This handsomely produced book is a remarkable achievement. Knowledge that Drew Hartzell was working on the catalogue had been circulating for several decades, for so long, in fact, that it acquired almost mythical status, so that its eventual publication was greeted with surprise as well as delight. It has a fine appearance and will look well on any library shelf.

The book deserves the epithet ‘monumental’ in a number of ways. On over seven hundred pages no fewer than 364 sources are covered. The description of the sources themselves takes up pp. 1–639, and there is a bibliography of some 314 items, an index of chant incipits containing over 3,600 items (why so many? see below), and an index of subjects with over 1,700 items (mainly rubrics in the manuscripts and liturgical occasions). Only the small number of half-tone plates is somewhat disappointing, as I shall remark later. I would have welcomed a list of manuscripts known by a name such as the ‘Bodmin Gospels’ or the ‘Bosworth Psalter’. Place names are not indexed: the number of references to Winchester would have been rather forbidding, but Sherborne, Tynemouth, St Vaast and so on would undoubtedly have been useful. More disappointing is the lack of indexes by type of book and by date. Yet the riches of the volume are undeniable, the fruit, as Hartzell says in his introduction, of nearly thirty years of visiting libraries all over the world and examining ‘more than 1500 manuscripts, some more than five times’. His work has thus taken him to Alençon (1 source), Bury St Edmunds (2), Cambridge (64), Canterbury (3), Chelmsford (2), Chicago (1), Copenhagen (4), Dorchester (Dorset) (2), Douai (Berkshire) (1), Douai (France) (1), Dublin (3), Durham (11), Edinburgh (2), El Escorial (1), Eton (2), Exeter (1), Le Havre (1), Helsinki (4), Hereford (6), Leicester (1), Lincoln (4), London (86), Matlock (1), New York (4), Nottingham (2), Oslo (28), Oxford (71), Paris (3), Rome (2), Rouen (6), Rygnestad (1), Salisbury (10), Shrewsbury (2), Southwell (1), Stockholm (23), Stonyhurst (1), Taunton (1), Winchester (1), Wisbech (1) and Worcester (3). Some sources are now split between more than one library (not taken into account in the figures above); and of course Hartzell must have visited many more libraries, for sources not accepted in the final catalogue. Not least for a scholar based at the University of Rochester, New York, this represents a vast expenditure of time, energy and, be it also said, financial resources. Ave, doctor diligentissime!

I think it is fair to say that the existence of the majority of the sources was known previously. Britain has been well served by such scholars as Frere, van Dijk and Ker, and systematic cataloguing projects such as those in the Nordic libraries have made valuable discoveries. I do not know how many manuscripts make their first appearance here in the scholarly literature. But this does not matter, for they are now presented with a detail which is in many cases quite unprecedented.

Hartzell's introduction explains the methods of description followed in the catalogue, with some interesting comments on particular issues. There is a section on ‘Anglo-Saxon neums’ (note the slightly archaic spelling) which lists and explains the common signs. The same might have been done for Breton neumes, which also turn up frequently in English manuscripts. Better still would have been the inclusion of a table to illustrate the basic shapes and some of their important variants. I am not sure why a section of the introduction should be devoted to ‘Fleury’, since Hartzell concludes that ‘the influence of its notation on England's written musical culture appears to have been negligible’ (p. xxiv). One could imagine similar sections on ‘Corbie’ or ‘Saint-Denis’, but there was obviously a limit to the amount of analytical discussion that Hartzell could include.

The descriptions are set out in the following way. After the library shelfmark comes a short designation of the chief contents of the source (‘Hymnal’, ‘Missal’ or whatever – it might have been better to add ‘fragment’ in very many cases) and its date. There follows a short description of the contents, indicating the extent of the musical notation. A great many of the sources are fragments used as binding material for later books. The next part of the entry is a full or partial inventory of the source, often with the addition of references to editions or listings of the piece in question. Finally come paragraphs in smaller type. They describe the handwriting of the literary text, the musical notation, then give the dimensions and other codicological and palaeographical information, and end with a statement about where the manuscript was written and bibliographical references. In the inventories, I find the printing of rubrics in bold typeface somewhat disturbing. It is clear that a typographical distinction was required, something to match the red ink commonly used in the original sources, but the entries become somewhat too prominent.

By and large, the descriptions meet any reasonable demands for comprehensiveness. Other scholars would have described this or that feature differently, but the sheer quantity of information is more than generous. Among other things, Hartzell's identification of the liturgical category to which each item belongs deserves very sincere thanks, for the correct designation is by no means always straightforward. Naturally, one is delighted that each item in the smaller fragments is identified and listed. And there are many larger sources where only a few words here and there are notated, as incipits, for example. None of these tiny entries is missed. But the policy of listing full contents is extended to complete sources as well, and some of these are very comprehensive indeed. Hartzell lists notated chant items in full, though not prayers or lessons in those sources which contain non-musical items. For pontificals he makes an exception, listing each liturgical occasion and also chants which are not notated. (Unfortunately, this is not done for the famous collection known as the ‘Cambridge Songs’, Cambridge University Library, Gg.5.35.) Readers may be interested to know which sources are treated in this comprehensive way (the designations are simplified here):

Some of these inventories contain hundreds of entries and cover many, many pages. Hartzell saw himself compelled to take shortcuts in two ways, for which he should not necessarily be chastised too harshly although they make the inventories less convenient. For graduals he does not list all the chants, only those where the selection differs from source ‘K’ (from Corbie) in Hesbert's Antiphonale Missarum Sextuplex. This is explained only in the introduction (pp. xxv–xxvi), and there is no warning in the actual descriptions of the individual sources. (Not many readers will have easy access to AMS, although the incipits, at least, are available online among the data-files at www-musikwissenschaft.uni-r.de/cantus.)

