We are pleased to announce the seminars for Hilary Term 2026. The seminars are all held via Zoom on Thursdays at 5 p.m. GMT. If you are planning to attend a seminar this term, please register using this form. For each seminar, those who have registered will receive an email with the Zoom invitation and any further materials a couple of days before the seminar. If you have any questions, please send an email to Joe Mason at all.souls.music.seminars@gmail.com; this address is the main point of contact for the seminars. We look forward to an exciting series and hope to see many of you there.

Margaret Bent (Convener, All Souls College)

29 January 2026, 5pm–7pm GMT: Presenter: Kévin Roger (University of Lorraine)
Title: Latin Motets and Literary Networks in the Late Middle Ages: Intertextuality, Rhetoric, and Digital Reading
Discussants: Yolanda Plumley (University of Exeter) and Karl Kügle (Universities of Oxford and Utrecht)

Abstract: Latin motets of the 14th and early 15th centuries preserve one of the most complex bodies of lyric poetry from the Late Middle Ages. While vernacular art was flourishing, these pluritextual works maintained a dense, erudite, and allusive Latin that has long hindered scholarly interpretation. Because their meaning is often obscure, research has traditionally focused on musical structure rather than on the literary strategies that shape the motet as a poetic object.

This paper investigates the modes of textual invention in Latin motets by analysing their intertextual mechanisms, rhetorical organisation, and broader literary framework. It considers the major French sources and examines how composers drew on classical, biblical, and patristic materials, as well as on florilegia and mnemonic practices. Rather than merely identifying quotations, this research seeks to characterise different forms of borrowing (citation, allusion, discursive resonance) and to understand how they evolve across the corpus.

Digital methods play a central role: TEI encoding enables fine-grained annotation of stylistic features and standardisation of data, while NLP approaches, including LatinBERT, assist in detecting textual reuse and semantic patterns at scale. These tools complement traditional expertise, revealing previously unknown intertextual links and restoring the literary richness of this challenging repertoire.

26 February, 5pm–7pm GMT Andrew Kirkman (University of Birmingham)
Title: Made to measure or prêt à chanter? The Court of Wilhelm IV and the Later Alamire Manuscripts
Discussants: Thomas Schmidt (University of Manchester) and Zoe Saunders (Independent scholar)

Abstract: The Alamire codices have traditionally been seen as diplomatic gifts, or at the very least commissions from magnates and super-rich aficionados. This article argues that for most of the later, paper codices at least, the sequence happened in reverse: in other words they comprised workshop material that was first produced and then sold once buyers could be found. The same conclusion prompts also a review of the construction of some of the more elegant, parchment sources, and the proposal that the ‘bespoke’ aspects of such codices may have extended no further than their opening—and hence most immediately visible—pages.

12 March, 5pm–7pm GMT Presenters: Elisabeth Giselbrecht, Louisa Hunter-Bradley and Katie McKeogh (King’s College London)
Title: No two books are the same. Interactions with early printed music and the people behind them

Abstract: The DORMEME project investigates how early modern owners, readers, and users engaged with printed polyphonic music books, focusing on 1500–1545, when music printing introduced new modes of circulation alongside manuscript and oral transmission. This technological shift expanded and reshaped how individuals interacted with music books—as tools for performance and teaching, as collectable objects, and as sites of confessional negotiation. Our project undertakes a copy-based survey of surviving printed polyphonic books across European and North American collections, documenting marks of use and developing case studies that reveal how these books were used, altered, and understood.

This paper presents the project’s first synthetic results. We outline a taxonomy of interventions—textual, musical, material, and paratextual—and consider them in relation to user motivations such as correction, performance facilitation, confessional adaptation, education, personalisation, and proof-reading. Drawing on detailed examples, we examine textual changes in religious motets, musical annotations including crosses, numbers, custodes, and barline-like dashes, and patterns of personalisation that illuminate different types of owners and users. We also address the distinctive role of the proof-reader as the “first reader,” whose interventions bridge production and use. Together, these findings show how annotations can reshape our understanding of early modern musical practice and book culture.

