A new document has been discovered in the archives of the National Library in Prague’s Klementinum which contains fragments of six two-voice musical compositions from the 13th century. They are believed to have been originally composed by the Notre Damme School in Paris. To find out more, I spoke to Jan Vojtíšek, the head of the Department of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books at the National Library. He began by telling me how the texts were found.
Petrus de Crescentiis: Ruralia Commoda, source: Archives of the Czech National Library, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
“The discovery was made by Dominique Gatté, our colleague from Strasbourg in France, who started to follow all of the new digitalised medieval manuscripts and their musical parts. He made this discovery thanks to his systematic work and let us know about it through our international cooperation on this topic.