The literature on the problem of Arabic influence on the music and poetry of western Europe in the Middle Ages is vast. The aim of this article is modest. It seeks to draw together some passages on music and musical instruments in Arabic texts that were translated into Latin in the Middle Ages. These texts were not specifically on music, and may have escaped the notice of musicologists for that reason. However, they are interesting in their own right, for they show the role of music in other contexts, such as medicinie, astrology and philolsophy, and exemplify the modifications that took place when texts were transferred from one culture to another.

Of the three most important Spanish composers of the Renaissance – Morales, Guerrero and Victoria – it is undoubtedly Guerrero who has attracted the least musicological attention. The complete edition of his works begun in 1949 is still little more than half complete, and the only substantial published account of his life and output is over thirty years old. As this article will show, at least one major work by Guerrero has managed hitherto to slip almost entirely through the musicological net, thanks to the general concentration on printed sources of his music at the expense of manuscripts.

Of all the musical traditions in the world among which fruitful comparisons with medieval European chant might be made, the chant tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church promises to be especially informative. In Ethiopia one can actually witness many of the same processes of oral and written transmission as were or may have been active in medieval Europe. Music and literacy are taught in a single curriculum in ecclesiastical schools. Future singers begin to acquire the repertory by memorising chants that serve both as models for whole melodies and as the sources of the melodic phrases linked to individual notational signs. At a later stage of training each one copies out a complete notated manuscript on parchment using medieval scribal techniques. But these manuscripts are used primarily for study purposes; during liturgical celebrations the chants are performed from memory without books, as seems originally to have been the case also with Gregorian and Byzantine chant. Finally, singers learn to improvise sung liturgical poetry according to a structured system of rules. If one desired to imitate the example of Parry and Lord, who investigated the modern South Slavic epic for possible clues to Homeric poetry, it would be difficult to find a modern culture more similar to the one that spawned Gregorian chant.

Towards the end of August 1350, Petrarch wrote from his home at Padua to Philippe de Vitry, chastising his friend for a letter that he had sent to their mutual patron, Cardinal Guy de Boulogne, papal legate in Italy. Vitry's mind has slowed since their first acquaintance, writes Petrarch, so that he now considers even a glorious absence from France undesirable. The man who, when asked where he was from, answered that he was a citizen of the world, now thinks any departure from France an exile. The dust of France lies too heavily on his shoes; the Petit-Pont in Paris, ‘its arch not quite in the shape of a tortoise shell’, is too appealing to him, and the murmur of the Seine delights his ear too much.

Bernardino Corio's late fifteenth-century history of Milan covers the city's past from its foundations to the collapse of the Sforza dynasty. Following the historiographic traditions established by Leonardo Bruni, its essential outlines are founded on careful use of sources and, for more recent events, contemporary memories and impressions. It is, however, also characterised by judicious revisionism and anecdotal invention. The careful reader always needs to ask why digressions have been included and what hidden points are being made. It is therefore well worth inquiring why Corio, a member of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza's court, chose to link his master's assassination on 26 December 1476 with a passage on his chapel choir and musical taste.