Rediscovered polyphony from Tudor Ireland: The Gloria <i>Amice Christi Johannes</i>

On the opening leaves of the so-called ‘Kildare Rental’ (British Library, Ms. Harley 3756) is an unfinished polyphonic setting of the Gloria. The Kildare Rental is an administrative book cataloguing the possessions, transactions and expenses of the Fitzgerald earls of Kildare in the decades around 1500. While the book has long been well known to early modern historians, the presence of music within it has so far been overlooked. As a recently rediscovered source of polyphony, Harley 3756 sheds precious new light on the musical culture of the Anglo-Irish Pale, particularly at the Fitzgeralds’ comital seat at Maynooth Castle. It is the earliest, indeed sole, source of polyphony from Tudor Ireland. The Kildare Gloria also appears to be a unicum and therefore an addition to the corpus of early-Tudor polyphony for the mass. However, in its incomplete and unattributed state, the new polyphonic fragment raises as many questions as it answers. This paper will set out the context in which the Kildare Rental and its polyphony were copied, describe the Gloria and its cantus firmus present some of our initial findings regarding the potential performing context of this new polyphonic mass movement.