The early career of Johannes Tinctoris: An examination of the music theorist's northern education and development

The musical treatises of Johannes Tinctoris (c. 1430-1511) have become central to our understanding of Renaissance theoretical thought. This investigation seeks the intellectual underpinnings of Tinctoris's writings in his early educational endeavors and uses this information to begin contextualizing him and his works within the mid- to late fifteenth-century intellectual climate. This study is structured around four interlocking lines of inquiry: (1) a fresh critique of Tinctoris's biography from his birth to the commencement of his Neapolitan employment (c. 1472); (2) an assessment of the institutions where he likely received his formal education, with special attention paid to the kinds of learning that took place at these centers; (3) a consideration of his informal education---insofar as it can be determined---including the likelihood and nature of other possible influences that the theorist might have experienced during his northern travels; and (4) analyses of the content, style and methods of argumentation found in his surviving pre-Neapolitan writings, with special regard to the above-mentioned educational influences.;Chapter one begins with a reevaluation and reinterpretation of the documentary evidence concerning Tinctoris's northern activities. I propose a new chronology of the theorist's formal education, which appears to have to have taken place in three different stages---at a choral institution (likely from the late 1430s to the mid-1440s), where he learned the elementary aspects of language, and then two universities, where he attained a degree in the faculty of arts (possibly at the University of Louvain in the early 1450s) and a licentiate in law (at the University of Orleans around 1467). An examination of the curricula at each of these institutions, an analysis of a short writing sample that the theorist completed at the University of Orleans, and a consideration of his other known northern activities reveal specific literary influences upon Tinctoris's writings.;In the second chapter, I explore Tinctoris's encyclopedic treatise De inventione, which, though monumental in length and scope, survives only in fragments and has received relatively little scholarly attention. I evaluate a recent proposal, which suggested that the theorist originally conceived this work before moving to Naples, and expand it to argue that he most likely completed an early draft at Cambrai in 1460. This treatise, whose content largely relies upon traditional theoretical sources, seems to have provided much of the content for Tinctoris's Neapolitan treatises, while the oft-noted humanist influence on these later works is primarily confined to their prologues and epilogues. Thus, the theorist's northern education appears to contain the key to understanding his Neapolitan writings. The appendix to this dissertation contains a full edition and translation of the surviving fragments of the northern version of De inventione.;Little is known about Tinctoris's final years in the north or circumstances leading to his employment at the Neapolitan court in the early 1470s. In the third chapter, I propose a new chronology and context for this migration. I suggest that the theorist participated in Burgundian musical circles in the later 1460s and early 1470s and traveled to Naples as part of a diplomatic entourage in 1472.