Secunda pars breviarii

Abstract

This paper reports the recent discovery of a 13th-century notated breviary of Esztergom (Strigonium, Gran) in the Metropolitan Library of the Archbishopric of Zagreb (Metropolitanska knjižnica Zagrebačke nadbiskupije). The codex was found in 256 fragments that had been glued to the covers of 126 books printed between the 15th and 17th centuries. These books were bound at the end of the 17th century on the order of Aleksandar Mikulić (1688–1694), the bishop of Zagreb. The fragmented codex is the missing sanctorale part, i.e. the second volume of the “Breviarium notatum Strigoniense” (BNS), now kept in the Strahov Library of the Premonstratensians in Prague (Strahovská knihovna) under the shelf mark DE I 7. Only these two volumes preserve the 13th-century office of Esztergom Cathedral with musical notation. Both of them are notated by two masters, who used the so-called “Esztergom notation”, which had been developed in that particular city by the end of the 12th century. The sanctorale consists of the offices of saints celebrated from January to December, the common of the saints and the common of the dedication of a church; it lacks, though, the office of the dead and the calendarium. (The first volume, on the other hand, contains the temporal feasts from Advent to the Sundays after Pentecost.) The reconstruction of what had been the sanctorale codex from its fragments was a complex task. In the paper I use a new iterative method based upon a careful analysis of the contents of the fragments and a comparison with the breviary of Esztergom as printed in 1484. Using the preliminary liturgical sequence of parchment-pieces that resulted, and taking into consideration the bookbinding process, I was able to identify the original fascicles of the manuscript and to determine the identity of the ambiguous fragments. The end result was more precise than that of the preliminary content-based reconstruction. I also show that four fragments kept in the University Library, Budapest, surprisingly belong to the BNS sanctorale. Although, I have been able to reconstruct a considerable part of the manuscript from its ruins, the longest lacuna remains from the 1st to the 15th of August. The codex constitutes the earliest-known record of the legend of Saint Ladislaus, the king of Hungary (1077–1095), and offers insight into the 13th-century readings for the matins of Saint Stephen, the first king of Hungary (1000/1001–1038). The antiphons and responsories venerating Saint Andrew Zoerard and Saint Benedict, the hermits of Mount Zobor, in the BNS sanctorale, are the earliest-known musical examples of the 11th-century office for these holy men. A section of a very rarely documented legend of Saint Francis of Assisi, the so-called “Vita brevior” of Thomas of Celano, was also discovered. We might possibly find a few other books bound with the fragments of the BNS sanctorale in other libraries in Zagreb.