Simon Mellet, scribe of Cambrai Cathedral

Abstract

Simon Mellet, scribe and vicar at the cathedral of Cambrai, is among the best-known music scribes of the fifteenth century. Jules Houdoy's classic study of Cambrai Cathedral (1880) documented numerous payments made to Mellet for copying, payments which have remained an important source of information for our understanding of the career of Guillaume Du Fay and the role of the Cambrai Cathedral as a vital musical centre in the fifteenth century. Simon Mellet's thirty-six-year career dominates the study of the production of music manuscripts at Cambrai. Payments made to Mellet are mentioned in most research on Du Fay and on sacred polyphony in the Franco-Burgundian regions. It is through these documents that we know of lost works by Du Fay, such as the Requiem, and of the existence of the composer Rasse de Lavenne. The payments even tell us of apparently wholly lost genres, such as the lamentations by Busnois, Ockeghem and Fremiet that were copied by Mellet in 1475–6.