Overview

For many centuries, the Western imagination has pictured the medieval period as a kind of odyssey: a journey that took mankind to a strange country and ended in the Renaissance, with his homecoming and the restoration of his inheritance. This book explores the kinds of generalizations that are habitually made about ""the Middle Ages"" and which, whether it is known or not, sustain the false image of a medieval odyssey. In chapters that proceed chronologically from the 13th to the 15th century, Christopher Page examines what is supposed to be the serenity of medieval reflection on such matters as the ""numerical"" explanation of musical beauty, and he questions the modern tendency to regard ars antiqua motets as music for ""an intellectual elite"". Turning to the ars nova and beyond, he discusses the relation between 14th-century innovations and contemporary science. A final chapter explores the powerful influence of Johan Huizinga's ""The Waning of the Middle Ages"" upon musicology. Christopher Page is the author of ""Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France 1100-1300"" and ""The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France 1100-1300"".

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9780198163466

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