Erasmus and the Lying Mirror: More Thoughts on Imitatio and Mid Sixteenth-Century Chanson Masses

Abstract

Composers, including Gombert and Manchicourt, brought the eloquent style of the chanson-including its syntactical aspects-into the dense polyphony of the mass through chanson allusions that invoke the charm of a love song and transform it into a Neoplatonic ideal of divine beauty. Composers reaffirmed the ideals of Erasmus, whose goal in Christianizing pagan literature was to combine eloquence with piety to create a rhetorical theology that would replace scholasticism. These practices can be viewed as musical analogues of literary borrowing practices, as analyzed by Gian Biagio Conte and encapsulated in his notion of ‘poetic dimension’ in which an artist expands the traditional ‘code’ within the norms imposed by the cultural content.