A Historical Overview of Musical Worship & Culture in Sardinia 449
rite secundum consuetudinem Romanae Curiae.66 Many thousands of songs—
transcribed in the canonical musical “black square” handwriting on the
tetragram, which finally asserted itself in the second half of the thirteenth
century—are included in 19 volumes on parchment, as well as in dozens of
fragments. The codes, which are kept in the cathedral, the convent of Saint
Francis, the monastery of Saint Clare, and the historical archive of the town
hall, are of central importance, not only for the study of liturgical music, but
also for paleography (textual and musical), for codicology, and for the history
of the miniature.67 In the Carta de Logu (chapter 26), the giudicessa Eleonora
introduced severe punishments for those who stole sacred books, assuring
their survival through sentences that included the gouging of an eye (boghent
unu hogu) and hanging (siat innantis impichadu) for repeat offenders.68
66 Stephen Joseph Peter Van Dijk and Joan Hazelden Walker, The Origins of the Modern
Roman Liturgy: The Liturgy of the Papal Court and the Franciscan Order in the Thirteenth
Century (Westminster, MD, 1960).
67 Oristano is home to 156 miniatures, including historiated and decorated initials in the
cathedral, plus three in the convent of the Minor Conventual Friars, almost all of which
were unpublished until 2009. See Mele, “Die ac Nocte”.
68 Ibid., 15.
Figure 17.1 Oristano Cathedral. Parchment fragment belonging to a breviary from
Tuscany dated to the first half of the 13th century. It works as a “flyleaf ” in
the P. XIII codex, a psalter-hymnal dated between the 14th–15th centuries.
Above: musical writing with neumes.