ABSTRACT
The State Archive of the city of Basel holds sixteenth- and seventeenth-century account books whose binding consists of music manuscripts dating from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. After the Reformation, the medieval choral books that had been kept in the city monasteries were no longer needed. Manuscripts that once carried sacred chants of the Roman liturgy were reused as bindings thanks to the robustness of their material. These objects show how music sources can take on a variety of functions over the course of their lives and are subject to wide fluctuations in value. Through their own materiality, the fragments discussed in this chapter testify to a special way of dealing with history. Between conservation and annihilation, these books provide an ideal starting point for pondering the fragility and persistence of things, the power of indifference and destruction, and the shifts in the value of objects throughout history. I focus especially on the tensions between preserving and destroying old materials, the changes in the appreciation of historical documents, and the simultaneity of sacredness and profanation.
