A facsimile edition of the monumental codex of the medieval Várad Cathedral with critical commentaries and essays in three volumes, in Hungarian and English:
The huge, richly illuminated and fully notated manuscript of the Várad Cathedral (Waradinum, Großwardein, today Oradea in Romania), the Antiphonale Varadinense was commissioned by John (Jan/János) Filipecz, diplomat of king Matthias Corvinus and Bishop of Várad in the last third of the 15th century. The manuscript was copied in an outlander workshop: its decoration, magnificent miniatures and musical notation were the work of contemporary Bohemian craftsmen. However, with its content, the inclusion of the chant repertory of the officium divinum in a specific system, and about 1,600 notated melodies, it is an unrivalled monument of the liturgical and musical tradition of late medieval Várad.
Its excised and cut off parchment leaves have been used for about 100 years since the end of the 16th century to bind manuscripts and printed books, to strengthen the covers. In addition to publishing the truncated main corpus preserved in the collection of the Diocesan Treasury and Library of Győr (sine sign.), Volume 1 and 2 reconstructs 62 fragmentary codex leaves found in 19 collections of 12 cities in 3 countries, inserting them into the original order of the antiphoner. The Hungarian and English essays of Volume 3 unfold the circumstances and background of the origin of the manuscript, the medieval and early modern itineraries emerging from the fragments, its research history, and finally the liturgical and musical analysis of its contents – summarizing the results of about 10 years of research.
The two monographs are the first two volumes of the monograph series Resonemus pariter – Studies in Medieval Music History launched by the Department of Early Music History of the Institute for Musicology with the participation of members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences 'Momentum' – Digital Music Fragmentology research group. The aim of the bilingual (Hungarian-English) series is the monographic processing and publication of a liturgical-musical source or group of sources from medieval Hungary, and their contextualization in Central and wider Europe.
In Volume 1, fragments from a 14th-century Transylvanian antiphoner preserved in the library of the Franciscan monastery in Németújvár (Güssing, Austria) are published for the first time in a facsimile edition and musical transcription, accompanied by thorough liturgical, paleographical and musical analysis in Hungarian and English. Volume 2 publishes the 15th-century hymn collection of the Zagreb Cathedral with a study in Hungarian, English and Croatian, in which, in addition to discussing codicological and book-historical issues, a detailed, thematically organized analysis of the officium defunctorum and the entire himnary is included.
csorbane.bognar.erzsebet@btk.mta.hu
