oa Tinctoris and Nivelles: The Obit Evidence

The final years of the life of the fifteenth-century musician and writer Johannes Tinctoris are—perhaps surprisingly in view of his high reputation—very poorly documented, especially in the period following his departure from the Aragonese court in Naples around the early 1490s. Although scholars have had some indication that he enjoyed links with the collegiate church (ex-monastery) of St. Gertrude, Nivelles, in the later part of his life, final confirmation of this from the extant records of St. Gertrude’s was lacking. The recent discovery, however, of a small number of references to Tinctoris, and also to his near-contemporary Marbrianus de Orto, in the surviving obit records of the church, now held in the Archives ecclésiastiques du Brabant, enables us to construct a little more detail of his relationship with Nivelles in the 1490s and early years of the sixteenth century. In addition, these records provide for the first time a likely calendar date for Tinctoris’s death.