In the past several years a concensus approach has been reached in diagnosis and therapy of brain abscess. The ease and accuracy of evaluation of intracranial lesions afforded by third generation computerized tomography scanners has lead to reliable, quick, non-surgical diagnoses and monitoring which is relatively non-invasive. The use of multiple agent, increased spectrum, antimicrobials has resulted in acceptable reduced morbidity and mortality. This has decreased the need for therapeutic surgical intervention. The non-surgical approach was preceded by several other modes of management which were acceptable in their time. During the past 21 years, 17 patients have been under the care of one or more of the above authors. A review of these cases is presented with instructive and informative histories. A knowledge of past therapeutic modalities and their attendant complications compared with present medical therapy assures an acceptance of the latter as the method of choice. A search of the general literature shows wide acceptance in other fields; however, no reference could be found in the recent otolaryngological literature to support a non-surgical approach.

John Hothby's career as cathedral choirmaster at Lucca is one of the longest, best documented, and most exceptional of any Northern musician active in fifteenth-century Italy. As director of the cathedral school and choir, this Englishman embodied two models of music master: a scholastic trained in the old Trivium and Quadrivium, and a professional maestro di cappella. Fulfilling this double role was but one way in which Hothby differed from his fellow oltremontani by ingratiating himself with his Lucchese patrons, colleagues, and citizens at large. Another was the integration into his curriculum of older pedagogies of local and regional origin, ones designed to appeal to his Italian students. The most important example of such appropriation were the laude that formed a basis for his students’ exercises in two-voice mensural counterpoint. The latter appear in I-Lc, Enti religiosi soppressi, 3086, one of only two examples of student work to survive from before 1500. These newly discovered exercises thus illuminate not only Hothby's career, but also a hitherto obscure stage of learning by which aspiring singers progressed from strict, note-against-note discant to complex, florid polyphony.

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Fifteenth-century Italy witnessed the marked expansion of the patron's role in the composition and performance of music. Despite the concern and resources that Renaissance princes and ecclesiastics devoted to their musical institutions, however, instances of actual collaboration between patrons and composers are quite rare. This essay considers just such an instance, Matteo da Perugia's Ave sancta mundi / Agnus Dei. A careful examination of this early 15th-century Eucharistic motet reveals that the composer's patron, the cardinal and friar Peter of Candia, likely played a crucial role in selecting the motet text, and was very possibly its author. Read within the context of the enduring and influential works of St. Bonaventure and other Franciscan luminaries, Ave sancta mundi appears to be not simply a general statement of Eucharistic theology, but rather an articulation of Franciscan piety. The most likely impetus for such an articulation was Peter's election to the papacy in 1409 at the Council of Pisa. As heard at the council, not only would the motet have alluded to Peter's status as a prominent member of the Friars Minor, it would have functioned as a forceful plea for ecclesiastical unity in the face of the Great Schism. Matteo's setting employs several musical strategies, including genre blending and chromaticism, which inflect Peter's text in such a way as to amplify these associations. Through a variety of literary allusions and musical processes, then, patron and composer joined in the creative process, fashioning a work that spoke to Peter's deeply held Franciscan beliefs and the aspirations of his fledgling papacy.