The San Lorenzo Palimpsest: Florence, Archivio del Capitolo di San Lorenzo, Ms. 2211 ed. by Andreas Janke and John Nádas, and: The San Lorenzo Palimpsest: Florence, Archivio del Capitolo di San Lorenzo, Ms. 2211 ed. by Andreas Janke and John Nádas (review)

One of the first graduate-level courses I took at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the mid-1980s was a seminar in trecento music, taught by John Nádas. The semester-long class project involved the cataloging of a recently discovered palimpsest manuscript of primarily Italian secular song from the fourteenth century, Florence, Archivio del Capitolo di San Lorenzo, MS 2211. Each of us in the course was responsible for identifying and cataloging a significant section of the San Lorenzo manuscript, and I still remember the hours I spent peering at shadows on the microfilm, straining to catch a recognizable group of notes, a telltale word, or in some cases, just a clef with a following initial. While there was much the class was able to discern about the contents of the manuscript from the microfilm, there were also many parts of the palimpsest that were simply unreadable and therefore remained frustratingly unknowable to us.

Fast-forward to the present day. After spending the length of his career searching for some way to make those shadows more decipherable to the musicological community, John Nádas has, with coauthor and fellow trecento music specialist Andreas Janke, finally published the San Lorenzo palimpsest in a landmark facsimile edition making use of the most cutting-edge photographic technology available, that of multispectral imaging. A discussion of the contents of the palimpsest as well as a description of its physical construction accompanies the facsimile volume, and gives the reader as full an accounting of the San Lorenzo palimpsest (hereinafter, SL) as is currently possible, given that the technology of multispectral imaging is still being refined, and that there is some music preserved in the palimpsest about which we may never have more information than we do now.

The procedures employed in the capturing of the images presented in the facsimile are described in some detail in volume 1, and that discussion brings home to the reader the difficulties of retrieving information that has been deliberately erased from documents and then written over in newer, dark ink. For SL, the technique that proved ultimately successful was the use of multispectral imaging, a process by which multiple images of each folio of the manuscript were taken using varying wavelengths of light, with filtering applied to allow for the isolation of specific bands of fluorescence. This process renders as dark text the inks on the surface of the parchment that are too faint to be read easily by the naked eye. Each folio was photographed twenty-four times, and these photos were then processed to find the best combination of wavelength and filter for making the underlying text readable. It was determined that the output image labeled "Band 1" in combination with the 455 mm blue reflectance wavelength resulted in the clearest contrast between the erased text of the palimpsest and the later overwriting. While this process was consistently applied to each folio, the authors are quick to point out that the resulting images for each...