Every little helps

A New Fragment from the Antiphoner Ms. I. 3c (Esztergom, Cathedral Library)

Abstract

The bindings of books from the Early Modern period often reveal small musical fragments, spine strips from the Middle Ages, containing a few notes – their identification is a huge challenge for the researcher. In most cases, these tiny parchment pieces are immediately discarded, as identification from a few pieces of data seems an impossible task. Sometimes, however, this work is successful, and the fragment can be reconstructed as a mosaic piece of an existing mother codex, or at least reveal its genre, age, content, notation and even its exact place in the original manuscript. The article focuses on fragments, recently discovered in Eger and Bratislava. The two small pieces are from a known mother codex, a truncated 15th- century antiphoner from Nagyszombat, Ms. I. 3c, kept in the Cathedral Library of Esztergom. Of these, the Bratislava fragment is the most interesting, because it allows us to go through the entire identification process, thus determining exactly from which folio of codex c the part of the later host volume that protects the spine was cut. However, our research did not stop there. On the one hand, it clarified the questions concerning the history of the host book, revealing the stages of the owner’s priestly career, and on the other hand, it placed a newly discovered fragment preserved in Eger next to the Bratislava one, thus immediately adding two new fragments to the surviving mother codex and its later history.