Why Music and Magic in the Middle Ages?

JOHN HAINES
University of Toronto

If we define magic and music in their broadest possible sensemagic as

encompassing both demonic and natural practices condemned by the
Church, and music as both learned speculation and everyday performance
then we might well begin, not with the title question of this article, but with
a related one: why not music and magic in the Middle Ages?1 That is to say,
why do we find little to no research on the interaction of these two major arts
during the longest historical period of Western Civilization? It is important to
answer this question first, since the reasons for the scholarly neglect of magic
and music can ultimately suggest helpful directions for future work on this
important dyad, which is a goal of this article. This article is addressed to
both musicologistsoriginally philologists (e.g. Pierre Aubry) and historians
(e.g. Friedrich Ludwig) with a peculiar interest in medieval musicand non-
musicologists alike.2 For it is only through the concerted effort of historians
of all kinds crisscrossing the artificial barriers of modern academic disciplines
that a deeper appreciation of magic and music can be achieved, two medieval
arts that were fully inter-disciplinary in the modern sense.
One of the reasons for the neglect of music and magic in the Middle Ages
is the relatively new status of medieval magic as a legitimated, mainstream
academic domain within the historical sciences. Readers of this journal are
well acquainted with Lynn Thorndikes foundational eight-volume work The
History of Magic and Experimental Science (19231958), the first four volumes
of which span the Middle Ages. Thorndike was writing at a time when little
of a scientific nature had been written on the topic in English-speaking lands.

1. On defining medieval magic, see Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 817. I would like to thank an
anonymous reader for their helpful critique of an earlier draft of this essay.
2. On Aubry, Ludwig, and the origins of musicology, see John Haines, Genealo-
gies musicologiques: Aux origines dune science de la musique vers 1900, Acta music-
ologica 73 (2001): 2144.

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (Winter 2010)

Copyright  2010 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

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As he noted in the preface to the first volume, the historical study of magic
was a rather new field.3 Throughout his work, Thorndike implicitly
stressed the importance of music in this new field by referring to it in various
contexts. He wrote of the occult power of numbers and its connection to the
music of the spheres with learned writers such as Macrobius, this writer being
the inspiration for a great deal of Neo-Platonic thought in the High Middle
Ages.4 Elsewhere, in the area of performance practice, Thorndike implicitly
referred to music in his frequent discussion of medicinal incantations, for
instance.5
Although Thorndikes History of Magic and Experimental Science raised many
possibilities for the study of magic in the Middle Ages, medievalists were
relatively slow to respond, in contrast to Renaissance specialists. The major
works of Frances Yates and D. P. Walker on Renaissance magic (to cite only
two major figures) are well known.6 Renaissance writers such as Ficino,
including his important testimony on music, received a great deal of scholarly
attention from Thorndike onwards; but not so for major medieval writers on
magic such as Adelard of Bath and Roger Baconuntil recently, that is.7
With notable exceptions such as Richard Kieckhefers 1976 book on late
medieval witch trials or the 1991 history of magic in the early Middle Ages
by Valerie Flint, it is only in the last decade or so that the study of magic has
made its presence felt in medieval studies, with the founding of the Societas
Magica in 1994, the Magic in History book series at Pennsylvania State
University Press four years later, and the Salomon Latinus series published by
Sismel, whose first volume appeared only a few years ago.8

3. Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 192358), 1: x.
4. Thorndike, History of Magic, 1: 544.
5. Thorndike, History of Magic, 2: 445; for more references to incantations, see this
word in the general index at the end of each volume.
6. Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge,
1964); D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (1958;
reprint, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975); and the bibliogra-
phies cited in these works.
7. Scholarship on Ficino includes Thorndike, History of Magic, 4: 565; Paul Kris-
teller, Music and Learning in the Early Italian Renaissance, Journal of Renaissance
and Baroque Music 1 (1947): 26976; D. P. Walker, Ficinos Spiritus and Music,
Annales musicologiques 1 (1953): 13150; idem, Le chant orphique de Marsile Ficin,
Musique et poesie au XVIe siecle: Paris, 30 juin4 juillet 1953 (Paris: CNRS, 1954),
1733; Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 329; Paola Zambelli, White Magic, Black
Magic in the European Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 2025 and 4243. Gary Tom-
linsons work is discussed below, as is Adelard of Bath.
8. Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and

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 Haines  Why Music and Magic in the Middle Ages? 151

Even as this chorus of magic studies has grown louder, music historians
have stubbornly refused to join it. To date, the only available study of music
in medieval magic is Jules Combarieus La musique et la magie (1909); in fact,
only a dozen scattered pages of this book are devoted to the Middle Ages.9
The primary reason for the dearth of research on medieval music and its
relationship to magic lies in something of a musicological aversion to the
topic. In the twenty-eight volumes of The New Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musicians, there is not a single entry for the word magic or related
expressions.
If we move outside the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, we are fortunate
to find Gary Tomlinsons landmark 1993 book that brought magic into main-
stream musicological discourse.10 Tomlinsons book has done little for the
cause of magic in medieval musicology, however, for two reasons. Firstly,
Tomlinson assumed a revival of magic in the 1500s from its near state of
oblivion in the Middle Ages, an idea inspired by the work of older scholars
on Renaissance magic such as Walker and Yates.11 This concept does not
hold up to the historical evidence that presents us instead with a continuous
tradition of magic from antiquity on. Richard Kieckhefer recently questioned
the assumption of a Renaissance revival of magic.12 The inference of the
Renaissance magic revival view for music is that magic played virtually no
role in medieval music and is thus unworthy of musicological enquiry. Sec-
ondly, Tomlinsons highly theoretical book bears the distinct stamp of post-
modern approaches then just emerging in musicology. Scholars of medieval

Learned Culture, 13001500 (London: Routledge, 1976); Valerie Flint, The Rise of
Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991);
Julien Veronese, LArs notoria au Moyen Age: Introduction et edition critique (Florence:
Sismel, 2007). The Societas Magica website at http://www.societasmagica.org/ pro-
vides a list of the Magic in History publications. For a bibliography of medieval
magic, see Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 20213.
9. Jules Combarieu, La musique et la magie: Etude sur les origines populaires de lart
musical, son influence, et sa fonction dans les societes (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1909), 108
13, 24445, 30410, and 33637. It is cited by Thorndike, History of Magic, 1: 568
n. 1.
10. Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
11. Tomlinson writes of the inescapable decline in occult thought from the Mid-
dle Ages on and magic in the Renaissance attaining a prestige lost for over a millen-
ium (Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic, 45 and back cover).
12. Richard Kieckhefer, Did Magic Have a Renaissance? An Historiographic
Question Revisited, in Magic and the Classical Tradition, ed. Charles Burnett and
W. F. Ryan (London: Warburg Institute, 2006), 199212.

