For a year and a half I have been working with a set of fragments from a collection of old books housed at Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek. My work has been covered in various previous blogposts, and it has consisted of identifying and transcribing the text, and in so doing find out as much as possible about the fragment, the book from which the fragment came, and the historical origin and context of that book.
One set of four fragments with which I have been working particularly much goes by the collective shelf-mark Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA Musik M 4. Three of these fragments are from the same manuscript, which appears to be a thirteenth or fourteenth century breviary from Northern Germany, as seen from both the musical notation and the place of the fragment-carrier's printing, which is in the Northern German town of Wolfenbüttel.
Most of the text of these fragment has been identified and transcribed, but there is still one prose text that remains difficult to solve. The prose text is shown below. It precedes, or belongs to, the chants for the feast of Saint Matthew (September 21). Unfortunately, the spine of the fragment-carrier runs along the fragment straight through the prose text, and consequently some of the crucial letters have been worn away. Although several of the words - such as "pastores", "in [a]edificationem ecclesi[a]e", "corporis" and "ihesu christi domini nostri" - can be read, these words in themselves are not enough to identify the text in question, primarily because they are too common in liturgical prose texts, as well as biblical passages, to allow for any specification.
This blogpost is, therefore, a call for help, hoping that someone will recognise the text from the surviving clues, or be a more skilled palaeographer and/or latinist than myself. If you do have any input on the prose text in the picture below, please let me know.
Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek, RARA Musik M 4, fragment X (detail)
Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek, RARA Musik M 4, fragment X
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