One Thousand and One Conjectures

The Amarusataka, the classical century of erotic single-verse miniatures ascribed to a King Amaru, is transmitted in sharply divergent recensions, a Southern, an Eastern or Bengal, a Western, and a mixed vulgate, that do not agree on which hundred verses the work…

The Agnipurana, an encyclopaedic Sanskrit purana, carries within it a compact treatise on poetics, its alamkara chapters, roughly adhyayas 336 to 347, covering figures, faults, rasa and dramaturgy in a few hundred verses. It sits oddly in a purana, and scholars of…

The Leon Antiphoner (Leon, Archivo Capitular, MS 8) is the fullest surviving witness to the Old Hispanic (Mozarabic) office, thousands of chant items copied in the tenth or eleventh century from a much older exemplar - and almost none of it can…

Rome sang its own chant, the dialect scholars call Old Roman, and it survives in about five notated manuscripts: the graduals Vatican lat. 5319, Rome San Pietro F 22, and Bodmer 74 (the Santa Cecilia gradual of 1071), and the antiphoners Rome…

Beneventan chant was the native liturgical music of Lombard southern Italy, and it was suppressed in the eleventh century as Montecassino and the Norman church imposed the Roman-Gregorian rite. What survives, Thomas Forrest Kelly reconstructed: a small proper-mass repertory for a limited…

Milan kept its rite. Alone among the great non-Roman Latin uses, the Ambrosian rite was never suppressed, and its chant survives in hundreds of complete, purpose-made, pitch-readable manuscripts - a fully notated tradition still indexable today. Set beside it, the suppressed repertories…

Before the Carolingians imposed Roman chant, the Frankish church sang the Gallican rite, and its music was almost entirely erased in the eighth-century Romanization - almost. A ghost repertoire survives, not as Gallican books, which do not exist, but as individual chants…

A saint's proper office - a historia, the full set of antiphons and responsories for the feast - was the most local and most vulnerable layer of the liturgy. Andrew Hughes' catalogue of late-medieval offices registers on the order of 1,500 such…

The received picture of Latin chant is a shared common core sung everywhere from one end of Europe to the other, and that core is real - but it is the visible tip of a very different distribution. Because Cantus Index records,…

How widely a chant was copied was set less by its age or beauty than by the rank of the feast it served. A duplex or totum duplex feast was mandated across a whole province and demanded a full proper, so its…

Even where a saint's proper office does survive with music, it usually survives incomplete. A full secular office is a large machine - first Vespers antiphons, the Matins invitatory and its nocturns of antiphons and great responsories, Lauds antiphons, second Vespers -…

When a saint had no proper office, or when the proper one was lost, the liturgy fell back on the Common of Saints - the generic offices for a martyr, a confessor, a virgin, sung from a shared menu and requiring no…

Not all chant genres died at the same rate, because they did not proliferate at the same rate. The great responsory of Matins - the responsorium prolixum, the longest and most elaborate office chant, with its solo verse - was the genre…

Everyone knows the headline: the Analecta Hymnica prints something on the order of 4,500 medieval sequences, and the Tridentine Missal of 1570 kept four (a fifth, the Stabat Mater, was admitted in 1727). But the famous number hides the real mechanism, which…

Chevalier's Repertorium Hymnologicum is a census of Latin liturgical poems - tens of thousands of numbered hymn, sequence, and rhymed-office incipits, assembled from the texts wherever they occur. A melody census is a different and much smaller thing, because text and tune…

Tropes - the interpolated additions that wrapped, prefaced, and glossed the fixed chants of the mass - were among the most productive genres of the central Middle Ages, and the Corpus Troporum has inventoried them exhaustively: thousands of distinct trope elements for…

The purge of the tropes was not uniform, and the survivors reveal its logic. Proper tropes - those wrapped around the Introit, Offertory, and Communion, the changing chants of the mass - were annihilated, surviving into no printed liturgy. Ordinary tropes fared…

