres ancien 1525' on spine. First page signed and dated 1690. Manuscript additions contemporary with prints. Music printed in oblong octavo, 15 x 10 cm.

Chansons nouvelles en musique (Altus [i.e. Paris, Attaingnant, 1528 Superius]-Tenor)

Chansons de maistre Clement Janequin (S) Paris: Attaingnant, [1528] Motetz nouvellement composez (S) Paris: Attaingnant, [1529] 3 folios of music in manuscript containing the Superius to the chansons Quantj'estoys a maints and Je suis desheritie (untexted).

MUNICH, BAYERISCHE STAATSBIBLIOTHEK, MUSICA

PRACTICA 40/1-8

Formerly in the collection of Hans Heinrich Herwart. Listed in Herwart's catalogue as bound in white vellum.2 Music printed in oblong octavo, 15 x 10 cm.

Del secondo libro de Madrigali de Verdelotto a Venice: Scotto, 1538 cinque vocz

I1 secondo libro de Madrigali de Verdelotto ... [Venice: Scotto], 1537 Adriano ... Festa

Il terzo libro di Madrigali de Verdelotto Venice: Scotto, 1537 Vinticinque Canzoni Francesi a quatro voci di Venice, Gardano, [1538]

Clement Jannequin

2 See H. C. Slim, 'The Music Library of Hans Heinrich Herwart', Annales musicologiques, 7 (1977), pp. 67-79.

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xii Motetz Paris: Attaingnant, 1529 Vingt et huit chansons nouvelles Paris: Attaingnant, 1532 Vingt et huyt chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1534 Trente chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1534

(OLIM WERNIGERODE, PARIS, BIBLIOTHIQUE NATIONALE

DE FRANCE LAUSANNE, SUCCESSION A. CORTOT), THEN

SUPERIUS

Signed inside the cover H[einrich] G[raf] u[nd] H[err] zu Castell, dated 1539. Music printed in oblong octavo, 15 x 10 cm.

Trente et quatre chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [153 1?] Trente et cinq chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [1529] Trente et deux chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [1529] Trente chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [1529] Trente et sept chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1532 Trente et huyt chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1530 Six Gaillardes et six Pavanes avec Treze chansons Paris: Attaingnant, 1530

musicales Vingt et neufchansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1530 Trente et six chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1530

Neuf basses dances deux branles vingt et cing Paris: Attaingnant, 1530 Pavennes . ..

Trente et troys chansons nouvelles en musique Paris: Attaingnant, 1532 Vingt et huit chansons nouvelles en musique Paris: Attaingnant, 1532 Vingt et quatre chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1533 Chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1533 Vingt et sept chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1533 Trente chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1534 Vingt et huyt chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1534 Trente et une chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1534 Vingt et huyt chansons musicalles Paris: Attaingnant, 1534 Vingt et six chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1535 Trente et une chansons musicales a troys parties Paris: Attaingnant, 1535 xii Motetz Paris: Attaingnant, 1529

2 folios of music in manuscript in the Superius volume containing the

Superius parts of a pavane, three gaillardes, and 'Trium. Vray dieu d'aimer'.

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WOLFENBUTTEL, HERZOG AUGUST BIBLIOTHEK, ON LOAN

FROM THE PRIVATE COLLECTION OF GRAF SCHWEINITZ

(SATB Q)

Bound in leather with gold stamping, 16th-c." Music printed in oblong octavo, 15 x 10 cm.

Chansons et motets en canon a quatre parties sur Paris: Attaingnant, [1528] deux (in A only)

Quarante et deux chansons musicales a troys parties Paris: Attaingnant, 1529 (in STB only)

Chansons de maistre Clement Janequin Paris: Attaingnant, [1528] Trente et quatre chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1529 Trente et cinq chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [1529] Trente et deux chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [1529] Trente chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [1529] Trente et sept chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [1529] Trente et une chanson musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1529 Trente et huyt chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1530 Six Gaillardes et six Pavanes avec Treze chansons Paris: Attaingnant, 1530

musicales Vingt et neuf chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1530 Trente et six chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1530

Motetz nouvellement composez Paris: Attaingnant, [1529] xii Motetz Paris: Attaingnant, 1529

Manuscript addition on three blank staves of the xii Motetz (fol. xiV), untexted composition for three voices, transcribed in Ludwig Finscher, 'Attaingnantdrucke', p. 37.

APPENDIX 2

Sixteenth-Century Prints with Manuscript Additions

PARIS, BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE DE FRANCE,

RES. 419-421 (S)

Binding refurbished in brown vellum.

La fleur de chansons premier livre Lyon: Jean Bavent, 1574 La fleur de chansons second livre Lyon: Jean Bavent, 1574 Le IIe livre du Jardin de musique Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1579

3 See the full bibliographic description in Finscher, 'Attaingnantdrucke', pp. 35-6.

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Manuscript 'Et cum spiritu tuo, Amen' in four-voice fauxbourdon, Le IIe livre, fol. 50v.

PARIS, BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE DE FRANCE, RES.

623-623BIS (Q)

Binding refurbished in white vellum.

Lassus, Continuation du mdlange Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1596 Lassus, Livre de chansons a 5 Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1599

Two folios with manuscript additions on endpapers (contemporary with

prints). Fol. 1: staves ruled by hand, Laudate dominum omnes gentes (Ps. 116), a four-voice fauxbourdon setting, including doxology; fol. 2: a four-in-one canonic chanson at the unison for high voices Viens belle and soft hexachord with mnemonic terms for solmisation syllables ('utiliter, realiter, mirabiliter, familiariter, solemniter, lacrimabiliter').

PARIS, BIBLIOTHEQUE MAZARINE, RES. 30345 A (SATB IN

ONE VOLUME)

Eighteenth-century red leather binding with gold stamping. Chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1536 Livre premier contenant xxix. chansons Paris: Attaingnant, 1536 Second livre contenant xxv. chansons Paris: Attaingnant, 1536 Premier livre contenant xxxi. chansons Paris: Attaingnant, 1536 Second livre contenant xxxi. chansons Paris: Attaingnant, 1536 Tiers livre contenant xxi. Chansons Paris: Attaingnant, 1536

Twelve fols. of printed music paper with eight chansons, one pavane and the motet Domine Deus omnipotens.

A full description of the manuscript additions can be found in Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, p. 286.

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