Civil War Discord and Cambridge Platonism

Entitled simply Harmonics, ideas from this treatise by the Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (100–c.170 AD) played an essential part in medieval and Renaissance education. This important translation from Greek into Latin was undertaken by the famous mathematician and onetime Queens’ Fellow, John Wallis (1616-1703). The illustrated frontispiece shows Ptolemy, as conceived in the seventeenth century, with his monochord. (An instrument used in antiquity and the middle ages to measure musical intervals in terms of ratios, and thus to quantify music in terms of numbers.) Although Ptolemy agreed with Pythagoreans that musical structures should be analysed intellectually through numbers, he also argued that such rationally derived systems must be assessed by the sense of hearing. His interest in practical music makes this treatise all the more significant as a rare insight into the practical music and instruments of ancient Greece. Like the Pythagoreans, Ptolemy related his harmonic analyses to the universal structures of all perfect beings, the soul and the heavens.
With the development of harmony and music in parts (polyphony), Ptolemy became of particular interest in the Renaissance. This was because, whereas the Pythagorean scale had served well for the singing of medieval chants, it proved less suitable for polyphony due to the harshness of its thirds and sixths. From the sixteenth century, Ptolemy’s ‘syntonic scale’, with its mathematically perfect thirds and sixths, better reflected musical practice and provided the means for theorists seeking to use music as a foundation upon which to speculate about nature and the world.

Author: Claudius Ptolemy
Title: Harmonicorum libri tres [Harmonics] (Oxford, 1682)
Shelfmark: H.5.33

H.5.33