ABSTRACT
It is largely on the basis of musical citations in the Speculum that a leading polyphonic composer of the late thirteenth century can even be named, and two or more motets and a specific notational practice attributed to him. Jacobus gives more clues towards a profile of the elusive figure of Petrus de Cruce than he does about his own identity, and armed with that name, these clues have been extended. What can now be pieced together about Petrus is central, in turn, to dating Jacobus’s formative period in Paris, what he learned there, and what access he may have had to written and oral music and music theory. This chapter seeks to follow the intertwined clues that Jacobus and Petrus could have been personally acquainted there in the 1290s. It also sets the scene for how Jacobus arrived, three decades later, at comparisons between his approved ‘ancients’, including Petrus, and the moderns of the 1320s whose notational practices he deplored. By that time, he says that those he praises are dead; Jacobus had evidently outlived Petrus by some time when he completed his magnum opus.
