Fragments of an Eleventh-Century Beneventan Gradual

Abstract

This article describes and analyzes two leaves from a mid-eleventh-century Gradual that survive today in the Franciscan Library repository in Dublin’s Trinity College Library and in the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid. The fragments contain parts of the masses for St. Lawrence and for St. Martin, including introit tropes, a number of prosulas for the alleluia, and the beginnings of the prose for each mass, in Beneventan script. Despite the small amount of music and text that survives, a collation with manuscripts from Benevento and Montecassino allows us to posit that the Gradual was copied probably at but not for Montecassino, that the context of some of the pieces as cited in the extended tonary in MC 318 points to the cathedral of Capua as the place for which the Gradual was copied, and that these two leaves are virtually the only surviving monument of the Capua liturgy in the eleventh century. A number of the prosulas are apparently unica, which adds considerably to our knowledge of the repertory of prosulas south of Rome. Moreover, the notation of the proses was clearly modeled on an exemplar written in a manner used virtually nowhere else in Europe outside St. Gall and Reichenau, indicating that in some cases the Notkerian canon reached southern Italy in versions unmediated by north Italian transmission. The concordance pattern of one of the proses also indicates apparently unmediated transmission of parts of the Beneventan repertory to southern France, confirming direct contacts between Aquitaine and Benevento that have hitherto been observed only in the transmission of Aquitanian material to Italy.