The earliest antiphoners are silent books. The Compiegne antiphoner (Paris, BnF, lat. 17436), copied around 870, gives the texts of the office and mass chants for the whole year and not a single note of music - it is one of the…

The Old Babylonian Sumerian literary catalogues are lists that record compositions one per line by their opening words - the Louvre catalogue (AO 5393), the Nippur catalogues (N1-N7, the Philadelphia lists), and the Ur catalogue (UET), first edited by S. N. Kramer…

First-millennium canonical series numbered their own tablets in their colophons: 'Nth tablet of the series X, total M.' That arithmetic is a census the ancient scribes themselves wrote. Real series with stated totals include Enuma Anu Enlil (celestial omens, about 68-70 tablets),…

CDLI is the most complete catalogue any ancient script possesses - 421,501 artifacts. Yet its own descriptive fields carry a residue of the un-enriched: rows with no genre, no language, no assigned period. This is not a defect to apologize for; it…

The Amarna archive - roughly 350 to 382 cuneiform tablets in Akkadian, excavated at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt - is a diplomatic mailbag, and it is a one-way one. The great majority are letters TO the Egyptian court: from Levantine vassals and…

Plot dated cuneiform by period and a canyon opens after the Old Babylonian collapse. Tablets thin dramatically across the First Sealand Dynasty and the early Kassite 'dark age' (roughly 1730-1450 BCE) before the Middle Babylonian recovery. This discontinuity can be production -…

The great Old Babylonian thematic lexical lists enumerate the material world by category - Ura = hubullu marches through trees and wooden objects, reeds, containers, textiles, leather, metals, animals, and foodstuffs across its 24 tablets, and the list of professions (Lu) names…

Assurbanipal assembled the Nineveh libraries partly by confiscation. Administrative records and royal orders document the systematic collection of tablets and writing-boards from Babylonian scholars and temples: the acquisition and booty records, the scholarly correspondence ordering collection, and accession dockets that count incoming…

The Catalogue of Texts and Authors (W. G. Lambert, JCS 16, 1962) is a rare native Mesopotamian bibliography: a first-millennium list pairing compositions, cited by incipit, with named authors and sometimes ancestral scribal families - attributing works to figures such as Sin-leqi-unninni…

House F at Nippur is not a library but a teaching cycle caught in the ground: a single Old Babylonian scribal school excavated with about 1,400 literary and school tablets, catalogued and analysed by Eleanor Robson (RA 95, 2001). Its compositions cluster…

The great god-list An = Anum (seven tablets, roughly 2,000 divine names, standardized by the later second millennium) organizes the Mesopotamian pantheon into genealogies and equivalences. Many of its deities are major gods with temples, festivals, and thick attestation; many are obscure…

The Assyrian state dated its years by eponyms (limmu), each year named for an official, preserved as a continuous canon for the early first millennium (Alan Millard, SAAS 2, 1994, The Eponyms of the Assyrian Empire 910-612 BC). The canon is an…

CDLI flags known forgeries in an is-fake field. In the in-house copy exactly 160 of 126,000 rows (0.127 percent) are so flagged - a small stock, but forgery is not sprinkled at random. Forgers make what sells: the market pays for royal…

A tablet's provenience - its excavated findspot - is the anchor of nearly everything we infer about where writing happened. In the in-house CDLI copy, 15,046 of 126,000 rows (11.9 percent) have no recorded findspot: bought on the market, looted, or long…

Cuneiform letters are unusually self-referential about writing itself: they mention tablets sent, tablets requested, tablets to be copied, tablets awaited. Two corpora make this countable. The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur (CKU, ed. Piotr Michalowski 2011) collects Ur III royal-administrative letters,…

The cuneiform we hold is not the cuneiform of the textbooks. In the in-house CDLI copy (126,000 rows), a single genre and a single fifty-year period each swallow the corpus: Administrative documents are 89,304 rows (70.9 percent), and the Third Dynasty of…

