YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

VIRTUS SCRIPTORIS: STEPS TOWARDS A TYPOLOGY OF ILLUSTRATION BORROWING IN MUSIC THEORY TREATISES
able subjects – could be and were borrowed from other institutions, both religious
and secular. Furthermore, within the ranks of medieval religious orders, the copying,
annotating, and binding of books by friars were considered permissible – even desirable
– activities, even when these activities became lucrative and thus conflicted with
the rules of poverty spelled out in monastic consuetudines; 18 these same orders
employed, in addition to men of their own, the services of lay professional scribes,
illuminators, and notators.
Often the same scribe copied the several tracts on a diversity of subjects forming
one composite codex, and sometimes this meant drawing the pertinent illustrations
in each tract. A case in point is Ellinger, Abbot of Tegernsee, who copied and illustrated
Bede’s De natura rerum, Calcidius’s translation of Plato’s Timaeus, a variety
of medical recipes, diagrams of constellations, the letter of Pseudo-Jerome known as
‘On the instruments of music’, and so on. 19 In doing so, he – and, indeed, any scribe
in his position – would have gained, through what I term ‘scriptorium osmosis’, a
certain knowledge of the subject matter in various disciplines. Some of these disciplines
were perceived as closely related to music: astronomy, astrology, mathematics,
geometry; 20 others were not: medicine is one case. 21
A rather large number of these books included, in addition to the normally expected
illuminated initials, some form of graphic illustration to visualize the story
told, the face described, the new land walked, the water crossed, the sky imagined,
the law explained, the numbers tabulated. Music theory treatises were no exception,
for in addition to signs for sounds and silence, the manuscripts abound in diagrams,
tables, graphs, charts, and other types of visual aids used to make more accessible
matters that reading alone could not clarify. Words could be either too much or not
enough, and, in order to solve problems of comprehension or further explicate the
subject at hand, a different level of visual perception was addressed: illustrations
allowed the eye and brain to take in information in condensed form. Furthermore,
drawings could create intelligible structure, order, and a sense of reminiscing about
things already seen or learned; the figure were an implicit invitation for the reader to
make mental comparisons with illustrations already familiar from non-musical works,
and, by extension, with the non-musical concepts thus rendered in graphic form.
18 For book-producing activities within the Dominican and Franciscan orders, see R. ROEST, A History
of Franciscan Education (c.1210–1517), Leiden, 2000, pp. 230–234, and especially n. 143.
19 Austin, University of Texas at Austin, The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, MS 29 (Phillipps
816); for a catalogue description, see RISM B/3/4, pp. 137–139.
20 See Boston, The Boston Medical Library, Ballard Collection I, MS no. 7, containing tracts on astronomy,
astrology, mathematics, and music – all illustrated with diagrams; for a catalogue description, see RISM
B/3/4, p. 146.
21 In Austin, University of Texas at Austin, The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, MS 29, see
above.
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