Walter Odington

Walter Odington was an English monk and theorist of music and of the mathematical sciences of the quadrivium, active according to the documents between 1298 and 1316. His most important musical work, the Summa de speculatione musice, is the most systematic and complete English treatise of its time, and survives in a complete copy (GB-Ccc 410) and in a significant fragment recently discovered (Lbl Add.56486(A)).

Direct biographical information about Odington is scarce, and this has led to errors of attribution and dating. In 1557, Bale assigned the scientific writings to a certain 'Odingtonus', dated to around 1280, and the musical treatise to a 'Gualterus de Evesham', dated to around 1240; for this reason, several scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries placed the Summa between 1217 and 1240. Nor should he be confused with a 'Walter de Evesham' documented between 1331 and 1346 as a member of Merton College, Oxford, although it is possible that the latter is the author of the works attributed to 'Walter Evesham'. What we do know from his own words is that he was a monk of Evesham, a Benedictine abbey near Worcester. A Benedictine general chapter of 1298 mentions him in a commission charged with administering Gloucester College, Oxford, and it is possible that he wrote part of his work there, as William of Worcester noted in 1463.

The Summa is organised into six parts. The first two deal with arithmetic and with music understood as a numerical relationship to sound, with particular attention to intervals, consonances and the comma; in them he notes that major and minor thirds, close to the ratios 5:4 and 6:5, are tuned in practice as perfect consonances. The third applies these proportions to monochords, organ pipes and bells, and the fourth, based on Isidore, uses them to describe metrical feet. The last two, intended for the practical musician, include a treatise on plainchant with a tonary of the eight ecclesiastical modes and a treatise on discant with notation from the Ars antiqua tradition, as well as a classification of polyphonic forms: organum purum, rondellus, conductus, copula, motet and hocket.

Odington drew on Boethius, Isidore of Seville, Cassiodorus, Adelard of Bath and Ibn Sina, and on a passage derived from John of Garland; unlike Jerome of Moravia, he integrated these borrowings into a logical framework of his own. His legacy lies in that coherence and in his influence on later English theory, such as Robert de Handlo's Regule, the Breviarium of Willelmus and the Quatuor principalia of John of Tewkesbury, as well as in the copies made of his work until the fifteenth century. His alchemical treatise, the Ycocedron, was perhaps the most widely circulated of all his writings.