(b Cambrai, c1400; d Paris, 23 Nov 1472). French theologian, theorist and poet. After studying and teaching in Paris until 1432, he acquired a reputation at the Council of Basle for his disputations with the Hussites. The council deputed him to Bohemia in 1433, and in 1434 he was sent to the court of Charles VII of France in an effort to end the Hundred Years War. In 1436 (1431 according to Fétis) he was appointed dean of Cambrai Cathedral, an office he held to the end of his life. From the 1450s he divided his attentions between Cambrai and the Collège de Navarre, Paris. He produced numerous theological, devotional and controversial writings, some of which were posthumously published in Sporta fragmentorum and Sportula fragmentorum (Brussels, 1478–9). The latter volume contains his Tractatus de duplici ritu cantus ecclesiastici in divinis officiis (ed. in Strohm and Cullington). The treatise, probably written late in Carlerius’s life, is a defence of the singing of polyphony in the divine service, citing classical, biblical and patristic writers on the value and effects of music. Tinctoris’s Complexus effectuum musices (c1472–5) depends to some extent on Carlerius’s treatise for content and language. In 1457–8 Carlerius composed the texts for a new Marian office, the Recollectio festorum Beate Marie Virginis, introduced at Cambrai Cathedral and sung throughout the Low Countries and in Savoy; they were set to plainchant by Du Fay.
FétisB
EitnerQ
J. Toussaint: Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques, ed. A. Baudrillet, xi (Paris, 1949), cols. 1046–50
Z. Kałuża: ‘Matériaux et remarques sur le catalogue des oeuvres de Gilles Charlier’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age, xxxvi (1969), 169–81
A. Seay: Introduction to Egidius Carlerius: Duo tractatuli de musica (Colorado Springs, CO, 1977); see also review by R. Woodley, ML, lx (1979), 357–8
J.-P. Lobies, ed.: Index bio-bibliographicus notorum hominum, xxxii (Osnabruck, 1984), 2229 [addl bibliography]
B. Haggh: ‘The Celebration of the “Recollectio Festorum Beatae Mariae Virginis”, 1457–1987’, IMSCR XIV: Bologna 1987, iii, 559–71
R. Strohm and J.D. Cullington, eds. and trans.: Egidius Carlerius, Johannes Tinctoris: On the Dignity and the Effects of Music: Two Fifteenth-Century Treatises (London, 1996) [Introduction by Strohm]
BARBARA H. HAGGH