File:Illuminated Choral Manuscript (IA 1883 53).pdf

Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, 1883‑53. Tuscany?, Italy, Circa 1300. This manuscript is a large Italian antiphonary for the feasts and ferial days from Easter through the end of the liturgical year. The chants are written in square notation on four-line staves and the Latin texts are written in rotunda script, with red and blue initials throughout and large decorated initials in red, blue, and yellow. The first quire (fols. 1-7) contains chants for Epiphany and ends with a catchword that does not correspond to the beginning of the text of the second quire, where the chants for Easter begin. The temporal cycle runs from Easter through the Sundays after Pentecost (fols. 8r-94r). The sanctoral cycle runs from the Feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross (May 3) through the Feast of Saint Clement (November 23), followed by the Common of the Saints (fols. 177v-210v), chants for the dedication of a church (fols. 210v-216r), the Office of the Dead (fols. 216r-220v), and a tonary (fols. 220v-238v). A few more chants were added by later hands (fols. 238v-239v), perhaps including the chants for Trinity Sunday (fols. 240r-247v), although these look very similar to the chants in the body of the manuscript. A marginal note in Italian in a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century hand at the Sunday after Pentecost, which became Trinity Sunday (fol. 49v), refers to the leaves at the end of the volume. The last added chant is to San Galgano, whose cult was active in Siena and Volterra, suggesting origin or early ownership in Tuscany.