A Fifteenth-century Response to a Musical Text: The Editor-scribe in Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Musée Condeé, ms. 564 (Codex Chantilly)

Abstract

During a research trip to Europe at the beginning of 2001 to consult the dozen or so manuscripts and fragments central to my doctoral research, I was unfortunately unable to consult Codex Chantilly, one of three central sources of the ars subtilior repertoire. The situation was such that access to this manuscript had been severely limited for some time in an attempt to conserve this important artefact, which had purportedly become difficult to handle. All was not lost, since I was able to consult a new high-resolution digitisation of the manuscript made 3-6 July 2000 by Dr Julia Craig-McFeely, Project Manager of the exciting on-line imaging project, 'The Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music' (DIAMM), http://www.diamm.ac.uk/ ... The experience was nothing less than astounding, leading to several new conclusions concerning the nature of Codex Chantilly, some of which I narrate here. In particular I focus on the presence of an editor-scribe who has made subsequent alterations to the original text (including the musical text).