Aribo's De musica: Music theory in the cross-current of medieval learning

This dissertation examines the late eleventh-century treatise on music attributed to Aribo. An inquiry into the textual transmission proceeds hand in hand with an analysis both of the treatise's content and organizational plan, and of the author's terminology and discursive methods. This range of analytic perspectives yields an understanding of both the treatise itself and its conceptual and theoretical relationship to the larger world of medieval thought.;Part I investigates such topics as attribution, early references to the name "Aribo," manuscript transmission, and the music examples in the treatise. This evidence suggests that Aribo's treatise originated in a South-German intellectual center, and that it was disseminated mainly within the borders of the Salzburg archdioceses. The focus on the manuscripts preserving Aribo's text shows that subsequent authors and scribes were particularly interested in Aribo's treatment of a small group of topics rather than in the treatise as a whole. Aribo's use of chant examples is found to be indicative of his interest in the theoretical manipulation of musical concepts and elements, rather than in the compatibility between theory and the world of sound.;Part II concentrates on the manner in which theoretical, philosophical, and theological discourses are intertwined within the text of the treatise. It reveals that the organization of Aribo's discourse and his method of presenting the theoretical material reflect the profound influence of doctrines of rhetoric and logic on his thinking. Furthermore, these discursive conventions frame the philosophical crux of the treatise, namely, that the music-theoretical elements are part of an ordo naturalis that is encapsulated in the caprea diagram that Aribo invented. The terms and imagery associated with the caprea and with the other diagram central to Aribo's treatise, the figura circularis, prove to be powerful Christological allegories that stem from medieval exegesis on the Canticum Canticorum.;The concluding argument is that rhetoric, theoretical content, discursive method, and the deployment of metaphor in Aribo's treatise assist and complement each other in the creation of a complex Neoplatonic vision of an Eriugenian cast.