Anonynmous French scribe

Anonynmous French scribe
A leaf from a Missal, in Latin, manuscript on vellum [northern France, c.1100]
A rare and evocative testament to the performative drama of Church ritual: a 12th-century leaf with text from the Passion sequence punctuated by superscript cantillation marks that provided instructions on how (or by whom) the passages should be read.

227 x 172mm. The text from Matthew XVII:38-66, followed by the beginning of the Mass for Monday of Holy Week, with readings from Isaiah, beginning '[latro]nes unus a dextris [...]' and ending '[...] speret in nomine Domini et innitatur in Domino Deo suo', 31 lines in two columns in a neat caroline minuscule with superscript cantillation marks 'c' and 's' in red, initials in pale blue and red, rubrics in red (recovered from a binding and consequently stained and rubbed, three small holes). Provenance: (1) The fragment is recovered from a 1592 receipt book: an inscription on the verso reads 'Papier de recepte de Pierre Coulland? pour l'annee 1592. (2) André Rooryck (1923-2010): his sale at Sotheby's, 5 July 2005, lot 12 (this leaf item 'a'). The manuscript is notable for including the marks for

performance of these Easter texts in church, a 'sacramental performance' that would be a precursor to the late medieval staging of Passion plays, and, as Christopher de Hamel put it in the entry for the previous lot when offered at Sotheby's, 'the ultimate ancestor of modern drama'. By the 10th century, bishops had begun authorising the dramatisation of some parts of the biblical narrative as an inducement to parishioners to experience the lessons with more feeling, and it is in the superscript cantillation marks that these instructions are given. There is a debate as to what the precise meaning of the 's' and the 'c' might be: early scholarship suggested that there may have been a distribution of speaking parts, and that 'c' might have stood for 'cantor', 'clericus' etc. and 's' for 'subdiaconus', 'sacerdos' or similar. A more recent interpretation is that these related to the intonation and/or speed of delivery of the text (celeriter or clare and sonoriter or sursum, for example). For an in-depth treatment of these cantillation marks, see K. Schlager, 'Passion,' Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik, 2nd ed., 26 vols., 1994.