This manuscript consists of three books joined together in the medieval period at the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The first of these contains 9th-century texts and tables for computus, the science of calculating times and dates using a combination of mathematics and astronomy.
The final page of this section features a diagram of the zodiac along with a song about the Zodiac signs added by a later scribe. The words of the song are accompanied by neumes, an early form of musical notation, making this a rare survival of pre-1200 music from outside the liturgy.
This manuscript was digitised with the support of The Polonsky Foundation.
Taylor McCall discusses early medieval approaches to various types of knowledge we might consider today to be ‘scientific’, as well as those subjects taught in the earliest universities, including mathematics and astronomy.
Music played a central role in Christian liturgy throughout the Middle Ages. Nicolas Bell describes the evidence for this music in manuscripts made before 1200.
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