Show Summary Details

Page of

Printed from Grove Music Online. Grove is a registered trademark. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).

Subscriber: null; date: 18 February 2025

Sources, manuscriptlocked

Sources, manuscriptlocked

  • Stanley Boorman,
  • John A. Emerson,
  • David Hiley,
  • David Fallows,
  • Thomas B. Payne,
  • Elizabeth Aubrey,
  • Lorenz Welker,
  • Manuel Pedro Ferreira,
  • Ernest H. Sanders,
  • Peter M. Lefferts,
  • Ursula Günther,
  • Gilbert Reaney,
  • Kurt von Fischer,
  • Gianluca D’Agostino,
  • Charles Hamm,
  • Jerry Call
  • , and Herbert Kellman

Updated in this version

article structure updated; sections accessible on new pages

A manuscript source is one that is written by hand. Before the invention of printing, music was preserved either by oral transmission or by MS copies. There is no reason to believe that oral transmission preserves the same music for more than a few centuries, at least in the West, so that all our knowledge of medieval and early Renaissance music depends on MSS. From the start of printing until the work of Petrucci in 1501, almost all printed music was monophonic, mostly chant: even thereafter, however, there has remained a living tradition of the MS copying of certain repertories where printing would not have been economically feasible.

The present article comprises a preliminary discussion of the nature of MS sources and their significance for present-day musical research, followed by a series of entries that review the character and repertory of the main classes of MS in use before 1600. These are arranged by subject matter and also chronologically. Three further categories are discussed in adjacent articles: Sources of instrumental ensemble music to 1630, Sources of keyboard music to 1660 and Sources of lute music; see also Printing and publishing of music.

Introduction to manuscript sources

Sources, manuscript: Western plainchant

Sources, manuscript: Secular monophony

Sources, manuscript: Organum and discant

Sources, manuscript: Early motet

Sources, manuscript: English polyphony, 1270–1400

Sources, manuscript: French polyphony, 1300–1420

Sources, manuscript: Italian polyphony, c1325–c1420

Sources, manuscript: Renaissance polyphony