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music, as Judith Peraino pointed out a few years ago, have resisted post-
structuralism more than specialists in any other historical period.13 So by plac-
ing the field of magic squarely in the postmodern camp, Tomlinsons book
may well have ensured that few medieval musicologists would think of wan-
dering into magical territory newly earmarked for post-modernity.
For another, more fundamental explanation of the musicological resistance
to medieval magic, one needs to inspect the musical repertoire most pervaded
by magic in the Middle Ages, the one historian Friedrich Ludwig called over
a hundred years ago the largest and oldest body of medieval music: liturgical
chant.14 As Ludwig pointed out then in his survey of scholarship, the study
of chant has often been conducted under the auspices of the Catholic Church
and to a certain extent dictated by ecclesiastic concerns. Ludwigs examples
of this range from the post-Tridentine Editio Medicaea (161415) to the Paleo-
graphie musicale and the Editio Vaticana then recently initiated in 1904, the
latter two with the heavy participation of the influential monk-scholars of
the abbey of Solesmes.15
A certain preconception of chant has influenced its study, from its earliest
scholarship to the present day. Chant is typically envisioned as a large, unified
body whose ideology and purpose conforms to those of the medieval and
modern Church, the latter two being implicitly the same entitya historical
quandary if there ever was one. In general, the medieval Christian liturgy
and its chant are both seen as a single harmonious puzzle into which fit all of
the many surviving notated pieces for office and mass. It is significant that
the little extant published work on the historiography of plainchant, such as
Katherine Bergerons maligned Decadent Enchantments (1998), has come
mostly from outside the circles of chant scholarship.16
Let us take a recently published prestigious collection of essays on the
office as a representative example of the prevailing perspective on plainchant.
In this 2000 publication by Oxford University Press, essays by leading musi-

13. Judith Peraino, Replacing Medieval Music, Journal of the American Musicolog-
ical Society 54 (2001): 20964.
14. John Haines, Friedrich Ludwigs Musicology of the Future: A Commentary
and Translation, Journal of Plainsong and Medieval Music 12 (2003): 155.
15. Haines, Friedrich Ludwigs Musicology of the Future, 15657.
16. Katherine Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at
Solesmes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Jann Pasler, review of the
same in the Journal of the American Musicological Society 52 (1999): 37083. Other
works on the reception of chant in the nineteenth century are cited in John Haines,
Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouveres: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 6 n. 14.

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 Haines  Why Music and Magic in the Middle Ages? 153

cologists explore a variety of topics on the medieval liturgy, organized as

follows: the pre-Carolingian office, manuscript studies, the late Middle Ages
and hagiography.17 Virtually all topics of historical enquiry on medieval chant
in this eclectic volume are dictated by official ecclesiastic books, councils,
and authorities; they are limited to the space between the fixed local liturgy
and the rules of its everyday adaptation, as one contributor puts it.18
To be sure, such traditional scholarship is laudable for both its rigor and
thoroughness. Indeed, it is indispensable when one considers the abundance
and complexity of extant liturgical sources with music. Yet the near monop-
oly of this source-centered and sometimes anachronistic approach for over
a century of scholarship on liturgical chant has pushed out other historical
perspectives that might complement this view of chant and flesh out our
understanding of the total religious life in the Middle Ages. There is little
room in the currently accepted historical matrix for chants that neither fit
into the official mass and office cycles nor conform to the theme of Christian
worshipespecially if these pieces do not survive in notated form. It is not
my intention here to condemn the traditional view, but simply to advocate
more than one way of studying medieval religious music. It is fair to say, I
think, that the traditional view implicitly discourages a study of the interac-
tion of magic and liturgical music, and more specifically, of the use of chant
in magic contexts as discussed below.
And yet, abundant evidence for music and magic survives for the Middle
Ages and awaits future study. In the following pages, I would like to show
how the landmark work of historians of magic in the last few decades has
paved the way for a musicological entry into the field of magic. Their work
suggests several fruitful areas for future research. In the area of music theory
or speculation, certain key concepts such as property (proprietas) and fig-
ure (figura) show a marked tendency towards esotericism and magic; or in
the realm of astrological science, as especially seen in the concept of celestial
music (musica mundana). As for the domain of practical music making, it too
has potential for the study of magic, and includes hitherto neglected but
important musical genres that relate to magical practices. The most significant
of these is the incantation, a genre that displays the close relationship between
Christian liturgy and magic in the Middle Ages. Given these multiple avenues
of study, the need for musicological work in medieval magic is long overdue.
In fact, so glaring is this lacuna that prominent medieval historians outside

17. Margot Fassler and Rebecca Baltzer, ed., The Divine Office in the Latin Middle
Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
18. Laszlo Dobszay, Reading an Office Book, in The Divine Office, 56.

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154 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2010

musicological ranks such as Charles Burnett have already initiated the study
of music and magic in the Middle Ages and pointed the way for much needed
future work.

M U S I C A S P E C U L ATI VA

Medieval writers on music typically divide the study of music into the practi-
cal and theoretical or speculative (musica speculativa). It is useful to begin
with the latter in our enquiry into music and magic. I would like to single
out two instances of the interaction between magic and musica speculativa;
these are not the only two possible avenues of research, but good places to
start nevertheless. The first instance is that of the music of the spheres and its
relation to astrology as found in the works of twelfth-century scholar Adelard
of Bath and in some of the Arabic works Adelard translated. Here I will draw
on the important work of Charles Burnett. Adelards writings and translations
do not belong, strictly speaking, to the corpus of music theoretical works,
but my second instance does. Medieval music theory treatises have received
much scholarly attention for over two centuries, yet these same treatises con-
tain language and concepts closely related to magical ones that have received
virtually no attention until now. Of special interest are theoretical works from
1200 onwards. These emerged under the aegis of the university and were
heavily influenced by Aristotelian works, as recent musicological research has
shown. Beyond Aristotelian authorities, however, we can also see in certain
cases the influence of non-university, esoteric works such as the Ars notoria
that reveal a significant connection between medieval music theory and
magic.
We begin with the concept of musica mundana and astrology. In the Middle
Ages, churchmen frequently condemned astral knowledge since it ultimately
originated in pagan sources. The practical applications of astrology in medie-
val life were many, in areas ranging from agriculture to medicine.19 Now, the
concept of musica mundana was condoned by most Christian music writers of
the Middle Ages from Boethius onwards. But this same concept of the har-
mony of the spheres and its influence on human activities owed much to an
astrological tradition going back to antiquity, as James Haar and Joscelyn
Godwin have demonstrated.20 Musica mundana thus had a precarious status.

