Scraping Beneath the Surface: The San Lorenzo Scribe Looking Backwards and Forwards at the End of the Trecento
Creators: name: Dioguardi, Christina C.
Publisher: name: Brandeis University
Year: 2024
Subjects: 14th century
Florence
Multispectral Imaging
Palimpsest
San Lorenzo
Trecento

description: This dissertation expands the foundation of San Lorenzo Palimpsest (SL) scholarship that has emerged since the manuscript’s discovery in 1981. It explores the unique perspective of the SL scribe, who in this one manuscript was able to simultaneously capture and preserve the legacy of the curated Florentine tradition and represent the complexity of the present-day activity of the city, which was profoundly influenced by the influx of music styles, genres, languages, and notation practices at the end of the Trecento. In its current state SL serves as a catalogue of property acquisitions that is securely connected to the church of San Lorenzo; however, before it was repurposed, the manuscript was a large collection of secular late-medieval polyphony, apparently compiled and copied in the first decades of the fifteenth century. Later in the fifteenth century the gatherings of the music manuscript were taken apart and the parchment was scraped for reuse, obscuring its original contents and function. While many of the manuscript’s surviving works have known concordances in other manuscripts, it is the high percentage of extant unica that mark the significance of its compiling and subsequent scraping; of the 216 surviving works in SL, 90 have no known musical concordances. Since its discovery no other source has come anywhere close to adding to the secular repertory in the same manner.
description: In its entirety this dissertation begins to decipher this scribe’s processes in his compilation of this collection, which might illuminate his particular agenda, and takes one more step forward in understanding why SL was compiled in the first place. Three overriding research questions about SL are the focus of this study, namely: 1) what can SL illuminate about this individual Florentine scribe’s understanding of the lineage of Trecento polyphony up to his present time?; 2) what do the contents and copying of SL tell us about the original use for the manuscript?; and 3) how does SL deepen our current understanding of the knowledge and influence of “northern” music, and thereby composers, in Trecento Florence? Idiosyncrasies of the manuscript directly bear on these questions: 1) the particular placement of the works of Bartolino da Padova, especially when compared to the transmission of his works in other principal sources; 2) the significant number of anonymous, and mostly unica, French formes fixes songs as space fillers at the bottoms of folios; and 3) the songs attributed to Hu[m]bertus de Salinis and their anonymous neighbors in Gathering 18. All three of these elements are unique to SL and this dissertation’s exploration of them therefore offers a distinctive picture of the Trecento through the perspective of this Florentine scribe. We may never be able to confirm why a collection as distinctive as SL would be destroyed, however, it is clear to me that it was compiled by an individual who had an insatiable appetite for Trecento music, both old and new, in order to support a more personal edification and preservation.