USC Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts

Manuscript Fragments

Manuscript fragments, the physical objects of partially-surviving medieval manuscript material, have long attracted scholarly multi-disciplinary interest and transdisciplinary research. For example fragments of liturgical texts, such as our breviary leaf, are a major interest for musicologists. Indeed, as William Duba and Christoph Flüeler note:

“Cuttings and leaves from books broken for antiquarian interests have attracted art historians, especially in North America. Historians working on regions where few medieval manuscripts remain, such as Scandinavia and Hungary, have been compelled to use fragments as the surviving pieces of the written record. The study of fragments extends beyond the Latin world; for Hebrew fragments, for example, the Cairo Genizah alone has spawned a century of research, publication, and analysis, culminating in several web-based projects. Similarly, papyrus texts, almost all preserved in fragments, created in the late nineteenth century a new discipline, papyrology, that is still very active today, with a community of researchers served by its own web platforms.” (Duba and Flüeler, 2018).


The transdisciplinary nature of fragmentology requires the collaboration of specialists trained in a range of fields, such as paleography, codicology, and diplomatics, as well as the history of the printed book, the history of libraries, musicology, art history, intellectual history, and digital humanities.

Research on the provenance, and possible identification of our breviary leaf via comparative analyses of other fragments in other collections world-wide, now digitized and available online, is indeed a tantalizing challenge.

Sources:
Caldelli, Elisabetta.  I frammenti della Biblioteca Vallicelliana : studio metodologico sulla catalogazione dei frammenti di codici medievali e sul fenomeno del loro riuso. [Roma]: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 2012.

Duba, William and Christoph Flüeler.  “Fragments and Fragmentology.” Fragmentology - A Journal for the Study of Medieval Manuscript Fragments 1 (2018): 1-5.
 
Medieval Studies and Research (USC Research Guide, by Danielle Mihram and Melissa Miller). “Fragments and Fragmentology,” in “Teaching & Learning with Manuscripts & Other Rare Materials.”

Danielle Mihram, October 2020.