19. Generally on astrology, see Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 12033; and
Charles Burnett, Astrology, in Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical
Guide, ed. F. A. C. Mantello and A. G. Rigg (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University
of America Press, 1996), 36982.
20. The standard study on the music of the spheres is still James Haar, Musica

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 Haines  Why Music and Magic in the Middle Ages? 155

Although widely accepted in the Middle Ages, it had a dubious pagan pedi-
gree that only became more obvious with the translation and dissemination
of Arabic astrological works beginning in the twelfth century.
Few specialists of medieval magic have done more than Charles Burnett
to show how speculative music concepts such as musica mundana relate to a
broader intellectual sphere that includes magic and astrology. Learned dis-
course on music almost always occurred in the context of the seven liberal
arts, including astronomy or astrology, the two being nearly synonymous in
the Middle Ages. In the wake of late medieval Arabic translations and their
reception, many learned men directly linked music and the liberal arts to
such things as necromancy, as Burnett has pointed out.21 Thus learned con-
versations surrounding music expanded in the twelfth century to include the
topic of magic.
In an essay published in 1987, Adelard, Music and the Quadrivium,
Burnett has brought up an important anecdote.22 In his letter to his nephew,
Adelard of Bath at one point turns his attention to music. As Burnett demon-
strates, this passage betrays the influence of Boethius famous treatise.23 When
Adelard turns to that symphony which is said to be in the heavens, he first
cites the beneficial effects of the music of the spheres (musica mundana) fol-
lowing the standard discussion from Boethius. Music can heal, Adelard
claims, just as Boethius had written that celestial music improves and calms
human beings, following Plato.24 But Adelard follows up this theme with a

Mundana: Variations on a Pythagorean Theme (PhD dissertation, Harvard Univer-

sity, 1960). See most recently Susan Rankin, Naturalis concordia vocum cum planetis:
Conceptualizing the Harmony of the Spheres in the Early Middle Ages, in Citation
and Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Musical Culture: Learning from the Learned, ed.
Suzannah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2005), 322
and the literature cited at 5 n. 7. Important readings in translation can be found in
Joscelyn Godwins Music, Mysticism and Magic: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1986), 4452 and 93113.
21. Charles Burnett, Talismans: Magic as Science? Necromancy among the
Seven Liberal Arts, in Burnett, Magic and Divination in the Middle Ages: Texts and
Techniques in the Islamic and Christian Worlds (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1996), 115.
22. Charles Burnett, Adelard, Music and the Quadrivium, in Adelard of Bath:
An English Scientist and Arabist of the Early Twelfth Century, ed. Charles Burnett (Lon-
don: Warburg Institute, 1987), 6986, at 71.
23. Burnett, Adelard, Music and the Quadrivium, 7474; and Adelard of Bath,
Conversations with his Nephew: On the Same and the Different, Questions on Natural Sci-
ence, and On Birds, ed. and trans. Charles Burnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), xx.
24. Burnett, Adelard, Music and the Quadrivium, 71; Boethius, Traite de la
musique, ed. Christian Meyer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 2331.

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discussion that breaks dramatically with Boethius. In the following sentences,

he takes up the malefic effect of music:25

But even in mute animals the same force [of music] has a not inconsiderable effect.
Among the English the very fish are driven into nets by the sweet sound of a bell
floating on the surface of the water. Among the Parthians the songs of men themselves
force the deer to be dissolved into sleep, so there is no need for nets. One cannot
doubt that birds are led into snares by songs. I have heard even you, while you
were disputing about musics force, make that claim, saying that you made a wild
hawkwhich you could not tame in any other waydocile by playing a musical
instrument.

The importance of this passage from Adelards On the Same and the Different
lies in the extent to which he suggests something quite divergent from Boe-
thius and other music writers, something likely influenced by astrological
Arabic works Adelard knew intimately for having translated them himself.26
This something is the power of song to effect evil. Boethius and later music
writers following him had long ignored this aspect of the music of the
spheres, but the modern twelfth-century Adelard informs his reading of
musica mundana with a knowledge of magic and astrology gleaned from his
Arabic masters, as he calls them elsewhere.27 In looking for early medieval
precedents of this, we find a remarkably similar theme to that of Adelard five
centuries earlier in the eighth book of Isidore of Sevilles Etymologies, devoted
to heresies and magic. Concerning the songs of magicians, Isidore writes that
they shatter the elements, disturb the minds of men, and, without drinking
a special potion, cause much destruction through the violence of song.28
Isidore also discusses the songs or charms (carminibus) of witches that can
change the course of planets, as well as incantations and their harmful art (ars
noxia).29 I am not suggesting that Adelard borrowed from Isidores disquisi-

25. Burnett, Adelard, Music and the Quadrivium, 71; and Adelard of Bath,
Conversations with his Nephew, 53; I cite the latter translation which differs slightly
from the first.
26. Adelard of Bath, Conversations with his Nephew, xixviii; Thorndike, History of
Magic, 2: 1943.
27. Adelard of Bath, Conversations with his Nephew, xxix.
28. Isidori Hispalensis episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lind-
say, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 1: 324, lines 1619: Magi sunt, qui vulgo
malefici ob facinorum magnitudinem nuncupantur. Hi et elementa concutiunt, tur-
bant mentes hominum, ac sine ullo veneni haustu violentia tantum carminis inter-
imunt.
29. Lindsay, Etymologiarum, 1: 323, lines 2527 and 324, l: 1315 and 2021.

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 Haines  Why Music and Magic in the Middle Ages? 157

tion on evil song, although this would certainly not be out of the question
for someone as well read as Adelard. Rather, these two passages five centuries
apart share a common theme that medieval music writers seldom if ever
discuss: the power of song to harm. Thus Adelards remarks flesh out the
standard Neo-Platonic discussion of the spheres by revealing the nefarious
power of music and by suggesting a relationship between magic and music.
To find a possible inspiration for Adelards comments in his work On the
Same and the Different, we must once again rely on Burnetts work. The theme
of the ambivalent force of music and its connection with the stars occurs
more than once in Arabic astrological works first translated by Adelard of
Bath and others in the twelfth century.30 Most notably, it comes up in a
work Adelard translated, The Abbreviation of the Introduction to Astrology by
Abu Masar, the best-known astrologer of the Middle Ages, as Burnett has
put it in his collaborative edition of this work.31 Abu Masar gives in the fifth
chapter of his astrological primer the traits and influences of each planet.
Venus, we read, indicates . . . love of entertainment . . . dancing, playing
wind instruments, moving the strings of lutes, songs.32 Further on, we learn
of Mercurys inclination towards rhetoric, poetry, the art of writing, which
Adelard paraphrases as a composer and writer of music (musice repertor et
scriba).33 The importance of music in astrology occurs in another of Abu
Masars works also edited and translated by Burnett and a collaborator, On
Historical Astrology. If Venus associates with music and dancing, Abu Masar
writes, its influence varies depending on its proximity to other planets. If
Saturn, then its music turns into wailing and the melodies of construction
workers; if Jupiter, the melodies of recitation which the religious use; if
Mars, those of schemers and vagabonds; if the sun, those of the lute; if
Mercury, those used with poetry; and if with the moon, the songs of sailors
in ships and boats.34
In sum, Abu Masar and his translator Adelard clarify the vital relationship
of music and astrology, thereby fleshing out the standard discussion by medie-

