ABSTRACT
Music and music-related manuscripts produced in Italy between the late fourteenth and the early fifteenth century are complex objects, made of different elements (notation, texts, images, rubrics), each one with its own meaning. Scholars from different fields have studied these manuscripts, each from their own disciplinary viewpoint (musicology, art history, palaeography, literature, etc.), but a global overview of these sources as complex media is still missing. This chapter considers these sources, taking into account their multiplicity of meanings and uses as texts determined by the interaction of all their verbal, musical, visual, and material components. Michele Epifani concentrates instead on the different types of layouts and verbal paratexts in musical manuscripts of Trecento and early Quattrocento Florence, demonstrating their close links with the formats of such manuscripts, and therefore intended readers. Francesca Manzari highlights the connections between some of the Ars Nova manuscripts and both liturgical books and literary anthologies compiled in Florence in the mid-fourteenth century. Placing these manuscripts within late Medieval Florentine book culture, she demonstrates how their decorative apparatus is crucial for their impact and meaning in a uniquely rich urban context such as Florence. Finally, Antonio Calvia examines the verbal paratexts of a few Florentine poetic anthologies of the same period, documenting the implicit presence of music in books that do not actually contain it, and suggesting a potential “musical” reading of these sources.
