Old Hispanic Notation and the Early Written Transmission of Chant: A Palaeographical Case Study of a Liber Misticus (British Library, Add. MS 30845)

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Much work has been done on the meaning of early unpitched Gregorian chant notation (neumes) and where each sign is used functionally, much of it building on Cardine's Semiologia Gregoriana (1968). However, very little research has been undertaken on the early medieval Iberian notation in which Old Hispanic chant was preserved in the 10th and 11th centuries. Furthermore, it is not possible to use later pitched versions of Old Hispanic chants to inform our interpretations of Iberian notation, since only twenty-four Old Hispanic chants were preserved using pitch. There are still fundamental questions to be answered regarding the meaning of individual neumes at a basic level: the number of notes contained in a neume and whether they rise or fall. In my PhD, I will examine how individual neume shapes are used in recurring melodic formulas to shed light on the use of unpitched notation and the meaning of specific signs in the early written transmission of chant.