Burns Antiphoner

The antiphoner is large enough to have been stood on a lectern and used by a group to sing from in choir, as in the illustration above. However, with its relatively small size, and the layout of 10 staves per page, it differs markedly from the much larger size and deluxe format of contemporary Italian Franciscan choirbooks, a notable example of which is a 1328 Franciscan antiphonal from Rimini (AU-Ssl 273). A roughly proportional comparison of the two books, showing their respective copies of the first matins responsory in the common of several martyrs, Absterget deus omnem lacrimam, is shown below, the full size of the pages of the Rimini book 525 mm high, those of Burns 300 mm.

Inside the leather covered boards that form its covers, the book now consists of 119 vellum parchment folios. Of these, the first 114 form the main body of the manuscript, the text copied largely by two scribes, and the music by three, with the exception of some late additions and corrections. As can be seen clearly in the margins, each page was ruled with dry-point guidelines. Ten 4-line staves were then drawn on each page in red ink. The words or text of the chant were probably then entered next in black ink, usually but not always resting on a drypoint guideline; after this the music was entered.

As tabulated below, two text scribes and three music scribes copied the proper and common cycles that form the bulk of the main manuscript. Whether any of the text scribes were also the music scribes remains unclear. The fact that text hand 1 appears in part 1A and part 2 with both music hand 1 and music hand 2 does however indicate that at least two scribes were involved in copying these sections, possibly three. Likewise, pending closer scientific examination, text hand 2 and music hand 3 could have been produced by either one scribe, or two different scribes.

Compared with more generously rubricated Franciscan manuscripts (notably CH-Fco 2), only a bare minimum of necessary headings and directions (rubrics) were added in red ink, with text incipits of other chants referred to in black ink. Between the chants, small sections of the pre-drawn staves were later erased to allow space for the addition of occasional verbal headings and directions, and for the larger illuminated initials. In the first 12 folios, the larger initials are copied in either red or blue with fine penwork decorations. Thereafter penwork decorations to the initials ceases, and blue is used only very occasionally (e.g. for the initial of the opening antiphon of the office of St. Clare, fol. 84r). The text copyists also drew the smaller initials, in red and black inks, almost always onto sections of un-erased stave.

Each separate section appears to have been copied in page sequence, with no major later insertions or erasures. In content and structure, each of the three main parts of the manuscript (part 1A, part 1B, and part 2) is also internally regular and unproblematic, except for gathering 5, into which a possibly pre-extant copy of the recent Corpus Christi office (Sacerdos in aeternum) has been inserted (part 1 insert Corpus Christi).