Beneventan neumes
A leaf from an Antiphonal, in Latin, manuscript on vellum [southern Italy, 13th century]
A large-format example of late Beneventan script and musical notation.

c.390 x 260mm, 12 lines written in black ink in a Beneventan minuscule, Beneventan neumes on a single-line red F staff, initials in red, larger initials filled with blue and/or yellow (recovered from a binding and stabilised on modern vellum, heavily stained with some parts of the text obscured). Bound in grey buckram at the Quaritch bindery.

Provenance:
(1) Bernard Quaritch, Beneventan Script, cat. 1128 (1990), no 21, acquired in 1988 by:

(2) Schøyen Collection, MS 69.

Text:
The text, from the Sanctorale, contains responsories and antiphons for Matins and Lauds on the Feast of St Agatha (5 February), starting on the verso as bound: '[...] adiuva me domine deus meus' to 'ut comprobaret Dominus quod a periculis incendii meritis'. The 1990 Quaritch entry indicated that several textual variants and the choice of versicles in the present leaf are comparable to Benevento, Biblioteca Capitolare 21 (for example, 'Ipse me dignatus', 'Mens mea solidata', and 'Domine qui me creasti').

Script and music:
The angularity of the script, the straight shoulder of medial 'r', the triangular-shaped top of some ascenders, and the substitution of charateristically Beneventan zoomorphic and flora initials with gothic-type majuscules embellished with red dots all suggests a date in the 13th century. The Beneventan neumes are thick and relatively short, with less frequent use of liquescents, and the quilisma is missing altogether.

V. Brown, ‘A Second New List of Beneventan Manuscripts (II)’, Mediaeval Studies, 50 (1988), p.602, no vi.
Répertoire des catalogues de manuscrits en écriture latine antérieurs à 1600, no 10, 1990, p.8, no 42.
BMB. Bibliografia dei manuscritti in scrittura beneventana, 1994.