This book owes its striking appearance to the paper used to bind it: sheet music printed in red and black ink. This music is notated in neumes, a visually distinctive system traditionally used to represent the melodic contours of Christian plainchant. The chants represented here are in Latin and would originally have been sung in a context of religious worship.
While a modern reader might expect the contents of the book to be printed, as signalled by the printed material that forms its cover, the book’s interior is actually manuscript: handwritten text. A variety (or miscellany) of texts, with topics ranging from theology to medicine to the law, has been hand-copied into the book. Perhaps surprisingly, given the book’s distinctive appearance, none of the texts appears to be especially concerned with music.
Based on the consistent style of penmanship, the various texts in this book all appear to have been copied by the same person. Given their wide-ranging subjects, they were likely selected based on this individual’s tastes and interests; the owner also made personal notes on some of the content. Though the handwriting is consistent, the person who copied the texts used a range of devices to mark the end of any particular text (pictured below), including writing the word “Finis”, drawing seemingly random squiggles, and a series of shortening lines that form a kind of inverted triangle shape. These flourishes interrupt the monotony of the book’s many pages of neat blocks of writing, making the ending of each individual text distinctive.
The consistent layout of words on each page is guided by the impression of margins and individual lines upon the paper. Each page in the book is fairly thick, and the guiding rules appear to have been imprinted onto the pages. These impressions create a surface that is conveniently divided for the writer’s ease in laying out their content onto the page. As they are seemingly formed through pressure (perhaps upon the wet page as it is made) rather than through the application of ink, these lines are also unobtrusive for the book’s reader. The book includes some pages with no writing on them, strongly suggesting that the book was bound before its pages were written on. It is on these blank pages that we can most clearly appreciate the stamped margins.
While the books’ contents are handwritten rather than printed, the sheet music visible as its cover is not the only print element present in the book’s form. From the top of the book’s spine, we can just make out a few words of printed text – seemingly not music, as with the cover, but regular text. These scraps of paper seem to be smaller than the sheet music, and used specifically to reinforce the spine of the codex rather than to hold the whole structure together or decorate it. The contrast between the internally- and externally-facing print elements suggest a particular attention to aesthetics on the part of those who created this book, while signalling their interest in repurposing existing printed materials.
Prepared by Andrew