Rethinking Classifications through Analogy in Medieval Theoretical Discourse on Music: Two French Approaches more

Late medieval music theorists’ discourse on the relative virtues of the arts retained the distinction between the seven liberal ones (which included musica) and the seven mechanical ones: wool-weaving, ironwork, agriculture, navigation, hunting, medicine, and theatrics. The latter enumeration, proposed by English theorist Walter Odington at the close of the thirteenth century, is reminiscent of Hugh of St. Victor’s while also echoing the Opus maius of Roger Bacon—who, in turn, was quoting St. Augustine’s authority. Furthermore, early Renaissance music theorists postulated that the work of cobblers, carpenters, and land cultivators did not belong with the instruments of inquiry into the speculative side of music; and that woodworking, ironworking, shoemaking (or mending), the making of shoe soles, architecture, and painting were manual occupations to be dismissed in scholarly discourse on the superior arts, including music.
Yet in quite a few music theory tracts of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries analogies were used to create bridges between the liberal and mechanical arts. As figures of speech involving elements of palpable reality, analogies reconfigured theoretical discourse, facilitated the understanding of musical concepts, and ultimately improved musical knowledge.
This paper presents two case-studies in connecting the liberal and mechanical arts through analogies inspired by leather preparation and cobbling in France:
The anonymous author of the Musica Guidonis (a Cistercian chant treatise based on the principles evolved by Guido, Abbot of Cherlieu, in the twelfth century) invoked the stretching of cured leather to explicate hexachord mutation as well as accommodating a large chant ambitus in vocal performance. The paper proposes that such an analogy is best read in the context of Cistercian monastic economy, which relayed heavily on in situ mills and tanneries for the preparation and production of both cloth and leather goods, and of which Cherlieu itself was a prime example as attested in contemporary documents.
In the early 14th century, Parisian music theorist Johannes Grocheio posited that just as the crafts of leather preparation and cobbling were mutually beneficial, so, too, theology and canon law, in prescribing the texts or the subject-matter of the sections of the Mass aided the work of the musical artisan. This double analogy discloses the author’s familiarity with at least some of the contemporary Parisian métiers whose bustling headquarters were situated on the Île de la Cité as well as in the Quartier d’Outre-Grant-Pont. The geographic distribution and physical association of trades, directly observed by Grocheio in Paris might easily have been a factor in his adoption of a rather unexpected analogy for the musical embellishment of the text of the Mass. Evidence for reading the analogy in its urban context comes from reconstructed maps of the city, the taille of 1292, Etienne Boileau’s Livre des métiers, the early fourteenth-century Le Dit des rues de Paris, as well as texts of late 13th-century motets.