Catalogue of Manuscripts Written or Owned in England up to 1200 Containing Music (review)

It is immediately clear from the title and layout, even down to hierarchies of type, that Hartzell's model for this book is the work of Neil Ker, in particular his invaluable Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon; the title also echoes that of Helmut Gneuss's indispensable Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100. The invocation of these models seems to imply an intention for this catalogue to be more than a narrowly-used technical work and I have been asked to review it from the point of view of a manuscript scholar with only an incidental knowledge of medieval music. Specialist reviews by musicologists have already appeared: see, for example, that of M. Gullick and S. Rankin in Early Music History 28 (2009), 262–284.

The book contains 364 numbered entries ranging over four centuries in date, essentially falling into three categories: liturgical manuscripts that intrinsically have to do with music even if not all of the associated music is given; additions to manuscripts, for example on once-blank pages; and material found on discarded leaves that have survived as flyleaves or pastedowns. The combination of this wide range, and the technical nature of much of what is described, combine to make this necessarily a very dense work indeed. However, I would query whether it could not nonetheless have been made less difficult to use.

Obviously every user of a book like this owes the author the courtesy of reading the introduction; readers of this book will have to read the introduction very closely, and I would suggest with a pencil in hand to supply missing cross-references and mark important details given in unexpected places. The introduction gives information about specific items that is not repeated in those items' entries: for example, on p. xxvi we find that 'The designation [Ant1] of 321 identifies it as part of the Oslo series', but a reader who goes straight to the description of 321, some fragments preserved in Rygnestad and Arendal, is not given this information.

Although it is excellent that the book is provided with eight plates, the existence of a plate is not signalled in any way in the entry on the illustrated manuscript — although references to plates in other publications are given. The plates are labelled with class-marks but without item numbers; they are tucked away at the end of the book after several blank pages, while the list of plates is at the start of the book, on p. x. An opportunity has been lost to make any use of these illustrations. When there are eight plates in a book on 364 items they must clearly have been chosen to illustrate particular things, and some commentary on their contents as examples representing different types of notation would have been very useful. Furthermore some cross-references in the item descriptions would also have been productive for people interested in the specific items involved. For example, Plate II is London, British Library, Add. MS 56488, fol. 5^r, and under the entry for that manuscript we are told that 'A peculiarity of the scribe is reflected in his torculus resupinus'. The form is then described in some detail, heavily dependent on technical terms in a way that is probably inescapable. But a reference to an example on the plate could have made this a useful remark even for those not already steeped in neumatic terminology. Further indexes likewise could have greatly expanded the usefulness of this book. The provision of an index of incipits will be welcomed by liturgists; but there is no index of owners or provenance, which would have been very useful for those interested in place of production or use. Ker's Catalogue has an excellent...