Workshop 8: A Hybrid Book where Medieval Music Meets Early-Modern Herbal
October 11, 2025 in Announcements, Early-Printed Books, Event Registration, Manuscript Studies, Research Group Workshops, Workshops on "The Evidence of Manuscripts"
RGME Workshops
on
“The Evidence of Manuscripts, Etc.”
Workshop 8
“Face the Music, or,
Where Manuscript Meets Print
in a Hybrid Book:
An Early-Modern German Astrological Herbal
with a Reused Binding Fragment
from a Medieval Musical Manuscript”
Sunday 26 October 2025
Online by Zoom
[Posted on 15 September 2025, with updates)
Our series of Workshops on “The Evidence of Manuscripts, Etc.” continues with an exploration of a hybrid book for Workshop 8.
The Hybrid Book
This workshop will examine a puzzling vellum fragment (or is it a set of patchwork fragments?) in a private collection. The fragment(s) come(s) from a single musical manuscript in Latin on vellum laid out in double columns with text and notation on 4-line staves. The reused medieval material forms the outer covering of a 17th-century printed book in German on laid paper.
Private Collection, Front Cover with Reused Medieval Musical Fragment on Vellum. Photograph by Mildred Budny.
The Musical Fragment and its ‘Find-Place’
For the musical fragment, we will work to decipher the visible parts of the text and music, identify the readings/lections and chants, and, if possible (given the fragmentary nature), determine the probable genre of original manuscript, such as lectionary, breviary, antiphonary, or missal. Perhaps, over time, we might find other survivors from the same despoiled medieval manuscript.
Narrowing down its possible origin—or location in the early 17th century or later when it came to be reused as a binding cover–might aid the quest to determine the circumstances of its reuse and whence other parts of it might have been disseminated, whether as reused binding materials or otherwise.
For the workshop, we will examine the features of the printed book. It includes multiple woodcut illustrations and occasional marginalia in forms of annotations demonstrating attention of several kinds to the contents of the herbal.
What brought this medieval musical fragment and early modern printed book together? Even if we might never know all the answers, won’t it be fun to question how and why? There is a story here.
We love the puzzles, and give thanks to the collector for lending the book to the RGME for study and teaching and for sharing it with our audience in this workshop and beyond.
Information
People who be participating at the workshop to offer observations, reflections, and suggestions about the composite volume include (in alphabetical order):
Phillip Bernhardt–House
Mildred Budny
Natalia Fay
Leslie French (represented by a report on the musical manuscript fragment)
Beppy Landrum Owen
David Porreca
David W. Sorenson (with some specimens of herbals mentioning astrological influences)
And others.
At our 2024 Spring Symposium at Vassar College, Natalia delightfully described her work for her exhibition on herbals then on display in the Art Library. She shares the poster and brochure for the exhibition with us, as she returns to our events in this workshop to report on her continuing interests in plants, books, manuscripts, and their transmission.
The Manuscript Fragments
The visible portions of the manuscript appear, with only one side facing and the other side hidden, on the outer sides of the front and back covers, spine, and fore-edges of the binding.
Their text and music on four-line staves stand upright on the volume. Written in Gothic script, the parallel lines of music and text have some elements in red and blue pigments. There are ten lines on the front cover and on the spine, but the back cover has an additional line of music at the bottom, amounting to 10 1/2 lines on this portion. Each portion of the fragment shows a single column, or part of one. At the right on the back cover, the right-hand side of the fragment extends beyond the column with an expanse of outer margin from its original extent.
Sections open with 2-line initials which span the full height of the paired lines of music-and-text, for which the staves separate their horizontal course. One initial comprises a blue capital I (front cover, line 7). Three band-like initials comprise decorative forms in black ink with a vertical twist at the left-hand side; red pigment fills the centers of their twists (front cover, lines 2 and 6; back cover, line 2).
1. Front Cover
Private Collection, Front Cover with Reused Medieval Musical Fragment on Vellum. Photograph by Mildred Budny.
2. Back Cover
Private Collection. Musical Manuscript Fragment, Back Cover with ruler.
Spine
Private Collection. Hybrid book with Musical Manuscript Fragment, Spine View.
The Printed Book
The printed text comprises the German Kreutterbuch (“Book of Herbs”), an astrological herbal, by Bartholomaeus Carrichter (1510–1574), in an early edition printed in Strasbourg in Alsace in 1606. The author, who wrote under the pseudonym of Philomusus Anonymus, was physician to Ferdinand I (1503–1564), Holy Roman Emperor from 1556, and his son Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor from 1564 to 1576. The first edition of his Kreutterbuch was printed in Strasbourg in 1517 by Chistian Muller. For later editions, the physician, poet, and alchemist Michael Toxites (1515–1581), whose birth-name was Johann Michael Schütz, added some material to Carrichter’s work and edited it.
One of various versions of the illustrated genre by different authors (see, for example the Kreutterbuch desz Hocgelehrten und Weitberuhmten Herrn D. Petri Andreae Matthioli . . . ), this book combines information about plants, use, and lore with astrological considerations.
Title Page
A catalogue description of the volume characteristically derives from information on the title page:
Philomusus Anonymous [Bartholomaeus Carrichter (1510–1574)], Horn des Heyls menschlicher Blödigkeit, oder Kreütterbuch, darinn die Kreütter des Teutschenlands auss dem Liecht der Natur nach rechter Art der himmelischen Einfliessungen beschriben / durch Philomusum Anonymum [Bartholomäus Carrichter], with a foreword by Michael Toxites, born Johann Michael Schütz (1514–1581), (Strassbourg: Anton Bertram, DCVI/1606).
An inscription in light black ink at the foot of the title page gives the initials “G. S.” Perhaps they refer to an owner.
Private Collection, Kreutterbuch, title page. Photograph by Mildred Budny.
For the first edition of 1576, printed in Straßburg, see an online digital facsimile of a copy in Augsburg, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek. For an edition of 1619 also printed by A. Bertram, see the copy in the Wellcome Collection.
Like the 1619 edition, this folio volume has 10 unnumbered pages, 180 numbered pages, and 5 unnumbered leaves, with a woodcut title page and outline illustrations. Interspersed within the columns of text, the book has 58 outline illustrations depicting the herbs which it describes. For example, borage (Borago officinalis) or starflower:
Private Collection, Carrichter’s Kreutterbuch (Strasbourg, 1604). Borage. Photography by Mildred Budny.
Up close:
Private Collection, Carrichter’s Kreutterbuch (Strasbourg, 1604). Borage. Photography by Mildred Budny.
For comparison: Borage ‘In The Wild’
Borago officinalis. Photograph by By Christian Orlandi (12 April 2025) – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0. Image via Wikimedia Commons via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Borago_officinalis_(2025).jpg.
Some marginal annotations in brown ink amplify or comment upon passages.
Private Collection, Carrichter’s Kreutterbuch (Strasbourg, 1604). Textual opening with marginal Annotations. Photography by Mildred Budny.
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Leslie J. French, our Research Consultant and Font & Layout Designer, has contributed to many RGME activities and publications from our very beginnings in 1989 as part of a major, outside-funded, research project on Anglo-Saxon and Related Manuscripts at the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College in the University of Cambridge. His contributions include