1 - In Search of Origins: The Afterlife of a Renaissance Manuscript

Summary

A FIND DOES NOT NECESSARILY MAKE A DISCOVERY

I have always wondered why, despite its exquisite content and challenging context, the Segovia manuscript has not enjoyed the same interest and scholarly attention in the twentieth century as have other sources with comparable characteristics. It is intriguing that the attitude towards the manuscript has varied enormously among different groups of scholars: whereas Spaniards were quite reluctant to deal with the manuscript, colleagues in Renaissance music in other countries have pointed out the knowledge gap resulting from this reluctance. On the other hand, they too seemed to be unwilling to do anything beyond what Norma Klein Baker had accomplished in her doctoral dissertation, seemingly expecting their Spanish colleagues to take over that tacit assignment. The ones who could did not want to; the ones who wanted to did not consider themselves in charge.

We all know that there is an epistemological relationship between the scholarly context and the constitution of any historical source. In this case, it became obvious to me that this relationship mattered in a very compelling way. This was the starting point of my present consideration. I first attempt to reconstruct the fortuna critica of the Segovia manuscript, linking it to political and historiographical developments in the regional and national identity of Spain as constituted in the twentieth century. I then discuss new evidence that allows us to relocate the creative context of the manuscript. Owing to the scholarly tradition in which Segovia s.s. had been discussed, this evidence could have been taken into consideration earlier. Everything begins with a find.

The discovery of the Segovia manuscript in the archive of Segovia Cathedral in 1922 could have gone down in history as an early twentieth- century milestone in recent Spanish musicology, had the event not been overshadowed by two circumstances. On the one hand, the historiographical path which this milestone should have marked out proved rather puzzling and has remained so to this very day. On the other, the manuscript did not warrant a euphoric ‘eureka’, let alone prompt publication for the happy finder. The source which the up-and-coming musicologist Higinio Anglés located ‘hidden away in an enormous archive that also functioned as a library’ in Segovia Cathedral was obviously the wrong manuscript at the wrong time.