The life and afterlife of the Caput Mass

The Caput Mass is the best-known English Mass cycle of the fifteenth century. This chapter seeks to make two small additions to our understanding of this important work. Firstly, it identifies the cantus firmus of the anonymous Mass preserved alongside Caput in the Coventry fragment. It seeks to demonstrate some evidence of a potential relationship between the two cycles, ultimately arguing that this deepens the Christological context of the Caput Mass. Secondly, it seeks to revisit some assumptions regarding the transmission of Caput to the Continent. The scribal approach to the copying of Mass cycles begins to change c. 1455, shortly after Caput and the group of Mass cycles with which it travelled reached the Continent. As a result of this new approach, scribes began to copy Mass cycles as discrete works, in which each movement was copied contiguously. The evidence of this change in scribal practice suggests that we can no longer assume that the outer movements of the Caput Mass (M7) reached the Continent after the rest, as has previously been believed.