The Savior, the Woman, and the Head of the Dragon in the Caput Masses and Motet

Abstract

God's dramatic curse of Adam, Eve, and the serpent, as recorded in Genesis 3:14–15, contains a theological ambiguity that played out in the visual arts, literature, and, as this article contends, music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Translations of this passage leave in doubt whether a male, a female, or both, will defeat sin by crushing Satan's head (“caput”). This issue lies at the heart of the three Caput masses by an anonymous Englishman, Johannes Ockeghem, and Jacob Obrecht, and the Caput Motet for the Virgin by Richard Hygons from the Eton Choirbook. Fifteenth-century discussions of the roles of Christ and Mary in confronting sin, often called the “head of the dragon,” help unravel the meaning of these works. The Caput masses are Christ-focused and emphasize the Savior or one of his surrogates suppressing the beast's head, as seen in illumination, rubric, and canon found in the masses. Folklorically based rituals and concepts of liturgical time are similarly built around the idea of the temporary reign of the Devil, who is ultimately trodden down by Christ. Hygons's motet appears after celebration of the Immaculate Conception was authorized in the late fifteenth century. This feast proclaimed Mary's conquest of sin through her own trampling on the dragon; the motet stresses Marian elements of the Caput theology, especially the contrast between the Virgin's spotlessness and Eve's corruption. Features of the Caput tradition mirror topics discussed in astrological and astronomical treatises and suggest that the composer of the original Caput Mass may also have been an astronomer. The disappearance of the Caput tradition signals its lasting influence through its progeny, which rise up in yet another renowned family of polyphonic masses. Together, the Caput masses and motet encompass the multifaceted doctrine of Redemption from the late middle ages under one highly symbolic Caput rubric.

Conceptualizing and Experiencing Music in the Middle Ages (ca. 500–1500)

“…The reasons for this shift must probably be sought in the rise of lay piety and the consequent increase in secular patrons that characterized the fourteenth and the fifteenth century. An anonymous composition of English origin, the so-called "Caput Mass" (named after a chant melisma on the word "caput" from which it draws its musical and symbolic structure ;Robertson 2006), by the 1440s paradigmatically introduced the use of a pre-existing melody ("cantus firmus"), a technique borrowed from the motet that could serve as a unifying device linking the five Ordinary movements into an ordered whole. An isolated full set survives by Machaut.…”