Bratislava, Slovenský narodný archív, Inv.Nr. 197 (Slovak Early Music Database)

This fragment of a gradual, deposited in the Slovak National Archives (Bratislava, Slovakia) was once part of a large liturgical codex. The manuscript was intended for the singers of a schola. It was produced and used in medieval Hungary (the present-day territory of Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, and parts of the territories of present-day Slovenia, Austria, Ukraine, and Serbia). This cut-off part of a gradual survived as the cover of an administrative book of the Demesne of the Červený Kameň Castle (Ledger of 1650, Inv. No. 197). According to the art-historical analysis of the golden initial S-alve, the original, late medieval manuscript from which the fragment was cut off dates to between 1420 and 1450. It has a high artistic standard of painting (golden embossed initial with blue ornamental filling). The fragment contains several chants of the liturgy of the Mass for the feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary (de Beata Maria Virgine). The opening chant of the Holy Mass for the feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Salve sancta parens introit (in mode II), which has a beautiful illumination, must have been very important for the institute that commissioned the manuscript, as it is beautifully ornamented. The gradual is notated with the monumental type of the so-called Esztergom notation that came into being in the early 12th century and was used only in the territory of medieval Hungary. Although this extant fragment comes from the 15th century, it exhibits all the typical features of the early medieval local, so-called Esztergom system, which include a fluent shape of the two-note pes neume (two ascending notes: a lower and a higher one) and of the three-note scandicus neume (three or more ascending notes: lower – higher – higher note), or a vertically positioned climacus (three or more descending notes: bipunctum (higher) – lower – lower). In the late medieval period, the Esztergom notation was used mainly in Paulinian scriptoria (Ordo Sancti Pauli Primi Eremitae in Latin, a medieval monastic order founded in the thirteenth century in medieval Hungary, which followed the Esztergom liturgy), therefore the original codex was presumably produced for one of the major Paulinian monasteries in Hungary (either for their Buda monastery of Saint Lawrence or for their monastery in Marianka near Bratislava, de valle Marie in teuptunico Thal).

• Eva Veselovska