IDENTIFYING FEATURES

Hover over a highlighted area to learn more about aspects to the text and the musical notation.

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Further analysis of our document

Based on the sheer size of the leaf, as well as evidence from an interview with the Vassar College special collections librarian we believe that our leaf is from a Gradual. A gradual is a liturgical book containing all the music for Mass. This would explain the size of the leaf as a gradual had to be big enough for the whole choir to be able to read from it.  We saw examples of a gradual of similar dimensions which gave us some idea about what our leaf's gradual volume looked like.

As earlier stated, based upon its five line staff structure, five line staves being implemented far later than the four line staff, we were able to generally date this leaf to the 15th century, or somewhat later. Living in the 21st century does afford comtemporary academics a certain luxury when it comes to attempting to identify documents through direct visual comparision. In the past one often had to travel to the archive in which one believed a similar document resided. With the advent of digital collections it is now easy to browse a visual log of every manuscript that an archive has digitized. Using this to our advantage we were able to locate several similar manuscripts.  These were similar both in style and in content and the closest matches were Spanish in origin. Since no other country's manuscripts have come to as close of an identical match as these Spanish leafs, we conclude that the WestConn leaf is likely from Spain.  We were also looking for a matching document that had similar binding markings to ours; we were unable to find that match.

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At the top of the recto of the WestConn leaf one can see the number 40, this is the leaf's page number. Armed with this knowledege, we turned to Ron Patkus, Associate Director of the Libraries for Special Collections at Vassar College, to learn more about what the page number could tell us.

Professor Patkus showed us a complete medieval Spanish gradual to give us an idea of where in the book our leaf would have been located. Professor Patkis told us that the average gradual had about 100 pages in total, meaning our leaf would have most likely fallen somewhere in the first half of the manuscript near the middle.

Use the zoom view below to look more closely at WCSU's manuscript leaf.