16th-century musica ficta: the importance of the scribe

Abstract

It is idle to pretend that a complete picture of 16th-century English musica ficta practice can be built up wholly by quoting unusual examples and wondering what they mean. This article, though delayed, complements my article (Bray, 1970) in which I did this. Since we rely on manuscripts for most of our information (though, as we shall see, not even printed sources are necessarily entirely reliable), we have to consider the scribes of these manuscripts, their circumstances, sympathies, and motives. If we can discover anything about scribal practice, or even see that a source has been tampered with later, then we can begin to understand more deeply the problems involved, and eventually we may wonder a little less.