The Caput masses are Christ-focused and emphasize the Savior or one of his surrogates suppressing the beast's head, as seen in illumination, rubric, and canon found in the masses. This issue lies at the heart of the three Caput masses by an anonymous Englishman, Johannes Ockeghem, and Jacob Obrecht, and the Caput Motet for the Virgin by Richard Hygons from the Eton Choirbook.įifteenth-century discussions of the roles of Christ and Mary in confronting sin, often called the “head of the dragon,” help unravel the meaning of these works. Translations of this passage leave in doubt whether a male, a female, or both, will defeat sin by crushing Satan's head (“caput”). God's dramatic curse of Adam, Eve, and the serpent, as recorded in Genesis 3:14–15, contains a theological ambiguity that played out in the visual arts, literature, and, as this article contends, music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
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