The transmission of the polyphonic Amen in the early fifteenth century

ABSTRACT Studies of manuscripts such as the Trent Codices (I-TRbc 87-92) and Bologna Q15 (I-Bc 15) have shown that fifteenth-century scribes were not necessarily passive transmitters of the material they copied. Whether motivated by practical constraints or aesthetic preferences, they added, excised and re-composed sections or voices as they saw fit. The frequency and ingenuity of such emendations encourage us to examine them further - not as unwelcome alterations to a putative â€̃Urtext’ but as creative acts in their own right. This article focuses on one site of scribal emendation: the concluding Amen sections of early fifteenth-century Gloria and Credo settings. Frequently, otherwise concordant sources for the same piece transmit Amen sections that appear to be unrelated to each other. I propose that certain types of Amen settings were more susceptible than others to alteration and that one type - the short, self-contained, homophonic Amen - arose through scribal emendation. In order to describe in precise terms the choices a scribe might make, I introduce a nomenclature system for the Amen settings encountered in this period. Taking a panoptic view of the major sources for sacred polyphony in the first half of the fifteenth century, this article contributes to our understanding of scribal activity and manuscript culture.