ABSTRACT
The notion of an organic rise and decline in culture, associated with imageries of light and dark, the seasons, plant life, and human life, is widely used in history. The musical ars nova of the fifteenth century was a French nationalist idea, sparked off by contact with Italian humanism in 'Switzerland', cultivated in France, and then reformulated in Italy under renewed humanist influence. Musica was an uncontroversial subject matter for erudite discussions as far as its moral, philosophical, or performative aspects were concerned. The idea of a rebirth of classical learning was always connected with issues of personality, fame, and invention. Early Renaissance humanists almost habitually supported their stories of decline and rebirth of classical eloquence with evidence taken from other arts and disciplines. As regards the historiographic concept of the 'rebirth', for fifteenth-century humanists it was not identical with a historical 'epoch' denoting a recurrent time-span, which is what we understand by 'Renaissance'.
