Music, scholasticism and reform

This is the first book in English devoted to music and its intellectual context in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

For countless monks and clerks during this period the study of music and its theory was synonymous with the study of singing: as the liturgical song of the western church, music was central to medieval culture, holding a position in the imagination of educated society equivalent to that held by ‘science’ today. Its study was not a speculative one based upon the ‘harmony of the spheres’ but a rigorously practical one that viewed music as the science of singing Gregorian chant correctly.

Drawing on a rich body of theoretical literature and manuscript sources, this book paints a detailed picture of the study of music in eleventh- and early twelfth-century Germany. It focuses on the activity of a group of prominent intellectuals based in the monastic and cathedral schools of the German Kingdom, charting their sources and shared concerns, while subtly examining their reception and modification of each others’ ideas. Distilling a considerable volume of German scholarship, it situates music in its proper intellectual amd institutional context, thereby highlighting important intellectual developments that took place in eleventh-century Germany.

McCarthy has written a  fascinating and original book that is above all a study of the motivations and thought processes of a group of medieval thinkers: it will thus appeal to specialist and non-specialist ecclesiastical, intellectual and cultural historians, as well as to historians of music and of medieval studies.