The San Fedele-Belgioioso Codex: A New Source of Secular and Liturgical Polyphony (the Pavia Fragment)

In 2019 two largely intact parchment bifolios containing late fourteenth-century polyphony, reused as book covers, were found independently in Milan area libraries: one at the Biblioteca Universitaria in Pavia and the other at the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan. This is the first of two articles demonstrating that the two bifolios belonged to the same original manuscript, a compilation of Mass Ordinary movements and secular songs copied in northern Italy (ca. 1400). This first essay presents the fragment Pv, a bifolio containing five polyphonic anonymous unica. The four secular works, two virelais and two rondeaux, are all for two voices with untexted tenor. The fifth piece is a fragmentary Credo of which only two texted voices remain. The essay contains a codicological and palaeographic description of the bifolio, a musicological study of the works, a linguistic and stylistic analysis of the French poems, and a critical edition of both texts and music. In the final paragraph, we offer a hypothesis on the origin of the fragment based on the data collected.