30. On which, see Charles Burnett, The Introduction of Arabic Learning Into England
(London: British Library, 1997).
31. Abu Masar, The Abbreviation of the Introduction to Astrology, Together with the
Medieval Latin Translation of Adelard of Bath, ed. Charles Burnett, Keiji Yamamoto,
and Michio Yan (Leiden: Brill, 1994), vii.
32. Abu Masar, The Abbreviation of the Introduction to Astrology, 65.
33. Abu Masar, The Abbreviation of the Introduction to Astrology, 67 and 12627.
34. Abu Masar, On Historical Astrology: The Book of Religions and Dynasties (On the
Great Conjunctions), ed. Keiji Yamamoto and Charles Burnett, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill,
2000), 2: 75.

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val music writers of the musica mundana. The music of the spheres, a concept
found in music writers from Boethius onwards, had become by the late Mid-
dle Ages fertile ground for music and astrology.
We now move onwards from twelfth-century astrology to medieval music
theory of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, where we find hitherto
unstudied connections between music and magic. Parting ways with the
Boethian Platonic tradition of music and number, thirteenth-century theo-
rists follow Aristotle by focusing on material concerns such as the graphics of
measured notation (e.g., Franco of Cologne) or the categories of musical
performance (Johannes de Grocheio).35 The apparently idiosyncratic lan-
guage of late medieval music theorists originates in a broader intellectual
context that has only recently come under scholarly scrutiny. For example, a
recent study has shown how Grocheio owes the entire framework for his
new division of music to Aristotelian zoological works newly revived in the
thirteenth century.36 Another thirteenth-century writer, the so-called Anony-
mous IV, makes explicit that he has read widely for his inspiration, from
Jordanus of Nemores Arithmetic to Johannes Sacroboscos Treatise on the
Sphere.37
Beginning with the landmark work of Jeremy Yudkin in 1990, musicolo-
gists have begun to explore the broader context for key terms used by medie-
val music writers.38 It is clear that when music writers use expressions such as
proprietas and perfectio to describe notational figures they are simply adopting
these terms from other, non-musical contexts. But their sources are not lim-
ited to general academic writings such as the anonymous Book of Causes or
Bartholomew the Englishmans Properties of Things, as argued in a recent
study, and here is where we eventually encounter magic.39 Anonymous IV,
for example, betrays the inspiration of the Fachliteratur or how-to manuals of
his day in parts of his treatise. In both form and content, he mimics practical

35. Franconis de Colonia, Ars cantus mensurabilis, ed. Gilbert Reaney and Andre
Gilles, Corpus scriptorum de musica 18 (Rome: American Institute of Musicology,
1974); Patricia DeWitt and John Haines, Johannes de Grocheio and Aristotelian
Natural Philosophy, Early Music History 27 (2008): 4798.
36. DeWitt and Haines, Johannes de Grocheio, 82.
37. John Haines, Anonymous IV as an Informant on the Craft of Music Writ-
ing, Journal of Musicology 23 (2006): 400404.
38. Jeremy Yudkin, The Influence of Aristotle on French University Music
Texts, in Musical Theory and Its Sources: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Andre
Barbera (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 17389.
39. John Haines, Proprietas and Perfectio in Thirteenth-Century Music Theory,
Theoria 15 (2008): 529.

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 Haines  Why Music and Magic in the Middle Ages? 159

treatises on alchemy, medicine and other trades.40 Anonymous IV has taken

in Euclids Geometry and uses Arabic loan words going back to Adelard of
Baths translations, as Charles Burnett pointed out over twenty years ago.41
The practical world of scribes evoked by Anonymous IV and other writers
such as Franco of Cologne also includes a monastic subculture devoted to
medicine, alchemy, and esoteric writing, as we shall soon seeall areas in
some way connected to magic. Thus the wider realm of inspiration for music
writing ultimately included magical works and not just university texts.
While musicologists have edited and commented upon most of the major
extant music treatises, none, to my knowledge, have explored the relation-
ship of music to magic in these writings. A connection between music and
magic emerges in the thirteenth century, and then more clearly in the four-
teenth century with a marked theme of esotericism. An interesting parallel
development can be traced in learned writing on magic, as Jean-Patrice
Boudet has recently demonstrated in his magisterial survey.42 Boudet
describes the thirteenth-century standardization and codification of magic
that follows its revival in the twelfth century; this codification process contin-
ues during the next two centuries. The graphic codification of musical reper-
toires in the High Middle Ages, less a practical measure than an extension of
the traditional speculative intellectualization of music, mirrors the develop-
ments studied by Boudet. For polyphonic music writing, the thirteenth cen-
tury was a period of codification; the new mensural writing codes became
the basis for further refinements during the next two centuries. The same
could be said to a certain extent of plainchant sources and music theory, to
single out two other musical examples.
I would like to review the emerging rapprochement of music and magic
in medieval music theory by looking at some inter-textual connections in
three manuscripts (table 1). In what follows, I shall point out the presence of
general themes such as cryptic writing codes, as well as specific concepts such
as proprietas.
Table 1 lays out the contents of three books dating from the eleventh to
the fourteenth centuries. The medieval music treatises found in them are
marked in bold letters. They are, from left to right, Pseudo-Odos Dialogue,

40. Haines, Anonymous IV, 38688.

41. Charles Burnett, The Use of Geometrical Terms in Medieval Music: elmua-
him and elmuarifa and the Anonymous IV, Sudhoffs Archiv 70 (1986): 198205; see
other references and discussion in Haines, Anonymous IV, 380 n. 18 and 397411.
42. Jean-Patrice Boudet, Entre science et nigromance: Astrologie, divination et magie
dans lOccident medieval, XIIeXVe siecle (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2006).

