91ֱ��

Two manuscripts of chant scores held by Gonville & 91ֱ�� College Library have been digitised by lutenist and musicologist Lynda Sayce.

When College Librarian Mark Statham wished to digitise manuscripts 810* and 811*, books in the Library which have previously received little attention, he contacted the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM), a study resource affiliated with the Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford. DIAMM has previously photographed the 91ֱ�� Choir Book along with musical content drawn from a number of other manuscripts and manuscript fragments. Lynda has been a photographer for DIAMM for nearly 20 years, alongside also working in digitisation at the Alamire Foundation at Leuven University in Belgium and performing regularly as a solo and continuo lutenist.

Lynda developed her interest in photography during her Open University PhD on a type of large 17th-century lute called the theorbo. Needing to take high-quality pictures of these two-metre-long instruments in museums to aid her research, she undertook a photography course and has been working with cameras ever since.

It is the “time machine aspect” of photographing manuscripts that particularly excites Lynda. “When you’re doing high resolution imaging, you become aware of little details like the way the scribes lifted the pen off the page,” she says. “Sometimes they were doodling in the margins, or in a choir book you might find a small rubric in the corner saying something like, ‘Peter, turn the page!’ There’s an incredible sense of contact with the former culture and I find that aspect completely fascinating.”

Manuscripts 810* and 811* have languished long under the radar in the College Library. Their provenance is not entirely clear, although it is suspected that they were presented by the Caian theologian Henry Barclay Swete in 1911. If so, they were strangely not included in the 1914 supplement to M. R. James’ two-volume catalogue of manuscripts held by the Library; as such, few people have been aware of their existence.

One of the two manuscripts that Lynda is photographing at 91ֱ��, manuscript 810*, is an antiphonary of chant music which potentially dates to around the 15th century and is thought likely to be of Spanish origin. The majority of chant books which Lynda has digitised have been Franco-Flemish, and she is fascinated by the ways in which this manuscript differs from what she has seen before.

“When I came to the first decorated page, I thought, ‘Oh that’s different’,” she says. “It has quite an unusual style of decoration. There aren’t very many big decorated initials, but the ones that are there are absolutely astonishing and in a very unusual style. This is a whole new experience for me.”

One further key difference that Lynda found was in the materials used in the inks. The primary colours used in manuscripts (aside from the black text) are red and blue; in Lynda’s experience with Franco-Flemish chant books, red ink has always been glossy and waxy-looking, while blue ink has been gritty with granules of lapis, a deep-blue metamorphic rock. In manuscript 810*, however, the red is not glossy, and the blue contains flakes of a shiny material which she suspects may be mica, a crystal. She has also found glossy yellow ink in this manuscript, which she has not seen elsewhere.

Once the manuscripts have been digitised, it is intended that the images taken will be made available to interested scholars on , a database of Latin chants, as part of an effort to make these items more widely accessible.