The troubadour corpus survived twice over, and the second survival was an order of magnitude harsher than the first: roughly 2,500 lyric texts endure, but melodies for barely a tenth of them, carried by four notated witnesses - the Occitan-made R (Paris,…

The razos - the prose anecdotes explaining what occasion a song answered - are usually read as commentary on the surviving corpus. This conjecture reads them as a transmission channel of their own, and a leaky one that indexes loss as it…

Pillet-Carstens numbers roughly 460 named troubadours, with the anonymous corpus banked separately under PC 461, and those 460 names share about 2,500 surviving pieces - a mean near five and a half songs per poet. This conjecture claims the mean is a…

The trobairitz corpus is some twenty named women and, depending on the anonymous-piece rulings, on the order of thirty to forty-six pieces (Bruckner's Songs of the Women Troubadours), a single melody - the Comtessa de Dia's A chantar, carried by the French-made…

The tenso and partimen - staged debate in alternating stanzas, each voice named inside the poem - had a strange archival property: they transmit as one text carrying two names. For a poet whose solo songs never entered a written repertory, being…

The sirventes was, by the tradition's own account, a parasite form: the Catalan Doctrina de compondre dictats instructs that it should take its tune from an existing song, and sirventes routinely borrowed a canso's full metrical scheme and rhyme sounds so that…

Twice, the tradition surveyed itself alive. Around 1170 Peire d'Alvernhe's Cantarai d'aqestz trobadors (PC 323,11) marched through a dozen named contemporaries, a stanza of ridicule each; a generation later the Monge de Montaudon updated the joke (PC 305,16) for sixteen more. A…

Eble II, viscount of Ventadorn, called Cantator, praised by the chronicler Geoffrey of Vigeois for his songs and invoked in the lyric corpus itself as the head of a school of composition - the school of lord Eble - has no surviving…

BEdT records, song by song, what each chansonnier's heading says about who wrote it, and the headings disagree constantly: the corpus carries hundreds of rival attributions. This conjecture is about where that noise bites - at the roster's tail, where an attribution…

The oldest dated chansonnier, D (Modena, Biblioteca Estense), was copied in Italy in 1254; V, Catalan-copied, is dated 1268; A, I and K came out of the Veneto in the later thirteenth century. The homeland's own great books - C (Paris, BnF…

Not all chansonniers are equal preservers, and the inequality runs opposite to prestige. The polished Italian canon-books A, B, I and K transmit a heavily shared repertory - the same export canon copied again and again with vidas attached - while the…

De vulgari eloquentia names its Occitan exemplars - Bertran de Born for arms, Arnaut Daniel for love, Giraut de Bornelh for rectitude, Folquet of Marseille, Aimeric de Belenoi, Aimeric de Peguilhan, Sordello - and that shortlist became European literary history's working memory…

The tradition wrote its own textbooks: Raimon Vidal's Razos de trobar - the first grammar of a Romance vernacular, written for would-be composers - Uc Faidit's Donatz proensals made in Italy in the 1240s, Terramagnino da Pisa's verse Doctrina d'acort, Jofre de…

The Albigensian crusade (1209-1229) is the standard caption for the end of the troubadours, and it is usually read as a production collapse. This conjecture claims the record shows relocation and re-genring before it shows silence. The war decades themselves are loud…

Survival size and survival depth come apart spectacularly at the top of the troubadour roster. The largest surviving corpora belong to late poets who bypassed the anthology market: Cerveri de Girona's hundred-plus pieces ride almost entirely on one Catalan collection (Sg, the…

One manuscript measured the melody catastrophe while committing it. Chansonnier R (Paris, BnF fr. 22543), the great Occitan-made songbook of around 1300, was planned as a fully notated monument: staff-space for music was ruled above the opening stanzas throughout the collection. The…

Around 865 Usuard, a monk of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, finished the martyrology that won: an abridgement of the whole prior tradition - the Hieronymian name-lists, Bede, Florus of Lyon, Ado of Vienne - trimmed to one commemoration string per day for reading in chapter,…