The fourteenth century has been dubbed the calamitous’. And in a political sense, this position is justifiable. Yet a focus on its calamities might blind the reader to some of its musical triumphs.
All in Middle Ages
Dante and Petrarch: Last of the old, first of the new
Less than a decade separates two of the grandest literary masterworks of the Italian Trecento: Dante's Divine Comedy and Petrarch's Canzoniere. And yet a yawning aesthetic chasm that divides them.
Medieval Music: Ars Antiqua
The history of Medieval music is one of remarkable uniformity. From the earliest notations of the ninth century to the Ars Antiqua of the thirteenth, music in the West progressed at such a slow pace, that the works dating from the end of this period are distinguishable from those at its beginning only by a few minor stylistic and technical advances.
Arthurian Journeys: Lancelot and Sir Gawain
Characters in the great medieval poems are markedly lacking in psychological nuance, to be sure. Yet to say that the medieval author was indifferent to the inner journeys of his characters is to be mistaken - as we shall see in the tales of Sir Gawain and Lancelot.
Piers Ploughman & Medieval Christian Morality
The fourteenth-century allegorical poem by William Langland is pegged, by most scholars, as a fierce indictment against ecclesiastical corruption - and that indeed it surely is. But heed must be paid to not endow the work with humanistic and liberal connotations it doesn’t possess.
Tales of Courtly Love: Marie de France's Lais
The Lais of twelfth-century poetess Marie de France may depict grand and, to modern minds, exaggerated romantic gestures, but grandiloquent as they can be, Marie’s short tales of courtly romance provide some surprisingly profound insights into the nature of love.
Logos: Mind of God
The impact of the slippery Greek term ‘Logos’ on Medieval philosophy is so immense, that any competent analysis of Christian doctrine is now impossible without a thorough understanding of it.
Augustine's City of God
When Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in CE 410, Saint Augustine of Hippo could hardly have imagined that the event would inspire some of his most enduring contributions to medieval philosophy.
Middle Ages: Beauty and God
Beauty, as it was conceived by the Medieval artist, was to be put to use in the service of that one, supreme governing principle; that value of all values which itself legitimated Beauty, and rendered meaningful all attempts to pursue it: god .
Jordi Savall's Jerusalem Project
In spite of its long and violent history, Jerusalem has been known through the ages as “city of peace”. When offered the daunting job of capturing its complex history in music, early music superstar Jordi Savall was quick to accept – but how did he do it? Find out in this article Limelight Magazine published in 2014.