YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

92 LUMINITA FLOREA
The pictor of Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.9.29 could well have been different
from Johannes Burghorsst or Burgherss, the scriptor of it. 54 The layout of the manuscript
was planned differently from both Digby 90 and Bodley 515: all twenty circles
cover a single page, and they were arranged in four columns of five rows each.
In terms of its illustrations, the copy of the Quatuor principalia in MS O.9.29 is technically
the most accomplished among the fifteenth-century exemplars of the text: the
circles were executed with a sharp compass, a rule was used to draw the inner rows
bearing solmization syllables, and each circular shape was enclosed within a rectangle;
the overall effect is that of a well-thought composition.
Circular schemes were also used to tabulate interval species on folios 39r–40v
of an English manuscript, possibly of the late fourteenth century, of Theinred of
Dover’s De legitimis pentachordorum et tetrachordorum. 55
THE VEGETAL REIGN
In music theory treatises, the most obvious place for tree-shaped diagrams is in the
sections on mensural music. In terms of visual complexity and aesthetic gratification,
they go from simple schemes to images of lush arbors of rhythmic relationships.
Bearing the fruits of the maxima, the longa, the brevis, the semibrevis, and the minima
on their branches, these trees are sometimes drawn in color and depicted as literally
growing in pots: an example is found in London, British Library, MS Lansdowne
763, where folio 86b is completely covered with drawings of vases containing plants
mimicking chandeliers with several arms branching off: the vase contains the
common root – the maximal value – while the stems illustrate a variety of duple and
triple divisions.
The ‘fount and origin’ of the tree-system drawings on folios 44r–45r in the
Quatuor principalia from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 90 is the larger value,
the one prone to division, visually placed at the lowest level of each diagram. From
it the smaller values are generated, like newer branches stemming from the root or
trunk of a tree and illustrating the various types of modus, tempus, and prolatio. The
man who copied the version in London, British Library, MS Add. 8866 – the scriptor
and pictor of it – was not one in favor of spectacular shapes; or, perhaps, he did not
have the talent or ability to go beyond drawing a series of ‘trees of division’ of
mediocre appearance. Just like his predecessor, the scriptor of MS Digby 90, he wrote
and drew as he copied from his model, and obviously had no master plan in terms of
54 Colophon on folio 53r.
55 On Theinred, see The ‘De legitimis ordinibus pentachordorum et tetrachordorum’of Theinred of Dover,
Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1982; and J. SNYDER, Theinred of Dover on Consonance: A Chapter
in the History of Harmony, in Music Theory Spectrum, 5 (1983), pp. 110–120. For a catalogue description,
see RISM B/3/4, pp. 111–113.