Review of Margaret Bent 'Magister Jacobus de Ispania, Author of the Speculum Musicae' Royal Musical Association Monographs 28, Farnham: Ashgate, 2015, xvi, 214 pp. ISBN 978-1-4724-6094 3 (hardback)

Abstract

Many readers would know the author of the voluminous music theory treatise 'Speculum musicae' as Jacobus Leodiensis or Jacques de Liège, although Johannes de Muris was thought for a long time to be its author. That is until Willibald Gurlitt recognized in the mid-1920s that the first letters of each book formed the author's first name: J-A-C-O-B-U-S. Yet nowhere does the treatise itself state that its author was from Liège. The grandiose sounding 'Leodiensis' was an invention of Jacobus's twentieth-century editor, Roger Bragard. The modern reputation of this magnum opus rests largely upon its seventh and last book in which the author takes to task the young ars nova Turks, arguing, sometimes vituperatively and venomously, that the dead composers of the ars antiqua had done things just as well without the new-fangled notes and other musical concepts, to which he mostly objects philosophically or theologically. Some modern authors left their readers with a fictitious image of an embittered old monk at the end of his life sitting alone in his cell in Liège (now in modern-day Belgium), penning his memories of a past musical glory while the world moved on around him. Richard Crocker, Oliver Ellsworth and, most recently, Karen Desmond sought instead to identify the author as Jacobus de Montibus, nonetheless still a canon in Liège. With the publication of Margaret Bent's book, this image, identification and indeed localization can no longer be assumed for the author of the 'Speculum'.