The Author of the Speculum

The hypothesis offered here – and it remains a hypothesis – is that Magister Jacobus de Ispania, author of the Speculum, according to Matteo da Brescia’s manuscript, is the same person as Magister Jacobus de Ispania, nephew of Queen Eleanor of Castile and illegitimate son of the Infante Enrique of Castile, whose biography has been outlined here. This final chapter will draw the two threads together and treat them as a single Magister Jacobus de Ispania, an expatriate, raised in royal circles which would have given him the exposure to and perhaps skills in practical music attested from his youth by the author of the Speculum (see Ch. 1), who incepted as magister in Oxford in 1291, laid the foundations for his broad and deep learning there, and then continued with advanced studies in Paris in the mid-1290s, including music theory. Links to Oxford as well as Paris have been posited for the author of the Speculum (see Ch. 1 n. 5). A Paris opportunity arises for James, as a mature student, at precisely the right time for Jacobus to have been there; both could have studied in both places, which would enable a confluence of James and Jacobus. ¹ Already a magister, he did not necessarily attain a further degree while acquiring the specific music-theoretical and other knowledge attested in the Speculum. This included deepened study of Boethius at a university where music was on the syllabus; there is no evidence for musical study at Oxford at this time. ² The early dating of Franco’s Ars cantus mensurabilis to 1260–65, favoured by Besseler and Huglo, can now be set aside; Wolf Frobenius revived earlier proposals of a date around 1280, now supported with compelling textual arguments about the chronology of Lambertus and the St Emmeram Anonymous of 1279, both of which seem to predate Franco’s treatise. ³ Jacobus was referring to a written text of Lambertus, and probably also of Franco, who could nevertheless have been active in Paris into the 1290s; the memory of his teaching was at least still fresh. As already stated, the mid-1290s would have allowed direct contact with the new motets of Mo, fascicle VII and Petrus de Cruce, praised as ‘that worthy singer’ (‘valens cantor’), who ‘composed so many beautiful and good pieces of mensural polyphony and followed Franco’s precepts’, and who appears to have been still in Paris, or with strong Paris connections, until at least 1298.