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Table 1: Some manuscripts containing music and magic

Paris, Bibliotheque London, British
nationale de France lat. Library Royal 12 C VI
3713 (11th13th century) (13th14th century)
1. Poems & proverbs 1. Ars notoria
2. Ps. R. Bacon, 2. Second Philosopher
Critical days
3. Alcuin, Virtues and vices 3. Wipo, Proverbs
4. Ps.-Odo, Dialogue 4. Secret of secrets (ed.
Bacon)
5. Proverbs 5. Prester John, Travels
6. Commentary on Song 6. Medical verses
of Songs
7. Master Simon, Sacraments 7. Aristotle, Physics
8. Dialectic treatise 8. Galen, tegni
9. Commentary on Georgics 9. Anonymous V
10. Proverbs, prayers & 10. Anonymous VI
formulas
11. Rondea: Faus
semblant
12. Anonymous IV
Paris, Bibliotheque
nationale de France
lat. 7378A (14th
century)
1. Practical geometry
2. Nicolas Oresme,
Proportions
3. Squaring the circle
4. Pseudo-Euclid, Mirrors
5. Ibn Muahd, Twilights
6. Jordanus of Nemore,
Triangles . . .
7. Jean des Murs,
Speculative Music
8. Jean de Lignieres, Canons
9. Leo the Hebrew,
Harmonic numbers
10. Ars nova
11. Predictions
12. Nicolas Jude,
Planisphaerium
13. Treatise and epistle
14. Al-Zarqali, Astrolabe
15. Astrological tables
and treatises on optics,
medicine, astrology
16. Commentary on
Aristotle, Physics

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 Haines  Why Music and Magic in the Middle Ages? 161

the treatises of Anonymous IV, V and VI, Jean de Murs Speculative Music,
and the Ars nova once attributed to Philippe de Vitry. As seen in table 1, the
manuscripts surround these music treatises with magical works. I would like
to argue that compilers brought these texts together because of the presence
of themes common to magic and music.
The first manuscript (table 1, left column) is a collection of works appar-
ently used at the abbey of Saint Martial. Among its magical works we find
the Pseudo-Roger Bacons Critical Days (left column, number 2) where the
following quote from the Arabic astrologer Masha allah occurs: the health
[or waning] of the moon is the health of all things.43 Other magic works in
this book include formulas, rituals, and esoteric writing from the abbey of
Saint Martial studied by Marie-Therese dAlverny (number 10).44 The monks
of Saint Martial may have brought these texts together with the Pseudo-
Odos Dialogue on Music because all of these activities, whether magic ritual or
chant recitation, functioned as monastic recreations, to quote dAlverny.45
Another possible thread binding these works together is the theme of an
esoteric and difficult art, be it magic or music. Various objects throughout
these texts, from the black-handled knife used in one of these rituals to the
monochord discussed in Odos work, help the initiate to better access the
art. And writing codes such as musical notes and cryptic magic formulas are
often vital in this process of initiation.
The importance of special writing codes to a difficult art was clearly a
unifying concept in the next manuscript, a collection of works from the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, compiled by Henricus de Kirkestede in
the 1380s and used by the monks at Bury Saint Edmunds (BL Royal 12 C
VI; table 1, middle column).46 The collection brings together three of the

43. Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, fasc. 9, De retardatione accidentium senectutis
cum aliis opusculis de rebus medicinalibus, ed. A. G. Little and E. Withington (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1928), 207: Habeto ergo lunam significatricem omnium rerum detri-
mentum, quia sanitas eius est sanitas omnis rei.
44. Marie-Therese dAlverny, Une baguette magique, Melanges Alexandre
Koyre, vol. 1, Laventure de lesprit (Paris: Hermann, 1964), 111, on fol. 105; eadem
in Compte-rendu des seances, Revue des etudes latines 34 (1956): 4748 on fol. 101;
eadem, Recreations monastiques: Les couteaux a manche divoire, Recueil de tra-
vaux offert a M. Clovis Brunel, 2 vols. (Paris: Societe de lEcole des Chartes, 1955), 1:
1032 on fol. 99v and 101. The first and last essays were reprinted in dAlverny,
Pensee medievale en occident: Theologie, magique et autres textes des XIIeXIIIe siecles, ed.
Charles Burnett (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1995), numbers XII and XIII.
45. dAlverny, Recreations monastiques.
46. Haines, Anonymous IV, 41415.

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162 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2010

best-known magic works of the Middle Ages: the Secret of Secrets, Prester
Johns Travels, and a special redaction of the Ars notoria related to writing that
heads up the manuscript (middle column, numbers 1, 4, and 5). With its
theme of esoteric writing, this Ars notoria scribendi neatly links to the three
works on music writing that close the collectionAnonymous IV, V and VI
(numbers 9, 10, and 12). This unique branch of the Ars notoria focuses on a
method of shorthand revealed to the author in a vision by Thomas Becket.
Presented first in epistolary form and then in dialogue format, this hermetic
work toys with the reader by giving only short glimpses of the authors pro-
posed shorthand method. In fact, the anonymous author never reveals his
method fully, referring instead to a long lost three-volume expose of it.47
There is a striking similarity between the compact signs and figures of the
Ars notoria scribendi and the musical notes expounded in the music treatises
found in the same manuscript. The notae of the Ars notoria scribendi are mostly
vertical lines with appended strokes; the principal notae of mensural music,
too, are vertical lines with various attached strokes. For Henricus de Kirk-
estede, the compiler of manuscript BL Royal 12 C VI, the connection
between these two writing codes appears to have been clear. Both the author
of this Ars notoria and music writers like Anonymous IV, writing around the
same time, provide an exegesis of a cryptic writing method comprised of
figurae or notae, as they call them, made of lines and strokes.48 For the notary
as for the music scribe, these innovative, compact writing codes present new
ways to master time by capturing sound as rapidly as possible, to write as
fast as the tongue can move, as the Ars notoria scribendi puts it.49
The exponents of these different writing codes emphasize that figures and
their properties are paramount to the transmission of a given art (ars or sci-
entia). The figura acts as a door to the esoteric room of knowledge, whether
musical or magical. And proprietas or property is a figure or things quality
that makes it special to the art. In the new mensural writing codes of thir-
teenth-century music, the figura refers to the written note itself and proprietas
to the property of a musical note or groups of notes. The property of a note
varies depending on how the scribe alters the shape of the figura.50 As has

47. See John Haines, Did John of Tilbury Write an Ars Notaria? Scriptorium 62
(2008): 4673; and Charles Burnett, Give Him the White Cow: Notes and Note-
Taking in the Universities in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, History of the
Universities 14 (1998): 130.
48. Haines, Anonymous IV, 39396 and 424; idem, Did John of Tilbury,
5758.
49. Haines, Did John of Tilbury, 55.
50. Haines, Proprietas and Perfectio (as above, n. 39), 5.

