1 - The authorship of the treatise

Summary

Like many writings of the Middle Ages, the Summa musice survives in a ‘late’ manuscript copied by a scribe whose interest in the material before him was partly that of a collector and antiquarian. The treatise is known from one manuscript, now number 264/4 of the Archiv des Benediktinerstiftes in St Paul in Lavantthal. A paper manuscript, dating from the early years of the fifteenth century or possibly from the very last years of the fourteenth, it could be French and may be Parisian. Two scribes can be traced in it, the copyist of the Summa musice being the main hand; unfortunately, his work is inelegant and so highly contracted that it is very difficult to read in many places. Gerbert remarks upon these difficulties in the third volume of his Scriptores where he prints the text of the Summa musice and indeed of most of the other treatises in the codex. Little is known for certain about the history of the book prior to his time.

Ulrich Michels has already provided a description and inventory of the manuscript. In addition to the Summa musice, the book contains all or part of several treatises by Johannes de Muris, the remarkable Tractatus de differentiis et gradibus cantorum by Arnulf de St Ghislain, a fragment of the second chapter of Franco's Ars cantus mensurabilis and some minor pieces. One of these, on f.30v, incorporates a few metrical lines of the Summa musice. Most of these materials reflect a fully developed taste for the apparatus of scholasticism with its formal questiones pursuing an ideal of thorough and dispassionate enquiry.