Jan Olbracht Gradual from the Archives of theWawel Cathedral. Physical description

Abstract

Research on Gregorian chant in Poland is necessary to establish the origin, specifity and the uniqueness of the Polish musical culture which grew on the foundation of the European artistic creation. Tracing the development of the Gregorian chant in Poland is also of great interest on account of its impact on other forms of sacred music which develop in our country already since the 14th century. Furthermore, this research has another significance as well, namely complement- ing the general musicological literature with information contained in Polish medieval sources. The reason for this is that Western European publications sometimes present our medievalistic culture in an one-sided manner without taking into account the results of research of Polish musicologists in this field. Source analyses of Polish medieval liturgical manuscripts are of a particular importance these days as only a tiny percentage of their former corpus has survived in Poland. That is undeni- ably evidenced by the information provided in early library inventories and the records from bish- ops’ visitsations. The subject matter of this paper is focused on the collation of the three-volume Jan Olbracht Gradual. In dealing with this issue, I used heuristcs, the method commonly used in the irst stage of source analyses. The paper begins with presenting the subject literature. Afterward, it contains the physical decsription of the codex, comprising the circumstances and the time of production of the gradual, book format, bindings’ description of all three vulumes, writing material, internal structure of the books’ blocks and their losses, foliation, additions and palimpset, and also the state of preservation. The last section of the paper is dedicated to the paleographic analysis focused on the issues such as: the visual aspect of the leave, textual and musical script, and decoration.