Step 1: Music in the Margins

A number of folios in Western MS 97 contain additions of notated music in the margins, some written by secondary scribes, and others in the manuscript's primary hand. We begin our investigation into the date and origin of the manuscript with these marginal addenda. Do the musical additions suggest Dominican variants of Gregorian chants? Or locally situated variations on a Dominican exemplar? 

For the results of a musical inquiry click on the links to your right, which address the most conspicuous musical additions in the manuscript. The gallery below contains a collection of leaves in Western MS 97 with musical emendations. Click on the image once to view a page containing its associated metadata, which includes a list of all the chants on the page. To view a high quality version of the image, click on the thumbnail at the bottom of the metadata page.

Note the scribes' various methods for making musical changes to the manuscript. Most commonly, the musical staff bleeds into one of the margins, as on folios 113r, 122v, 211v, and 237r. On these leaves the hand seems to match that of the main scribe. On folios 159v, 213r, and 230r, a different (and likely later) hand pasted musical edits written on new parchment directly onto the page.

Step 1: Music in the Margins