The Latinity of Jacob Obrecht

Abstract

This article studies the competence in Latin of Jacob Obrecht (whom Rob Wegman has shown to have been educated up to a master’s degree) as manifested in the motet-texts he may be supposed to have written, and in the canonic instructions he gave for the performance of his music. The prose text Inter preclarissimas, an attempt to gain the patronage (so Wegman) of Pope Alexander VI, displays some awkwardness perhaps aggravated by Obrecht’s discomfort at adopting the posture of a humble suppliant to a man less admirable than his office; Mille quingentis, a poetic commemoration of the composer’s father, shows greater skill, with Vergilian classicism overlaid on a medieval basis; the goliardic stanza O preciosissime (assuming it is Obrecht’s) is thoroughly medieval and thoroughly competent. Some of his canonic instructions betray the influence of Busnoys in their exuberant display of Greek terms taken from music and other liberal arts; but he is also fond of quotations from the Bible and scholastic philosophy; classical poetry is less exploited, but the use made in his Missa Fortuna desperata of the tag In medio consistit virtus shows Aristotelian ethics and the vicissitudes of fortune linked by a Horatian ode.