An urgently needed guide to understanding medieval music to be used as a text for the university undergraduate, graduate students in music and interdisciplinary medieval studies, and for the professional musicologist and medievalist. This book will also be appreciated by everyone interested in early music. Nancy van Deusen's The Cultural Context of Medieval Music addresses the mental landscape surrounding music that, especially, was sung and experienced in the Middle Ages. Largely anonymous in its composition, and apparently lacking the motivation of fame and commerce, music within a well thought-out system of education served a purpose that goes far beyond casual entertainment or personal professional advancement. Offering experience through performance, music exemplified the basic principles not only of the material and possible measurements of the visible world-such as of objects, relationships, and movement-but also of the invisible materials of sound and time, making it an ideal medium for working with unseen substances such as concepts, imaginations, and ideas. St. Augustine in the late fourth century reinforced the importance of music for the process of learning when he wrote that nothing could be truly understood without music. This book shows how this, in fact, is the case-a message of great relevance today.

Despite a good deal of research and writing concerning the development and intellectual transformation in the period of the early university, the subject remains in many respects enigmatic. This collection of essays in honor of Otto Grundler tackles many of the questions that run to the heart of the early university. The volume will be of interest to scholars of the period as well as anyone familiar with issues of today's academic profession, as the questions that confronted the early university are not so unfamiliar today: What exactly is the "life of the mind"? What should one learn in a university? What is learning itself "good for"? What is a discipline, and is it possible for disciplines to reinforce each other? Can some university disciplines be identified as givens, as forming an unquestionably self-evident basis for university study? And even that most basic question: What is a university after all? This collection of essays from experts in a range of fields confronts these questions in a broad, satisfying way that expands and clarifies the questions that are as relevant today as they were in the thirteenth century.