Being a Mediaeval Detective

I’m in Carlton on a sunny warm Melbourne autumn day, having a cup of tea and doing some research. Firstly, the background to today is that back in the 80’s I was privileged to study music art history and later museology. My final music history paper was on a music manuscript held in italy, bound in 1448 and made as a working choristers book for the chapel singers.

On my first trip to the UK in 1986 I was lucky enough to take with me recommendations from my Professor and mentor and was admitted to the Reading Room at the British Library for access to the very special collections in the closed manuscripts room. For the 6 weeks I was there I had access to some of the various manuscripts of my study. I saw the actual objects! I touched them! I smelled the vellum and the rancid fat that has stiffened and preserved them for hundreds of years. Eeeeewwwww!  I had the privilege of being in the presence of incredible books; amazing documentary evidence of lives and times not of this world.



The main manuscript I viewed was the Old Hall Manuscript. A primary source of C15 English music. I also saw a number of other books too. I also viewed another manuscript that was Italian. In the introduction I translated (very badly) a mention of yet another volume, which started sounding very similar to that of my main subject of study, back in Australia. I copied down the index in my notes and put a big question mark over that listing, starting to get a bit of an excited knot in the stomach. What was this manuscript referred to? Why? Was I translating the introduction correctly? Was it indeed so similar to the main manuscript of my final year paper? Did I have this right? I’ve never heard this book mentioned before?? (and I’d reviewed all the relevant ones available at the time). Why were all those same composers listed in the same way in a totally different book? OMG! What a potentially amazing discovery! Perhaps it was an undiscovered copy, perhaps it was another book presenting a series or second volume. Who knows?
For these past 24 years as life has taken me along quite a different path and I have often wondered if anyone else made those links and if my discovery came to anything. Over these past this days I decided to check it out.

So here I am in a café in Carlton, back with my old text book, which was new then and is now (discovered on the net) the land mark, award winning scholarship on the music of Italy in the 1400’s. When I bought it new (in London on Feb 3rd 1987, for £30) it had not yet won the awards, nor gone down in history (Yes, with all my books I sign and date them).
Its been very rewarding, reminding myself of the details of the music, the court, the people, the palaces of Italy in a north Italian court of 1448. I have forgotten most of the detail but it’s all so familiar and coming back rapidly. I’m taking notes busily and writing down a list of references to refresh my mind with. As I sit here immersed in the goings on of the C15 a small folded piece of paper caught my attention in the back of the book.

Its been sitting there quietly for 24 years.
Not realising what I was about to see, I unfolded it, then my heart virtually stopped.
It’s the original order slip from the British Library requesting a manuscript. Which manuscript? Not the Old Hall, not any referred to in the book I’d been reading. OMG I think I’ve found the manuscript of the mysterious index list that excited me all those years ago. From moving house a zillion times in the last 24 years I know I cannot put my finger on the original research done at the British Library. D’OH. I always thought if I wanted to pick up the trail I’d be starting from the beginning and would have to strike again the serendipity that lead me to the curiosity discovery. Chances of that fortuitous mistake happening somehow again? Zilch pretty much.
Until today. The knot in the stomach is back.