Unidentified fragment

F-l032

Odense, Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek, RARA Musik L 46

General Information

Title Unidentified fragment
Shelfmarks RARA Musik L 46
Former Shelfmarks RARA Musik K 14 125
Material Parchment

Current Condition

Extent One piece
Dimensions 56 x 51 mm
More about the Current Condition

Most of the fragment is from the blank margin of the manuscript, preserving only a few letters on each side.

History

Provenance

Denmark

Host Volume

Title Collection of masses, motets, madrigals and chorales by various composers (sexta vox)
Date of Origin/Publication ca. 1600-1620
Shelfmark RARA Musik K 14 125
Remarks

RARA Musik K 14 125 is the final volume of a series of paper manuscripts containing polyphonic music from around 1600. There were originally at least twelve volumes, of which five survive, distinguished by their RISM identifiers 121-125. K 14 belonged to Herlufsholm Skole, a private Latin school located in Næstved, Sealand founded in 1565 on the grounds of a secularised Benedictine monastery, St Peders Kloster. The old library of Herlufsholm was transferred to the University Library of Southern Denmark in 1968-69.

Ole Kongsted hypothesises that the musical pieces in the host volumes were collected by Danish musicians who travelled to Italy around 1600s. How and when the books entered Herlufsholm is unclear, but the bindings were certainly made locally for the school, as the stamp on volume 124 indicates (Possess. Herlufs H.). They sport blind-tooled half-leather bindings with covers made of several reused parchment manuscripts. The outer fragments remain in situ, but further parchment fragments were originally inside the bindings as spine supports, but they were extracted during a bookbinding intervention in the 20th century along with the wastepaper that made up the paste-laminate boards. The bindings are all stamped 1604, which however cannot be the year they were bound, since among the extracted material from the original paste-laminate boards we find copious leaves containing writing exercises from Herlufsholm, dated 1624-26.

Bibliography