Mise-en-page: Designing musical manuscripts in pre-Conquest England

How was music written down in the early 11th century? Lottie Wells explores the layout of three pre-Conquest ‘tropers’, manuscripts of notated chant, to discuss how music was learned and performed in England before the Norman Conquest. With the graphic symbols, commonly known as ‘neumes’, used to represent melodies not necessarily recording pitch or even rhythm, these manuscripts containing musical notation cannot be thought of as equivalent to modern sheet music. To get a sense of how and why they were used, we need to turn not just to the contents, but to the manuscripts themselves.

This talk will analyse the construction and layout (or ‘mise-en-page’) of three manuscripts from the first half of the 11th century: Corpus 473 (the Winchester Troper), Bodley 775 and Cotton Caligula A. XIV (the Caligula Troper). Despite these three manuscripts sharing content, there are major differences in how they were designed, in terms of their size and shape, their use of images and the placement of musical notation. By analysing the page layout of these manuscripts, we can understand how they might have originally been used, and better understand the role of the book in musical learning and performance in the pre-Conquest English church.

Manuscripts are not merely vessels for the texts they preserve: they are complex works of devotion and engineering, expensive tools that were, more often than not, intricately planned, and the product of months of scribal labour. From the striking images found in the Caligula Troper, to the elaborate polyphonic melodies recorded in the Winchester Troper, these manuscripts offer a rare, tangible glimpse into life in an early medieval monastery. This talk aims to introduce the audience to the concept of manuscript materiality (mise-en-page), studying the book as an object in its own right, in addition to exploring how chant melodies were recorded.