Expand All. And so, back to Machaut and Pepys. Rather, I bring up this example as an illustration of the vicissitudes and fluctuations of meaning and value. It seems that many of his medieval acquisitions had at their core a visual rather than a textual fascination.
Beyond the appeal of decorative or illuminated manuscripts here, his medieval sketchbook, MS , stands out , Pepys was deeply invested in calligraphy. This view suggests that the dit itself held no artistic or content-related value to Pepys at the point of purchase. In trying to draw a line between an initial highpoint of social prestige assigned both to the dit and the book that contained it, and this late seventeenth-century nadir of appreciation, it is possible to point at a more or less gradual loss of musical and visual impact and a declining interest in the subject matter as indicators of an inexorable process of atrophy.
Before succumbing to this metaphor, however, we should note that this process was neither linear, one-directional, nor continuous. This process relies on a re-accumulation of knowledge and, resulting from it, of interest, and on the referencing of new readings to older ones within a modern tradition of interpretation.
And, in all honesty, I simply could not resist the round numbers and numerical symmetry built into this chronology while writing this, still in Merry Mid-winter, however you choose to celebrate or ignore it, and a happy new year, assuming you at least pay lip-service, if not adhere to the Gregorian Calendar.
The research project I have been talking about in my previous posts La Obra Musical Renacentista has now come to an end. As usually happens in research, it has left us with new hypotheses and objectives that we hope to take on board in the next research project of the Contrapunto team www. Taking advantage of the end of the project, which also coincides with the end of my sabbatical year, I would like to tell you about some of my experiences and impressions at Oxford.
