Story of the Flute
to the Cantigas de Santa Maria, an illustrated Spanish MS. of the thirteenth century, written by King Don Alonzo of Sabio and preserved in the Escurial at Madrid. This last-mentioned picture has been reproduced in Don F. Aznar's Indumentaria Espanola, 1880, in Don Juan Riano's Notes on Early Spanish Music (App. Fig. 8, p. 118), London, 1887, and also in English Music, p. 139. It is to be noticed that the player is left-handed. Another early picture of a transverse flute occurs in The Romance of Alexander by Jehan de Guise, dated 1344, now in the Bodleian Library. There is in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford a china basin from Urbino, dating about 1600, depicting a feast, which portrays a long transverse flute, and beside the player lies a case for the instrument.
A Provençal poet, musician, and composer, named Guillaume de Machault, born c. 1300 (whose works were discovered in 1747), in his La Prise d'Alexandrie, includes "flaüstes traverseinnes" in a long list of the instruments of his day. This would appear to be the earliest known mention of the transverse flute in literature. It is also mentioned by Eustache Deschamps, another French poet of the fourteenth century. It certainly was well known in the time of Gallileo; and Rabelais, writing about 1533, describes Gargantua as playing on the Allman [i.e., German] flute with nine holes (Bk. I., ch. 23).
Though the earliest form of the transverse flute in mediæval Europe is generally said to be of Swiss origin, and was called Schweitzerpfelff, the Germans
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