They could do this, for instance, by singing the notes faster (sometimes twice as fast), by substituting their next-smaller values in performance (longa by breve, breve by semibreve, and so on), by taking away part of their value (one-half or one-third), or by temporally compressing them according to a numerical proportion (normally 2:1). According to this received view, the stroke would have told performers to 'diminish' the notes ruled by the mensurations O or C. The existing literature on the subject is virtually unanimous in defining and as signs of diminution in perfect and imperfect tempus, respectively. In the present essay I propose to review some of the issues which it raises and to suggest areas where a reconsideration of the evidence may be in order. Thus far her argument appears to have attracted little comment in print.

It is now almost four years since Margaret Bent published her essay 'The Early Use of the Sign ,' in which she advanced a new hypothesis about the early meanings of the mensural signature -a hypothesis whose potential implications are fur-reaching and in some ways indeed breathtaking. At present, there appears to be no basis for abandoning the received interpretation of. This interpretation is open to challenge on both factual and methodological grounds. Before then, she has argued, was in use as a 'general-purpose sign,' with a broad range of meanings of which diminution was only one. According to a new interpretation advanced by Margaret Bent, however, this was not its primary meaning until the later fifteenth century. The stroke in the mensural notation sign (which turns up in musical sources shortly after 1400) has generally been understood to signal diminution in perfect tempus.

Nota musical semi fusa