The Gottschalk Antiphonal was written and illustrated in the late twelfth century by the scribe/artist/monk Gottschalk of Lambach and was used at the Lambach abbey for several centuries. Along with many other early manuscripts, It was broken for binding scrap in the late fifteenth century, and its leaves were used as flyleaves, pastedowns, and spine-liners for books found at the Abbey bindery. During World War II, many of the leaves were removed from the bindings and sold as a way to raise money for a new wood lathe for the abbey. The leaves are now scattered and have been identified at the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, the St. Louis Public Library, a hotel in Badgastein (Austria), the abbey of St. Paul im Lavanttal, and in Lambach itself (although the leaves that were bound into incunables there as late as 1998 have now vanished and are represented in my reconstruction by my old black-and-white photographs).

As recently as 2016, an offset of a leaf of the Antiphonal was found in an incunable belonging to the Beinecke Library (ironically, it was there while I was working on my thesis at Yale, but it was only during a recent survey of the bindings by Elizabeth Hebbard (Indiana Univ.) that the offset was photographed and identified). The missing leaf was consecutive with one of the leaves at Harvard, and I have added a manipulated image of the offset to my Fragmentarium reconstruction.

For those of you who care about such things, it is worth noting that images of the two leaves at Harvard have been imported directly into Fragmentarium using a persistent IIIF url. The other images were uploaded as individual JPGs.

When I first studied the manuscript in the early 1990s, I did it with scissors and paste and black-and-white photocopies on the floor of my living room. It is truly thrilling to see it in glorious IIIF-compliant interoperable color in Fragmentarium! I hope that it will complement the liturgical, art historical, and musicological study in my book: http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/music/nineteenth-century-music/gottschalk-antiphonary-music-and-liturgy-twelfth-century-lambach