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. 3Bohn' 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 Mller, 'Die "Sammlung Bohn": Ein bedeutender Quellenfundus zur Geschichte des gregorianischen Chorals in

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