A Second Look at Multispectral Data of Late Medieval Music Manuscripts

Abstract: The material manifestation of late medieval parchment manuscripts results from their history, which is shaped by owners, fragmentators or bookbinders. While certain characteristics, such as the dissection or palimpsesting of manuscripts, are clearly recognizable and analyzable, these objects contain further significant information about their past, which is, unfortunately, invisible to the human eye. Using three music manuscripts from the early fifteenth century, we demonstrate how processed multispectral data can provide digital images that contain new evidence about the manuscript’s past, its production, and its use and interaction with other objects. Multispectral data have until now been generated – mostly at great expense – to make obscured writing visible. Our approach relies on a secondary use of these data to elucidate a manuscript’s production and its afterlife, and some results consequently compelled us to undertake further codicological and material investigations. Our specific findings include the imprints of spectacles used by Florentine monks, the traces left by Viennese bookbinders and Nuremberg librarians, and a music scribe’s unexpected change of inks. This paper is aimed at manuscript researchers and imaging scholars, as well as librarians and conservators, who are interested in the information on materiality that can be gleaned from manuscripts by applying MSI, and that can thus enrich our understanding of these unique objects.