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 Haines  Why Music and Magic in the Middle Ages? 163

recently been pointed out, music theorists discussion of the proprietas of a

note owes much to the new Aristotelian jargon widely disseminated in thir-
teenth-century university circles.51
But the notion of proprietas as the special property of a graphic figure that
can be subtly varied and manipulated in order to give it a greater or lesser
degree of potency, precisely the sense intended by music writers, can also be
found outside the university. Indeed, the concept of proprietas is fundamental
to magic during this same period, and especially to natural magic. The proprie-
tas of objects was indispensable, for example, in everyday medical proceed-
ings, as Francis Brevart has recently pointed out in his study of medieval
German drug literature on mugwort (artemisia vulgaris).52 Physicians needed
to acquire a knowledge of proprietates in order to rise from the status of a
vulgar healer to that of a learned one, as Arnau de Vilanova puts it.53
Elsewhere, the different properties of stones (as seen in their size, color, and
other features) needed to be understood if one wanted to put them to proper
use, as Albert the Great reminds us.54
My third manuscript is Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France lat. 7378A
(table 1, far right column), a fourteenth-century compendium containing the
famous Ars nova music treatise whose status as a single work by Philippe de
Vitry was questioned by Sarah Fuller over twenty years ago.55 Until now, the
common ground of magic and music in that most ancient science of astrology
has been implicit: implicit in the music of the spheres discussed by Boethius
and subsequent writers; implicit in column B, with the juxtaposition of the
Pseudo-Bacons Critical days or the Secret of Secrets in a collection also contain-
ing musical treatises. In the fourteenth century, the astrological link between
magic and music becomes explicit. The earliest two astrological works in lat.

51. Haines, Proprietas and Perfectio, 1318.

52. Francis Brevart, Mother of All Herbs: The Magical Plant Mugwort (Artem-
isia vulgaris L.) in Medieval German Wonder Drug Literature, in Er is ein wol gevri-
under man: Essays in Honor of Ernst S. Dick on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday,
ed. Karen McConnell and Winder McConnell (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2009),
4372, at 55, 59, and 62. My thanks to Francis Brevart for pointing this article out
to me.
53. Michael McVaugh, The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages, Micrologus Library
15 (Florence: Sismel, 2006), 64.
54. Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, trans. Dorothy Wyckoff (Oxford: Claren-
don, 1967), 3654.
55. See Sarah Fuller, A Phantom Treatise of the Fourteenth Century? The Ars
Nova, Journal of Musicology 4 (1985): 2350. On this manuscript, see also Pascale
Duhamel, Lenseignement de la musique a lUniversite de Paris dapres le manuscrit
BnF lat. 7378A, Acta musicologica 79 (2007): 329.

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164 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2010

7378A are from the heyday of Arabic astrology in the eleventh century: num-
ber 5 in table 1, the Twilights or De crepusculis by Ibn Muahd, and number
14, the Astrolabe by Al-Zarqali. From the early fourteenth century come Jean
de Lignieres Canons or astrological tables (number 8).56 Astrology and geom-
etry go hand in hand in the fourteenth century, as seen in our manuscripts
opening Practical Geometry and in the work on triangles by the Paris mathema-
tician Jordanus of Nemore (number 6). Astrology, mathematics, and music
come together here in one man, the famous Paris master Jean des Murs, or
Johannes de Muris. Our manuscript contains his Musica Speculativa, a work
that follows Boethius. Jeans name also comes up later in the manuscript, in
the collection of Predictions (number 11). He, along with several others,
predicted the famous conjunction of planets in 1345. For many, this conjunc-
tion was an astrological warning of the great plague a few years later.57
As mentioned at the beginning of the last paragraph, this same manuscript
contains the most famous music treatise of the fourteenth century, the Ars
nova (number 10). We have already noted general resemblances between the
methods and purposes of thirteenth-century music treatises and the Ars notoria
found in manuscript BL Royal 12 C VI. In the fourteenth century, with the
ongoing transmission of the Ars notoria and the unprecedented complexity in
music writing introduced by the Ars nova, parallels between magical and
musical figurae become even clearer. The close relationship between the Ars
notoria and Ars nova is evident. These two treatises share common elements:
an inclination towards the liberal arts, including astrology; an obsession with
specialized and esoteric writing whose power is brevity and whose mastery is
time; an emphasis on the power of the signa, nota, or notula, with special
attention to its forma, and on the symbolism of square and circular shapes.
Most importantly, the two works share the same name; the Ars notoria is
sometimes called Ars nova.58 To sum up, the similarity of themes in these two
treatises, as in several other ones in the three manuscripts just discussed, con-
firm the extent to which both the ars musica and the ars magica partake of that
most ancient art of observing the stars, astrology.
MUSICA PRAC TICA
The mention of astrology directly above neatly connects learned musical dis-
course to practical music making. Astrology, and especially lunar astrology,

56. On Jean de Lignieres, see Thorndike, History of Magic, 3: 25267.

57. Thorndike History of Magic, 3: 3034.
58. Veronese, LArs notoria, 34, 40, 45, and 57; Philippi de Vitriaco Ars nova, ed.
Gilbert Reaney et al., Corpus scriptorium de musica 8 (Rome: American Institute of
Musicology, 1964), 2224 and 2731.

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 Haines  Why Music and Magic in the Middle Ages? 165

pervaded everyday medieval life, from interpreting birthdays to predicting

the weather. As Richard Kieckhefer writes in his Magic in the Middle Ages,
popular astrology was perennial.59
We have already seen that learned medieval writers take their cue from the
humdrum music of daily routines, as in Adelard on the songs of English
fishermen or Abu Masar on those of construction workers and vagabonds.
One of the few modern historians to have paid attention to the musical and
astrological link in daily medieval music making has been Madeleine Pelner
Cosman in an 1978 essay entitled Machauts Medical Musical World.60
Cosman discusses a wide range of music performed in Machauts day related
to medical needs. Related activities ranged from eating to wedding celebra-
tions, not to mention the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, both physical
and psychological.61 As she points out, knowledge of astrology related
directly to all of this music and to the medieval planning of daily events in
general. All belonged, in Cosmans words, to Gods great scheme.62 As she
puts it in her conclusion, the learned doctrine of the music of the spheres had
a very practical application as the divine, astrological music to which all
human music needed to synchronize. As Roger French has put it in a chapter
devoted to astrology in medieval medical practice, astrological knowledge
was not only sacred, it was necessary and useful to daily life.63
The field of practical music making is large, with many areas relating to
magic as yet unexplored. It cannot be overstated at present that the vast
majority of music performed in the Middle Ages either has not survived in
notated form or was never written down in the first place. Modern histories
understandably tend to focus on the surviving notated pieces of music, espe-
cially the pieces exhibiting literary or polyphonic sophistication. Historians

59. Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 86; on astrology in general, see ibid,
8590 and 125133, as well as Charles Burnett, Lunar Astrology, the Varieties of
Texts Using Lunar Mansions, with Emphasis on Jafar Indus, Micrologus 12 (2004):
43133.
60. Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Machauts Medical Musical World, Machauts
World: Science and Art in the Fourteenth Century (New York: New York Academy of
Sciences, 1978), 136.
61. See also Christopher Page, Music and Medicine in the Thirteenth Century,
in Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity, ed. Peregrine Horden
(Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2000), 10919.
62. Cosman, Machauts Medical Musical World, 6.
63. Roger French, Astrology in Medical Practice, in Practical Medicine From
Salerno to the Black Death, ed. Luis Garca-Ballester et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 3059, at 3031.

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have particularly favored the repertoires of Latin chant, sacred polyphony and
late medieval vernacular song. More often than not, these repertoires were
committed to parchment anthologies either because of their exceptional
sophistication or because of their association with a prestigious institution
that also controlled writing centers. The most obvious example of this would
be repertoires written by and for the Church such as the polyphonic organa
composed for the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Yet a more responsible
history of medieval music must take into account a multitude of less sophisti-
cated repertoires used in a variety of daily contexts. These neglected reper-
toires included magic incantations. Its music lies somewhere between
recitation and full out song.
This important musical genre, the incantation, has received virtually no
musicological attention until now. Incantations and other magic melodies
were often performed in liturgical contexts. We have already encountered
this phenomenon in the monastic recreations from Saint Martial men-
tioned earlier. Over a hundred years ago, Jules Combarieu suggested that
music and magic frequently came together in liturgical practice, in the many
rituals characterized by rigorous symbolism and formalism.64 What can be
known about these rituals and their contexts, and consequently about the
practical performance of magical music in the Middle Ages?
The groundwork for the answer to this question has been laid by medieval
historians, chief among them Richard Kieckhefer. Over the last few decades,
Kieckhefer has put into sharp focus the liturgical context of a great deal of
magical activities, including music performance. In his important history of
magic in the Middle Ages cited earlier, Kieckhefer has now famously argued
that magic often took place in a clerical underworld. As he points out, the
average medieval cleric possessed only rudimentary training in Latin and the
liturgy. And many members of the lower clerical orders especially were active
as tradesmen outside the church, as Kieckhefer argues. These medieval
churchmen easily participated in a host of popular and quasi-liturgical rituals
ranging from healing ceremonies to necromantic invocations. These rituals,
although mostly condemned by the church, were both deeply rooted in
antiquity and widespread among the general medieval population.65
It should not surprise us, therefore, that most surviving medieval magic
texts emanate from ecclesiastic or monastic milieus. We have seen this most
clearly in the case of the monastic recreations in Paris, Bibliotheque natio-

64. Combarieu, La musique et la magie, 10910.

65. Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 15356.

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 Haines  Why Music and Magic in the Middle Ages? 167

nale de France, lat. 3713, studied by dAlverny (table 1, left column). Another
such case is the outstanding manuscript transmission of the popular Ars noto-
ria, including the recension devoted to shorthand writing found in manu-
script Royal 12 C VI and discussed above. The widespread Ars notoria was a
treatise of Solomonic ritual magic containing prayers and special figures or
notae for the rapid acquisition of knowledge, in particular the seven liberal
arts. As Julien Veronese has put it in his recent edition cited earlier, the Ars
notoria was born from Christian hands, as the ample Biblical and liturgical
references found throughout make clear.66 Marie-Therese dAlverny traced
its origins to twelfth-century monastic communities.67 Arguably the most
celebrated name in recent scholarship attached to the Ars notoria is that of
Jean de Morigny, a monk from northern France who composed his branch
of this magic work in the early fourteenth century. For Jean as for many
practitioners of the Ars notoria, religious devotion was integral to the efficacy
of the art. As related in a famous passage from the Grandes Chroniques de
France, Jean required that the reader of his so-called Book of Visions of the
Blessed and Undefiled Virgin Mary prepare himself adequately with prayers and
fasting.68
We come directly to music performance and incantations with yet another
case of the monastic milieu of magic, a fifteenth-century German necroman-
cers manual edited by Kieckhefer.69 This magic book is a collection of pray-
ers and conjurations for a variety of purposes: illusionism, psychological
experiments, and, of course, the exorcism and conjuration of demons. As
with most medieval practices, this is late evidence of a much older activity
that, as Kieckhefer points out, was hardly peripheral in medieval society.70
Indeed, the proximity of these prayers to those of the mainstream medieval
liturgy is striking. Many specify which chant should be imitated; others bor-
row liturgical chants wholesale; some even prescribe the recitation of a mass.

66. Veronese, LArs notoria, 25.

67. Michael Camille, Visual Art in Two Manuscripts of the Ars Notoria, in
Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic, ed. Claire Fanger (Uni-
versity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 11039, at 111.
68. The famous passage is given in Camille, Visual Art, 110, and in Nicholas
Watson, John the Monks Book of Visions of the Blessed and Undefiled Virgin Mary,
Mother of God: Two Versions of a Newly Discovered Ritual Magic Text, in Conjuring
Spirits, 163215, at 164.
69. Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancers Manual of the Fifteenth Century
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).
70. Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 10.

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The latter, of course, implies that the operator is a cleric.71 Named mass and
office chants include the Kyrie, Sanctus, and Asperges me.72

Example 1: Asperges me chant

If we find it difficult to imagine how a chant like the Asperges me might

have migrated out of its liturgical context into a magical one, some assistance
comes from vernacular literature, and in particular animal stories. In animal
stories, the symbolism of a given animal is crucial to its narrative role.73 Cer-
tain animals traditionally considered Satanic in bestiaries and elsewhere have
a similar diabolical role to play in vernacular animal romances. The fox and
the ass are especially prominent as Satanic or malevolent characters in late
medieval romances. These two animals feature prominently in two important
romances for the study of music, Renart le nouvel (ca. 1300) and the Roman de
Fauvel (ca. 1315). In the former, the ass Timer represents a corrupt ecclesias-
tic, probably an archbishop.74 When Timer the archbishop-ass intones chant,
therefore, he does so satirically. Near the end of Renart le nouvel, Timer sings
the Te Deum that is notated in several manuscripts of the romance. The con-
text for this chant drips with satire, as Timer the archbishop has just lifted the
excommunication over the evil Renart; with this chant he opens a meal held
in the foxs honor.75 Earlier in the romance another clerica human this
timesings the Asperges me chant (example 1), which is also notated in the

71. E.g., Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 9.

72. E.g., Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 202 and 225.
73. Florence McCullough, Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1962); Francis J. Carmody, ed., Physiologus Latinus:
Editions preliminaires, versio B (Paris: Droz, 1939); Wilma George and Brundson Yapp,
The Naming of the Beasts: Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary (London: Duckworth,
1991); and Jan Ziolkowski, Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast Poetry, 7501150
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).
74. See Henri Roussel, Renart le nouvel, par Jacquemart Gielee, publie dapres le
manuscrit La Valliere (B.N. fr. 25566) (Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1961).
75. Roussel, Renart le nouvel, line 6946.

