One of the small, slightly ridiculous things I sometimes do in the archive is count the lines in decorative initials – the enlarged “drop caps” that begin sections of text.
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Two lines. Three lines. Occasionally six. If you’ve never spent time staring at an early modern prayerbook, this may sound like the sort of scholarly detail that proves that historians have too much time on their hands. But sometimes those tiny details tell us something important. Recently I went through the Office of the Virgin in a sixteenth-century German prayerbook from the Lake Constance region and tagged every decorated initial. Not just whether there was an initial, but how large it was: two lines, three lines, sometimes a larger marginal initial. I also recorded the genre of the text that followed – psalm, antiphon, collect, hymn, and so on. In other words: I counted them. Every. Single. One. The result is the sort of table that delights the inner nerd.
Table 1. Raw counts of decorated initials by genre in the Office of the Virgin from Bregenz VLB Hs 17, copied by Scribe 2. Before interpretation, the numbers simply show how often each type of text is introduced with enhanced initials. At this stage the numbers are just numbers. We’ve known for years that manuscripts use two-line and three-line initials as a kind of visual hierarchy (Hughes MMMO). Two-line initials mark many items—antiphons, collects, and psalms. But the three-line initials cluster strongly around psalms, and around the structural openings of the Hours. To make the pattern easier to see, I reorganized the data and highlighted three clusters: · Yellow: Psalms · Orange: Musical genres (antiphons, hymns, responsories) · Blue: Collects
Table 2. Percentages of each genre marked by enhanced initials. Converting the raw counts into proportions reveals the manuscript’s visual hierarchy: psalms (yellow) receive enhanced initials most frequently, while musical texts (orange) and collects (blue) are marked but less often emphasized. Once the colors are added, the structure of the Office jumps out immediately. The psalms dominate the enhanced initials. They receive the largest and most frequent decorative emphasis. Visually, they anchor the page. The musical genres, by contrast – antiphons and hymns – are consistently marked but rarely elevated to the highest level of prominence. They are clearly signposted, but not treated as the structural core. The collects occupy an interesting middle position. They are marked reliably and occasionally emphasized, suggesting that the scribe saw them as moments of liturgical articulation – points where the flow of psalmody gathers into a focused prayer. Put together, the manuscript’s visual system reflects a three-part hierarchy of the Office: · Psalms as the structural backbone · Musical texts as framing elements · Collects as moments of devotional focus This is interesting, and maybe even a bit disconcerting, because if you ask a modern musicologist what matters most in the Office, the answer is often the antiphons. Those are the musically distinctive parts. They carry the chant melodies that change from feast to feast. They are where the repertoire becomes specific. But this prayerbook suggests that the Thalbach sisters who used it experienced the Office somewhat differently. For them, the antiphons were important – but the psalms were the real center of gravity. Psalms structured the Hours. They carried the devotional weight. They were the texts that deserved the most visual attention on the page. And, of course, they were the first texts that novices would have learned – the most familiar part of the Latin liturgy. The heavy presence of Latin incipits for the psalms – and the relative paucity of those labels for other genres – reinforces their importance to the Sisters whose book this was. In other words, the page layout quietly encodes that understanding of the centrality of psalmody. The decorative hierarchy mirrors the liturgical one, our musical longing notwithstanding. Which is why counting the lines in drop caps – two lines, three lines, occasionally six—turns out not to be ridiculous after all. WORKS CITED Bregenz, VLB Hs 17, a Thalbach Sister's Prayerbook from the 16th century Hughes, Andrew. Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: A Guide to their Organization and Terminology. Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 1995/r2017.
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