A.W. Robertson’s scientific contributions

One of the intriguing aspects of fifteenth-century sacred music is its tendency to recycle familiar, and often highly moving, themes. This sometimes leaves the impression that there was a consensus of sorts about which motifs, typically involving the Virgin Mary, Christ, and the saints, were to be venerated across the culture. The touching episodes of Jesus’ Nativity were memorialized visually in illuminated books of hours, in paintings of the Virgin Mary nursing her newborn, in sculptures of the scene in the stable in Bethlehem, in the architecture of countless churches dedicated to the Mother of God, and in the mystery plays that elaborated the details of Christ’s birth, just as it was celebrated aurally in music composed on the Christmas antiphon Nesciens mater. Similarly, the image of Mary weeping at the foot of the Cross was captured both in the visual and dramatic arts and in music based on songs in Latin (Stabat mater) and the vernacular (Comme femme desconfortée). Even the newer genres of sacred music sometimes conceived without cantus firmus - from the declamation-style pieces of John Dunstaple’s generation to the early compositions of Josquin des Prez, Loyset Compère, and others who sought to imitate text directly - delighted in developing themes drawn from the Song of Songs, the Passion of Christ, the Psalms, and other emotional texts. These subjects reinvented and perpetuated themselves in music throughout the late Middle Ages for many reasons. This period saw the rise of an international style, in part because composers had opportunities to exchange ideas. They moved freely between church and court, they encountered one another at the great councils, and their music circulated widely in large repertory manuscripts. Yet sociological circumstances alone cannot explain the universality of recurring themes in sacred music and the cross-fertilization of these ideas among the arts in this period. Surely other stimuli, reflecting basic habits of mind and educations of composers and patrons, lie in the background. What shared experiences helped drive the cultivation and circulation of beloved sacred motifs in the fifteenth century?.