The transmission of the polyphonicAmenin the early fifteenth century

Abstract

ABSTRACTStudies of manuscripts such as the Trent Codices (I-TRbc87–92) and Bologna Q15 (I-Bc15) have shown that fifteenth-century scribes were not necessarily passive transmitters of the material they copied. Whether motivated by practical constraints or aesthetic preferences, they added, excised and re-composed sections or voices as they saw fit. The frequency and ingenuity of such emendations encourage us to examine them further – not as unwelcome alterations to a putative ‘Urtext’ but as creative acts in their own right.This article focuses on one site of scribal emendation: the concludingAmensections of early fifteenth-century Gloria and Credo settings. Frequently, otherwise concordant sources for the same piece transmitAmensections that appear to be unrelated to each other. I propose that certain types ofAmensettings were more susceptible than others to alteration and that one type – the short, self-contained, homophonicAmen– arose through scribal emendation. In order to describe in precise terms the choices a scribe might make, I introduce a nomenclature system for theAmensettings encountered in this period. Taking a panoptic view of the major sources for sacred polyphony in the first half of the fifteenth century, this article contributes to our understanding of scribal activity and manuscript culture.