The San Fedele-Belgioioso Codex: A New Source of Secular and Liturgical Polyphony (the Pavia Fragment)

In 2019 two largely intact parchment bifolios containing late fourteenth-century polyphony, reused as book covers, were found independently in Milan-area libraries: one at the Biblioteca Universitaria in Pavia (I-PAVu, Pergamene sparse, scatola 4, n. 8) and the other at the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan (binding of I-Mt, 1759). This is the first of two articles demonstrating that the two bifolios belonged to the same original manuscript, a compilation of Mass Ordinary movements and secular songs copied in northern Italy (ca. 1400). This first essay presents the fragment Pv, a bifolio containing five polyphonic anonymous unica. The pieces are written in fourteenth-century black notation using dragmae, including an unknown form of ‘dragma brevis’ and a case of half-coloration. The four secular works, two virelais and two rondeaux, are all for two voices with untexted tenor. The fifth piece is a fragmentary Credo of which only two texted voices remain. The essay contains a codicological and palaeographic description of the bifolio, a musicological study of the works, a linguistic and stylistic analysis of the French poems, and a critical edition of both texts and music. In the final paragraph, we offer a hypothesis on the origin of the fragment based on the data collected.