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 Haines  Why Music and Magic in the Middle Ages? 169

manuscripts.76 This too is a satire of authentic liturgical performances. Renart

has just falsely confessed his evil deeds to save a sinking ship, and the priest
follows this up by sprinkling the ship with holy water and singing the Asperges
me. The performance here clearly parodies a standard liturgical one of the
Asperges me.
This is the very same chant cited in the fifteenth-century German necro-
mancers manual edited by Kieckhefer. That the same chant occurs in such
diverse contexts attests to the flexibility of liturgical song. From its satiric and
parodic role in Renart le nouvel, a century or so later the Asperges me chant has
waded further out into the decidedly non-liturgical waters of the necromancy
manual. In both cases, we find liturgical chant where we are unaccustomed
to seeing it, in places well outside the typical narrow perimeters of mass and
office favored by modern scholarship, as discussed earlier. Both cases attest to
the close relationship between magic and liturgical song throughout the Mid-
dle Ages.
What distinguished magical chant from its conventional liturgical counter-
part? Since the pitches and words of chants were apparently often little
changed in magic rituals, how then did a magical performance of, say, the
Asperges me differ from its standard liturgical one? It is likely that the differ-
ence lay in the manner of performance and in the sound or timbre of the
voice. The topic of the sound of medieval song, to borrow the title of
Timothy McGees important book, is a surprisingly poorly studied topic,
partly on account of medieval music writers relative apathy towards it.77
Luckily, however, one unusual testimony on the sound of incantations does
survive, as Beatrice Delaurenti has recently stated in her study of late medie-
val scholarly debates on incantations.78 In a series of writings spanning the
1350s and 1360s, Nicole Oresme discusses what incantations sound like. In
one particularly vivid passage, Oresme describes the performer of incantations
as changing in countenance, and appearing as if half-dead.79 He mixes
animal cries with other sounds of nature, Oresme reports; an unfitting and
almost trumpet-like cry resounds.80

76. Roussel, Renart le nouvel, line 5304.

77. Timothy McGee, The Sound of Medieval Song (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998).
78. Beatrice Delaurenti, La puissance des mots: Virtus verborumDebats doctrinaux
sur le pouvoir des incantations au Moyen Age (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2007).
79. Marshall Clagett, ed. and trans., Nicole Oresme and the Medieval Geometries of
Qualities and Motions (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 350; Delaure-
nti, La puissance des mots, 41920.
80. Clagett, Nicole Oresme, 368369, Delaurenti, La puissance des mots, 467.

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Example 2: Anonymous fourteenth-century song, opening (Oxford, Corpus

Christi College Library 233, fol. 150v)81

Hopefully, future research will uncover similar passages that will further
elucidate the sound of medieval magical song and other aspects of practical
music making related to magic. As for music that is explicitly magical, more
discoveries remain to supplement the sources identified some fifty years ago
by Wolfgang Irtenkauf as containing astrological melodies related to computus
study.82 I recently discovered one outstanding anonymous fourteenth-
century melody on a badly mutilated folio at the end of the miscellany
Oxford, Corpus Christi College Library 233 (example 2). The form of this

82. Wolfgang Irtenkauf, Der Computus ecclesiasticus in der Einstimmigkeit des

Mittelalters, Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft 14 (1957): 115. For another melody, see the
fifteenth-century song by Johannes Tecensis in Ian McPhail, Alchemy and the Occult: A
Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts from the Collection of Paul and Mary Mellon given to
Yale University Library, 4 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977),
3: 29.

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melody is reminiscent of a liturgical sequence, the ornate song performed in

between scripture readings during mass; it follows a paired phrase structure
(AABBCC). The text of this song, however, describes a distinctly non-litur-
gical gathering. The first strophe mentions the secret ones who come
together. The second strophe states that the lead singer should be mad with
the muse, and the fourth mentions the single path to the Lower World.
The song goes on in its fifth strophe (not given in example 2) to mention a
strange deity (peregrina deitas).

CONCLUSION

Why music and magic in the Middle Ages? To sum up my arguments in this
essay, magic inhabits both speculative and practical music. In the speculative
tradition, magic shows up not only in music treatises but also in works not
specifically devoted to music. As an example of the latter, we have looked at
discussions of astrology and music in the works of Adelard of Bath and some
of his Arabic sources. In treatises strictly on music of the thirteenth and four-
teenth century, we find generalitiessuch as esoteric writing codes and the
importance of astrologyand specific conceptssuch as nota and proprietas
that clearly connect these treatises to contemporary magic works such as the
Ars notoria. In relation to this, I will also single out the theme of esoteric
writing that has come up several times in this essay. In music, this theme
shows up in the complex graphic codes of the fourteenth century, those of
the Ars nova and the so-called Ars subtilior. Concepts associated with music
notation such as nota and figura also belong to the broader magic theme of a
difficult and esoteric art. As for practical music making, the important musical
genre of the incantation shows up in various medieval quotidian contexts,
from medicinal procedures to para-liturgical rituals. From healing songs to
ritualistic instrumental performances, a great deal of magical music performed
in the Middle Ages must have shared characteristics with liturgical chant, but
also differed from it in fundamental ways.
Given the abiding relationship between music and magic in the Middle
Ages, it is difficult to agree with the argument that musical magic needed to
be resurrected in the Renaissance.83 As I have argued here, the extant evi-
dence has still much to offer us concerning the many ways in which music
pervaded the magical arts of the Middle Ages, from writing to healing rituals.
This relationship between music and magic was not new; it had been present
long before the medieval period and would endure well after it. When, in

83. Cf. Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic, 7275.

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the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino speculated about magical song and its
relationship to demons, he was not offering a brand new thought.84 Ficino
was merely pursuing ideas that had fascinated many others long before him,
and contributing in his own way to the well established relationship between
two of the greatest arts in history: magic and music.

84. Cf. Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic, 10144.

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