Unidentified fragments (liturgical?)

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Odense, Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek, RARA Musik L 46

General Information

Title Unidentified fragments (liturgical?)
Shelfmarks RARA Musik L 46
Former Shelfmarks RARA Musik K 14 121 and 123
Page/Folio Reference Envelopes 4 and 11
Place of Origin Germanic area
Date of Origin 1201-1300
Script, Hands

Northern Textualis. Mix of straight- and round-backed d as well as r and r rotunda.

Current Condition

Extent NIne small pieces
More about the Current Condition

Some pieces have holes and retain sewing threads or glue from when they were sewn into the spines of their host volumes. 

Book Decoration and Musical Notation

Description

Red rubrics and pen-flourished initials.

History

Origin

Likely Germanic, perhaps Denmark, due to the spelling ewangeli[...].

Provenance

Denmark

Host Volume

Title Former host volume: Collection of masses, motets, madrigals and chorales by various composers (Bassus 1 and 2)
Date of Origin/Publication ca. 1600-1620
Shelfmark RARA Musik K 14 121 and 123
Remarks

These fragments came out of the bindings of RARA Musik K 14 121 and 123, two volumes 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