Sound, Light and Cosmic Music: Grosseteste’s Commentary on Posterior Analytics and the pseudo-Grossetestian Glosses to Boethius

Robert Grosseteste incidentally transmitted the common passages on the generation of sound in On the Liberal Arts and On the Generation of Sounds by re-elaborating and inserting them in his Commentary on the Posterior Analytics, in a section in which he explains the nature of sound in terms of the action of light, a notion absent from the two early opuscula. This re-elaboration was, in turn, used by an anonymous scholar, who flourished around the mid-thirteenth century, and whose glosses upon the first book of Boethius’ Fundamentals of Music are preserved in two manuscripts. In the second half of the thirteenth century Grosseteste’s idea of sound as incorporated light spread more widely. This study considers firstly the parallel sections on sound in Grosseteste’s Commentary, in On the Liberal Arts and in On the Generation of Sounds; secondly, the relevant passages from the glosses on Boethius inspired by the Commentary and the possibility that they were written by Adam of Exeter, an Oxford master and former pupil of Grosseteste; and, finally, the ideas of sound as embodied light and of the ‘radial’ cosmic music in works by other medieval masters.