English cittern, Southwark, circa 1620.
The cittern was a mainstay of domestic music in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but remarkably few examples survive. Surprisingly it was the English, rather than the Italians that made the best use of the instrument with highly virtuosic repertoire emerging out of the Elizabethan era. As early as 1618 Michael Praetorius identified the klein Englische zitterlein as synonymous with this style of playing and the example illustrated conforms precisely to the dimensions of the scaled drawing of such an instrument in his Syntagma Musicum. This is a unique survivor of English making, clearly produced in Southwark, because it shares common features in the varnish and the carving style that are found in the works of Henry Jaye and Jacob Rayman who both worked there. Petrus Rautta appears to be a latin corruption relating to the province of Germany that incorporated Füssen. Jacob Rayman was also an immigrant from that city, arriving before 1618, and there are a number of records of immigrant instrument makers working around that time in Southwark. On the basis of my identification the instrument was purchased by the National Music Museum. A full report on its attribution is published on our research blog, violinsandviolinists.com.
Connoissership at Oxford University.
For the academic world there are deep problems that arise from historic artefacts that are untethered from a record of provenance, and the violin is
