Medieval Studies in Music, Music Fragments from late-medieval Canterbury: A story of loss and preservation

My project seeks to uncover the process and reasoning behind the fragmentation of music manuscripts from the late 13th to the early 16th centuries. It celebrates the wealth of opportunity for the study of hidden remains of a historical period of material destruction during pivotal shifts in liturgical landscape. It is in recent years that fragments have garnered significant scholarly attention. Despite their status as waste material, fragments offer rich insights to Medieval Studies. The project encompasses the disciplines of manuscript studies, palaeography, codicology, liturgical, institutional history and fragmentology. Defined as a study of fragmented sources, the latter is new and fast-growing. In the digital age, new fragments are discovered and made available, each causing us to reconfigure our ideas of the past. My project will contribute to this field by tracing the musical 'scraps' that remained from once flourishing scriptoria in Canterbury. A deep study of these fragments will shed new light on the musical and liturgical impact of the church reformations of manuscripts, scriptoria, and the music of the Christian church in Canterbury, the British Isles, and internationally. My project strategically exploits the research methodologies of fragmentology to explore the intersection of music history, pre-reformation history and codicology. This is a significant project to the field of Medieval Studies because it allows for the examination of the dismantling and reuse (in some cases) of music manuscripts from this period. It would also give space to investigate possible causes of this process which look deeper than just the church reformations. The project would add to the rich field of medieval manuscript studies as well as the growing curiosity surrounding fragments created from the destruction of manuscripts, to further emphasise the importance of them as key sources and vessels of historical insight, despite having been cast aside as 'incomplete'. In addition to its bibliographical significance, this project considers the active shaping of historical memory by its participants to various ends, reconfiguring liturgical history through investigating the palaeographical and codicological features of the fragments. The set of fragments from Canterbury and those from other scriptoria will help elucidate the details of manuscript production and use in these locations.
Recent years have seen a rapidly expanding corpus of publications on manuscript fragments, from facsimile editions (such as Fragments of English Polyphonic Music c.1390-1475, Early English Church Music, 62 (2022), to the edited volume Disiecta Membra Musicae: Studies in Musical Fragmentology (Varelli (ed.), 2020). It provides a cross-section of the work surrounding medieval music fragments in Europe, highlighting methodologies, and witnessing the wealth of digital resources afforded to researchers of fragments.
An interdisciplinary approach is imperative when interacting with manuscript fragments. During my academic studies and archival work experience, I have honed my skills and experience in palaeography and codicology to study these fragments, acknowledging the potential to uncover more about the liturgical and institutional history surrounding them. The study of fragments is fundamentally contextual. The incomplete survival of a source calls for a hypothetical reconstruction of the larger item (normally a book) from which it stemmed, and to place it in its broader context. Comparative palaeographical analysis, for instance, may show that a fragment is in the same hand and/or produced by the same scribe as other fragments or complete books, in Canterbury or elsewhere. Other clues include material traces of binding and the acquisition of 'waste material' by bookbinders (to be reused as flyleaves and pastedowns in new books).