Reflected and Refracted: A Fragment Collection from Trier

Fragments can often yield glimpses into books and musical traditions that may not otherwise have survived.Even a single leaf of chant can, on occasion, point to valuable evidence for a certain chant notation, melody, or other evidence of its liturgical tradition.Such research is often frustrated, however, by a lack of context -for example because the fragment' s provenance is unknown, or parts of the page are damaged or missing.On the other hand, fragments also open up avenues of inquiry into the fate of a musical book after its point of origin: how its pages could become separated from their volumes, dispersed, and/or collected again in their present locations.Indeed, one might say every fragment typically has at least three layers of history associated with it: that of the liturgy it represents (which could of course itself have layers of re-use or revision); the time at which it was removed from its original volume, whether for practical or commercial ends; and a time at which it found its way to some sort of collection, whether private or public.In this paper, we will consider three items from a single collection, and the ways their historical layers intersect and shed light on one another.The fragment collection of Peter Bohn is a group of some 120 fragments of medieval liturgical books, largely from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, currently held at the Stadtbibliothek Weberbach Trier.Peter Bohn (1833-1925) was an organist and school teacher who spent almost his entire life in Trier or nearby. 1 After a ten-year stint as organist of the Gervasius church in Trier, he spent another fifty years (1866-1906) as a music teacher in Trier' s Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium.In addition he maintained a scholarly interest in chant: he founded, and was for a time the secretary of, a society for research into sources of Gregorian chant, wrote contributions to the chant journals of his day, translated several medieval treatises, and was an advocate for maintaining Trier' s local traditions in the face of contemporary pressure to adopt standardised printed editions he perceived to be unsatisfactory.2 Trier was, after all, the oldest episcopal see in Germany, and could lay claim to a Christian tradition that stretched into late antiquity: an early bishop of Trier, Agricius, is attested at councils in AD 314, and a cult existed around its first bishop, Eucharius (and his companions Valerius and Maternus) by the late fifth century.3 Bohn' s interest in the religious history of his city could thus draw on a long history. 1 • Bohn's life and basic details of his collection are outlined in Embach, Michael, and Martin Möller, 'Die "Sammlung Bohn": Ein bedeutender Quellenfundus zur Geschichte des gregorianischen Chorals in der Stadtbibliothek Trier', Kurtrierisches Jahrbuch, 59 (2019), 313-58. 2 • He would be recognised for his role in the restoration of Gregorian chant by pope Pius X in 1907; see Embach, 'Die "Sammlung Bohn"', p. 318. 3 • An inscription labelling the tombs of Eucharius and Valerius (who probably lived in the third century) was erected in Trier by Bishop Cyrillus c. 450; Gregory of Tours writes in his Life of the Fathers 17.4

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.