Settings for the Offices, and other liturgical texts

Settings for the Offices, and other liturgical texts

This manuscript’s small scale indicates that it was conceived for portability; its contents are custom selected to enable its user to contribute vocally to the daily Offices that structured monastic life. It consists of general musical forms as well as more specific chants for the annual liturgical cycle. “Fr. Ioannes de Plebe” is named as the scribe in the colophon. The toponymic surname “de plebe” might refer to an individual from Piove di Sacco, near Padua, where a Franciscan convent was established in 1484. The pedagogical nature of the volume is enhanced by the presence of a finely drawn Guidonian hand, depicted here. This emblematic mnemonic device is named after its inventor, Guido of Arezzo (991/2–after 1033), who developed the ancestor of the modern system of pitch notation through lines and spaces, and a method of sight-singing based on the syllables ut–re–mi–fa–so–la.

Scribe: Ioannes de plebe (colophon, fol. 121v)

Second half of the 15th c.

Manuscript on parchment, 123 fols.

University of Pennsylvania, Ms. Codex 1248

Italy (perhaps Padua?)