This book began as an attempt to carry out a suggestion made in 1929 by Carl Engle in his "Views and reviews"―to fulfill his wish for "a living record of musical personalities, events, conditions, tastes... a history of music faithfully and entirely carved from contemporary accounts."
In The Early Christian Period and the Latin Middle Ages, we witness the merger of musica, then an abstract academic enterprise, and cantus, or practical music. The volume spans a millennium of writings, ranging from scriptural commentaries by St. Jerome and other fourth-century Church Fathers to an excerpt from Speculum musicae, an extensive fourteenth-century treatise by Jacques of Liege. Along the way we read from the works of St. Augustine, Boethius, Hildegard of Bingen, Guido of Arezzo, Franco of Cologne, and a score of others, all in impeccable English translations prepared or revised by James McKinnon.
