BOETHIUS' DE INSTITUTIONE MUSICA : A HANDLIST OF MANUSCRIPTS

Dedicated to Michel Huglo on his 65th birthday

The handlist offered in these pages is intended to serve as a prolegomenon for future historical and textual study of Boethius' De institutione musica. Such study requires a thorough of the extant codices, and this handlist represents an intermediate step toward that goal. I call this step « intermediate », because scholars before me have taken the first steps of preparing « handlists » of one kind or another, and have discussed these codices in articles and monographs treating other works by Boethius, or works by other classical and medieval authors. The goal of this list is to record and acknowledge the works of those scholars as well as to pull together a record of all extant codices containing the treatise itself or texts relating directly to its textual tradition. The list is limited to sources compiled before about 1500 and does not report manuscripts or studies of the text dating after the turn of the 16th century.

The form of this list largely follows that of Birger Munk Olsen's L'Étude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe siècles (ACL in Bibliography). The thoroughness of his approach is obviously out of place in a list as abbreviated as this, and complete codicological descriptions and detailed analyses of contents must await a future catalog and monograph treating the history of the text. Nevertheless Munk Olsen's precise methods in reference and bibliography have shaped my approach, and, in most cases, I have adopted his abbreviations for