Seek and ye shall find

It was Egon Wellesz in the Hilary Term of 1950 who first taught me the importance of going back - 'ad fontes' - to the original source material of whatever subject I was researching.

In those days and subsequently, such going back often involved long journeys by car or by rail. My little old Austin took me to Wellow in search of the English composer and keyboard virtuoso John Bull. He wasn't there. He never had been. A simple bus ride from Marylebone Road to the British Museum solved that particular riddle. When Anthony à Wood compiled his Athenae Oxonienses back in the 17th century, he confused 'my' John Bull with a man of the same name at Brasenose College. And it was the BNC alumnus who farmed the land at Wellow in Somerset.

40 years ago, the great railway lines of Europe took me to Autun and to Munich - and to many other delights - searching the archives for earliest extant examples of Western musical notation. Autun MS 19 f5 was the story of an authority figure too eagerly 'seeing' musical notation where none existed. And Munich was the story of a scholar failing to note that the melody on the very last page was not part of an original dated text.

And so to this morning, ere she of the rosy fingers had left her nocturnal couch, I go off once again chasing wild geese. I read: 'The earliest example we have of the use of accents in a New Testament manuscript dates to the 5th century AD.' It's in a MS known as the Bezae Cantabrigensis - and I sit in my cozy attic while the Internet does my searching.

Sure enough the clues are there for the finding. Codex Bezae is now MS Nn.2.41 of Cambridge University Library. It's online in digitised form. I leaf through the alternate pages of Greek and Latin written in the kind of capitals called Uncials. No sign of any accents until ...  a much later hand adds a footnote which includes signs which look to be accents over lowercase letters. They are there - I find them hard to distinguish - at the foot of slide '34 of 856'.

So there we have it. If my eyes do not deceive me : acute grave and circumflex in a 5th century CE ms. True ...  Except except except. They are not 5th century accents.

Thank you, Egon Wellesz.

fc oxon 2017 august 28 monday