Abstract

In his Liber de arte contrapuncti Johannes Tinctoris (d. 1511) invokes the beauty of music by Binchois, Dufay, and other composers, referring to the way their compositions smell. How are we to assess the meaning of such an unexpected idea? Questions such as this are easily overlooked in modern studies of the medieval music theorists, for the technical information those writers impart encourages us to read their works in a severely purposeful fashion. The treatises of Tinctoris, a voluble and most informative writer, are a case in point. The project of reading Tinctoris's work in a "literary" manner might take many forms, but one kind of literariness is concentrated at moments of heightened intertextuality. Such entanglements of sense have first to be discovered before they can be assessed, however, and the process of tracing intertextualities may be an arduous one since the books that medieval clerics studied as a matter of course have few readers today. Some newly identified intertexts in Tinctoris allow us to see the intricacy of the weave in several unexpected cases. Tinctoris consults a commentary upon Aristotle's Politics; he secretly rewrites a passage from Augustine's Confessions, bringing reading and reminiscence together in a moment of self-scrutiny; finally, as he invokes the sweet odor of music by Dufay and other composers, he brings reading and reminiscence together with an impulse that is hard to convey now that the language of learning does not resonate with the diction of biblical and patristic Latin: it is a kind of rapturous allusion which crosses and re-crosses the boundaries embodied in modern terms such as "piety," "beauty," and "learning."