2 - A Palaeographical Analysis of the Verbal Text in Montpellier 8: Problems, Implications, Opportunities

Summary

SEVERAL chapters of this volume seek a firmer dating for the copying of Mo 8 than has heretofore been ascertained, their arguments based on stylistic comparison of the fascicle's musical repertory and artistic work with a broad base of dated and datable materials. As palaeographers have long taught us, script, too, has style. No less than the work of artists and composers, that of scribes was conditioned by the changing needs of those who used their products, as new patterns of book use emerged, supporting and supported by a growing book trade in the later Middle Ages. Like colleagues working in other artistic media, scribes responded to changes in taste and fashion. Thus scripts belong to history and, under certain circumstances, hands may be datable.

Dates offered for Mo have ranged broadly even in recent scholarship, in no small part because disagreements remain about whether and to what extent Montpellier is a composite codex – or, to put this the other way around, whether and to what extent it was planned as a whole. How someone construes the material evidence naturally affects how that scholar dates the manuscript (or some portion of it). There is not space here to review all the codicological, palaeographical, and art-historical work relevant to the issue; but reliable accounts of earlier scholarship exist already. Suffice it to say that the earliest dating proposed for fascicle 8 would place it in the 1270s – a suggestion of Mary E. Wolinski. The latest might put it as far into the fourteenth century as the 1320s – a possibility floated by Yvonne Rokseth in the 1930s, and compatible with some of the new evidence offered in this volume by Alison Stones (who finds that ‘a date in the decade of c.1315–25 for the execution of Mo 8 would be most likely’). Covering six decades, this is a broad range.

Research on Mo's production constitutes a sizeable and imposing – indeed, a daunting and inspiring – body of scholarship, still more impressive given that some of its most important contributions were written when their authors were students, and before any widespread use of the technologies of manuscript reproduction upon which the field has come so heavily to rely.