Some pages are plain, others purposefully illustrated while others are whimsical. Page references were added in or changed as the book was used. We have seen pages where an inattentive scribe forgot to include a letter or a note another page is hand-stitched where someone carefully fixed a tear in the parchment.
And even when the clues go nowhere, they provide a window into a small piece of the past: the unique way that that community chose to celebrate.Įage page is a hand-made object, and reveals something about the people who made it. So, if the pages cannot be put back into their books, what can be said about them? In the absence of the rest of the book, small details of each page become more remarkable.Įven one page, which typically only contains the music and texts for a small part of the day, can reveal some small choices in wording or melodies, providing clues to its origins.
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Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Typ 704 (6), Leaf 131 in Davis, The Gottschalk Antiphonary, CC BY-NC Windows into the past The text invites the saint to ‘put on the crown prepared for you’ as illustrated. The exact melody is not written out, but outlined for the singer with symbols above the words. Hundreds of pages of the Gottschalk Antiphoner, and of Ege’s collections, remain at large.įragment from the ‘Gottschalk Antiphonal’ showing the first major chant of the night service (matins) on feasts of virgin saints. Many of these bindings were sold to collectors during the Second World War, but thanks to extensive scholarly sleuthing, 30 of the pages have been put together digitally, making it possible to get a better glimpse of this remarkable volume.īut often what has been broken is not readily put together again. Abbey library mysteryĪ slightly different case is the Gottschalk Antiphoner, a beautifully decorated 12th-century chant book from Lambach Abbey in Austria, which was eventually taken apart and used to bind books for the abbey’s library. Now, it is possible to undo some of Ege’s book-breaking, by gathering up pictures of the pages he sold and re-ordering them digitally. Ege rearranged their pages into bundles of 50 to sell to libraries this way, he reasoned, library collections could have examples of many different kinds of manuscripts. Sometimes it is possible to reunite a book’s pages again, especially if there is a clue about when and where the pages were last seen together.įor example, in the mid-20th century, American art history professor Otto Ege of the Cleveland Institute of Art took apart many books. One of the goals of our research is to make the contents of these individual pages easier to access, so that they can be better understood. Some were taken apart once their contents were no longer useful to their communities, or disassembled by booksellers hoping to make more money by selling the book page-by-page. The antiphon ‘Te deum patrem,’ (You, God the Father) from a book written around 1550 for a women’s religious community in Turnhout, Belgium. Medieval chant books followed similar patterns, but could also be surprisingly different from one another. Medieval Christian communities wrote down the many chants needed for their worship in books called antiphoners (music only), breviaries (which also included texts to be read) and graduals (containing chants that were part of the mass, the central act of worship in the Catholic Church).Įach chant was intended to be sung at a particular time or occasion, and rarely did two communities do things exactly alike.
Our research collects images of these scattered and fragmented pages of chant and creates inventories of their contents, revealing their many and varied stories.
Fragments of chant books travel across time and space, ending up at antique stores, tucked away in attics or even made into book covers. Across medieval Europe, monks and nuns and clergy in city cathedrals sang daily chants in communal forms of timed and sung prayer still practised by some Christians today. Medieval chant books and the parchment they were made of were designed to last a long time - so long, that pages of them can outlast the book itself.
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