In the end of the 14th century a new musical style emerged. Specialists call it ars subtilior. It is of extremely complex and experimental nature, hard to sing and produce and with super refined musical notation. Obviously, only a small circle of true composers and music lovers could enjoy this musical style. Overall, it was the avant-garde music of the late medieval period. However, as a specialist and web analyst I find some controversy in this issue. Even though the ars subtilior music is highly refined, it was not merely a dead-end artistic movement. Even more, it seems that some of ars subtilior music was widely known and distributed because many of the devices first used by its composers became standard compositional techniques in the Renaissance.
The center of ars subtilior was Avignon when it was a residence of a Pope who was fighting the opposing fraction in Rome headed by another Pope. From Avignon this musical style spread to Southern France, Paris and Northern Spain. In the beginning of the 15th century it reached England and established itself there too. Ars subtilior music was exclusively secular. Its songs were telling of courtly love, war, chivalry and even praise of public figures.
The majority of what we know about ars subtilior French composers comes from a single invaluable and extremely rare medieval manuscript the Chantilly Codex. It is the most important source of information, because we don’t know anything else about many of these music creators, including their biographies, dates of life and death. Brief texts that accompany the music and some of its lyrics allowed us to discover great composers of that time like Solage, Borlet, Grimace, Trebor, Senleches and others. The Chantilly Codex contains 112 polyphonic pieces, mostly ballads, motets, and rondeaus, that represent the most popular courtly dance styles of its time.
In 1486 an ambitious Dominican monk and an inquisitor Heinrich Kramer decided to write an extraordinary manuscript. He wanted to prove in his work the existence oft witchcraft and that the majority of those who were practicing witchcraft were women. Kramer’s document was supposed to serve as some kind of manual for authorities who would hunt witches, find them in local population and “deal” with them accordingly.
As a web analyst I tried to review Kramer’s advertising and marketing “campaign”. The guy was a master crook of his times. Here is what he did.
He spent over a year to complete his project and as a result produced an infamous, opportunistic treatise named “The Hammer of Witches” (in Latin, Malleus Maleficarum). Kramer understood that he was too insignificant for Catholic church, so he decided to add the illustrious name that would give his manuscript credibility. So he added as a co-author the Inquisitor of Germany Jacob Sprenger without the permission of the latter.
After theory comes practice. Thus, equipped with this diabolical manual Kramer tried to unleash a huge anti-witchcraft campaign in his local area but was blocked by authorities. The ambitious Dominican monk added the papal bull on witchcraft as the preface for his book to make it look as the sign of approval from the Pope of Rome. But this did not help him much either.
In search of powerful endorsement Kramer submitted his book to the review of the University of Cologne but failed again. The theologists of the University condemned The Hammer of Witches as unethical and illegal work. This did not prevent Kramer to insert a fake endorsement from the University in his creation.
Undoubted forgeries in the book made Catholic church to ban it completely in the 1490. However, even the Church could not prevent it to become the bestseller of the ignorant masses of the Medieval Europe.
Witch hunters and inquisitors loved The Hammer of Witches and used it as guidance extensively. Up until 1669 it was published almost forty times in multiple editions and was translated in all major European languages.
One of the most interesting forgeries in the medieval times is the so called manuscript Canon Episcopi. This infamous document played a sad role in the birth of inquisition and witch hunts that took place all over Europe. I found about it in the archives of my web analytics company. Canon Episcopi was first mentioned in the beginning of the 10th century by religious scholars who assumed that it was written during the some religious council of Anquira in 314. Needless to say, that such a council never happened. In fact, the manuscript was some kind of Frankish composition. It did not prevent Catholic church from treating Canon Episcopi as a canon law for centuries until the views on European witchcraft began to change dramatically.
So why this manuscript added fire to the later witch craze of medieval Europe? The Frankish author described in it Pagan worship of the Roman goddess Diana. In several paragraphs he was telling the audience that some women became the “instruments of Satan” by fooling other people about their participation in goddess Diana’s wild hunt. In their stories during certain specified nights they would travel on the backs of the animals great distances, serving goddess Diana and obeying her orders. The author concluded, that thanks to these “wicked” women stories, people leave Christian faith and fall into pagan error.
Anonymous author called this worship as superstition and phantasm, but, medieval theologians used it as a link to non-existent witchcraft beliefs of their own times. This allowed Catholic church to create a theological position of witchcraft based on this pre Christian descriptions of pagan beliefs. Religious scholars did have very vivid imagination, so they did their best to reconcile Canon Episcopi with their own views on witchcraft that they considered both real and effective.
