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Women's involvement with medieval music took a variety of forms; they served at times as audience, as participant, as sponsor, and as creator. The evidence for their roles, like that for their male contemporaries, is sporadic at best. Many musical sources have been lost, and those sources that do survive only occasionally provide composer attributions. Information on specific performances is virtually non-existent, and the references to musical performances gleaned from literary allusions must be read critically. Similarly, an art-work portraying a women musician may be representational or symbolic--or both. Yet despite these handicaps, modern scholarship reveals many ways in which medieval women were engaged with--and enriched by--the music that flourished around them.

Primary materials. Primarily, freely-available online texts, in the broadest sense of WRITTEN THINGS: * documents, manuscripts, printed books, music, and images; * transcriptions, facsimiles, editions, and translations; * hyperprojects that also come under MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE HYPERPROJECTS: digital humanities, electronic, hypertext projects; featuring encoded or marked-up text, relational or searchable databases, … * digital catalogues (especially of manuscripts).

Thousands of  painters, craftsmen, patrons of the arts perished during the mid 14th century. The heart of the cultural world was torn open.  The horrors of the black death pervaded all aspects of Medieval culture and especially art. The effects were lasting, bringing a somber darkness to visual art, literature, and music. The dreadful trauma of this era instigated the imaginations of writers and painters in worrying and unsettling ways for decades to follow. The insecurity of daily survival created a atmosphere of gloom and doom influencing artist to move away from optimistic themes and turn to images of Hell, Satan and the Grim Reaper. Many painters simply gave up art believing that it was hopeless to try and create beauty in a hellish world.

"Explore 1120 pages in the manuscript New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 905, better known as the Geese Book. Use the drop-down calendar to locate feasts and saints' days. Hear and see selected chants with transcriptions and translations."