Change of policy on seminar recording

The seminars have taken place on Thursdays at 5 p.m. UK time for over thirty years. When we moved them to Zoom in 2020 during Covid, it soon became clear that in attracting wide global participation, including expertise not available locally in Oxford, they would continue online into the foreseeable future. Many have indicated how much they value these online but ‘live’ opportunities to share and respond to new work, or just to learn from them. We decided from the start not to make them hybrid (which doesn’t facilitate awareness or interaction between the in-person and online participants), not to make them webinars (where there is no interaction with the audience), and not to record them. The reasons for that were to protect unpublished work (we know who has registered and received any associated materials), and to ensure a sense of occasion and enable participation in real time. Much of that would be lost if people could easily listen in at their convenience. We are receiving increasing requests to record the seminars from those who can never come because of conflicting schedules or unfriendly time zones. We are therefore proposing the following change:

• Where a speaker and the invited discussants are happy to do so, we will record the first hour of the seminar;
• If the speaker but not the invited discussants are happy to record, only the first half hour may be available;
• We will not record the second hour of general discussion, as we do not wish to inhibit that discussion, and would need to secure too many permissions;
• We would make the recording available on the seminar’s YouTube channel at a later date.

This change of policy is intended to serve those whose schedules do not permit them to attend, as well as those who would like to revisit the presentation afterwards. Recordings will not include the general discussion, and may not include the invited discussion. As for the protection of unpublished material: any unauthorised or uncredited ‘borrowing’ can be documented from the availability of the Youtube recording. As not all speakers may want to be recorded, and as it will not be known in advance which seminars will be available afterwards, we still hope to encourage as much attendance in real time as at present.

You can register for the seminar’s YouTube channel here, where any recordings will be uploaded.

All Souls College, Oxford Hilary Term, 2023

Led by Dr Margaret Bent (Convenor, All Souls College, Oxford) and Matthew Thomson (University College Dublin)

The seminars are all held via Zoom on Thursdays at 5 p.m. GMT. If you are planning to attend a seminar this term, please register using this form. For each seminar, those who have registered will receive an email with the Zoom invitation and any further materials a couple of days before the seminar. If you have questions, please just send an email to matthew.thomson@ucd.ie.

Seminar programme

Thursday 26 January, 5pm GMT

Julia Craig-McFeely (DIAMM, University of Oxford)

The Sadler Sets of Partbooks and Tudor Music Copying

Discussants: Owen Rees (University of Oxford) and Magnus Williamson (University of Newcastle)

The digital recovery of the Sadler Partbooks has revealed considerably more than simply the notes written on the pages. Surprisingly more in fact. It has led to a re-evaluation of pretty much everything we thought we knew about the books and their inception, and indeed the culture of music copying in England in the mid- to late-16th century. This paper examines the question of who was responsible for copying Bodleian Library Mus. e. 1–5. Some tempting speculations are explored, and some new paradigms proposed.

Thursday 16 February, 5pm GMT

Martin Kirnbauer and the project team Vicentino21: Anne Smith, David Gallagher, Luigi Collarile and Johannes Keller (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis / FHNW)

Soav’ e dolce – Nicola Vicentino’s Intervallic Vision

The musical ideas and visions that Vicentino sets out in his writings L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (Rome 1555) and the Manifesto for his arciorgano can only be concretely traced on the basis of a few, mostly fragmentary, surviving compositions. However, the research carried out within the framework of the SNSF-funded research project “Vicentino21” (https://www.fhnw.ch/plattformen/vicentino21/), with the aim of creating a digital edition of Vicentino’s treatise, now provides concrete findings. Using the example of the madrigal Soav’ e dolce ardore (III:51, fol. 67), questions concerning Vicentino’s musical visions and the edition will be discussed.

Thursday 9 March, 5pm GMT

Emily Zazulia (University of California at Berkeley)

The Fifteenth-Century Song Mass: Some Challenges

Discussants: Fabrice Fitch (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) and Sean Gallagher (New England Conservatory)

Love songs and the Catholic Mass do not make easy bedfellows. The earthly, amorous, even carnal feelings explored in fifteenth-century chansons seem at odds with the solemnity of Christian observance’s most central rite. Recent scholarship has attempted to bridge this divide, showing how some of these genre-crossing pieces conflate the earthly lady with the Virgin Mary, thereby effacing the divide between sacred and secular. But a substantial body of song masses survives whose source material is decidedly not amenable to this type of interpretation—masses based on songs that are less “My gracious lady is without peer” and more “Hey miller girl, come grind my grain”—or, as we shall see, worse. This paper turns an eye toward these misfit masses, surveying the corpus for a sense of what there is—the Whos, Whats, Wheres, and Whens—as a first step toward the Hows and Whys of these puzzling pieces. One particularly tricky example, the mass variously referred to as Je ne demande and Elle est bien malade, suggests that it may be time to replace prevailing sacred–secular interpretative models with a new approach.