Readers may have wondered why Durham B.III.11 was not listed above, the twenty-four leaves of an eleventh-century antiphoner of which Frere published a facsimile in 1923 (under the title Pars antiphonarii) and which was included in Hesbert's Corpus Antiphonale Officium (as source ‘G’: ‘Gallicanum’). Here Hartzell does not list each chant, but simply indicates the number and category of the chants (RVA I10R 5AA, etc.) using Andrew Hughes's abbreviation system (from Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office, 1982). He says: ‘Although the description seems formidable at first glance, a comparison of its text with that of the manuscript as calendared [‘calendared’?] in CAO should unlock its logic’ (p. xxvi). If even one complete antiphoner had survived, there might have been an argument for adopting a shorthand of this sort, though only for reasons of space. As it is, rather little space is saved. And nothing can really replace a proper list of the chants, not least since Frere had not included one in his facsimile. In any case, it would have been more logical to adopt the same policy with regard to antiphoners and CAO as in the case of graduals and AMS.

Nevertheless, the coverage of these substantial sources is undoubtedly impressive, while their restricted number (I picked out thirty-three above) indicates the enormous quantity of sources of which only fragments survive, or in which little notation has been entered. Sometimes the entries are no more than pen-trials. But Hartzell describes them all, if they fall within his time-span. (Later additions to manuscripts are mentioned but not inventoried.)

It would be interesting – but probably asking too much – to know which manuscripts Hartzell considered but rejected, and on what grounds. He must have seen many, many sources practically unknown to scholarship, and it would have been good to have had at least a simple checklist of them. Questions would no doubt arise about the author's judgement, but that is the case with any catalogue, the present one not excepted. On the other hand, Hartzell's grounds for including some of his chosen sources are not particularly clear. The troper BL Royal 8 C.XIII, for example, he confidently assigns to Normandy. The only connection with England appears to be the signature of John Theyer added on the back of the last folio, but surely not before 1200. Here it may be recollected that Ker's Medieval Libraries of Great Britain included an italic letter preceding the short title of each entry, ‘to denote the kind of evidence on which the book is assigned to a particular medieval library’. That is a minimum, appropriate for the concise nature of Ker's catalogue, and quite invaluable as far as it goes. Catalogues such as that of processionals by Michel Huglo for RISM frequently include a short note explaining how their origin was decided. Hartzell expects that his description has been clear enough for the final designation ‘Written in England’, ‘Written at Worcester’, etc., to be more or less obvious.

Some of the most valuable entries are those for the fragments in the Nordic countries, many of them brought together from disparate locations. (We can see the names of those who made these invaluable identifications in the introduction.) Some are quite substantial, such as the thirty-one fragments of an antiphoner in the Norwegian Royal Archives, lat. fragm. 873, or a number of sources in the Swedish Royal Archives, including two breviaries, BR 312 of which eighteen leaves survive and BR 436 with twenty-seven leaves, and two missals, MI 1 with twenty-four leaves and five fragments surviving, and MI 4 with thirty-six leaves. Most of these Hartzell assigns to England (MI 4 to London), though it is not always clear (to me, at any rate) how the matter is to be decided. The sanctorale (if enough is present) and above all the notation provide good evidence. But can one always be certain that a scribe trained in an English tradition could not have been working in Norway?

The matter of notation brings me to what is the least satisfactory aspect of the catalogue. Hartzell goes to great pains to describe the notations, trying to provide something a little more specific, or characteristic, or memorable, than a simple designation such as ‘Anglo-Saxon neum[e]s’ or whatever. So we have ‘Anglo-Saxon neums drawn at a good cant’ (p. 377), ‘flexible Anglo-Norman neums’ (p. 387), ‘antiseptic Anglo-Saxon neums’ (p. 456, the main scribe of Bodley 775, by the way), and then in many cases an attempt to characterise each individual sign. Hartzell would have been a hard taskmaster in a medieval scriptorium, though he can also bestow praise.Footnote ¹ The literary text of BL Royal 5 E.VII, f. 1 (a single leaf of an eleventh-century gradual) is in ‘A fluid but misshapen Caroline which leans to the right’. The notator gets better marks: ‘An estimable Anglo-Saxon notation’, upon which there follow fifteen lines of description (over 200 words) of the individual neumes. Sometimes one can indeed imagine what Hartzell means, but it is difficult to relate one description to another, for there is no attempt to draw the threads together. Of the text hand in this manuscript, Hartzell says ‘It is similar to that observed in other manuscripts and fragments described in this catalogue’ and devotes six lines to pointing out the characterstic features. But there are no cross-references to the other manuscripts he has in mind. A systematic study, at least of the notations, would in fact be a book in its own right. In the circumstances it might well have been preferable to omit these descriptions, quirky and idiosyncratic as they often are, and provide more plates, for a good photograph is worth more than a paragraph of verbal description, however hard the author may try.

Despite this there is no doubt that Hartzell has provided a massive amount of extremely useful information. One can live with the idiosyncracies, though one hopes they do not set a trend. As more and more libraries make images of their manuscripts available online, we may hope that the lack of illustrations will be compensated.Footnote ² While the last word doubtless remains to be said on many of these manuscripts, Hartzell has provided the starting-point for any further work on the great majority of them. The Plainsong and Medieval Music Society and the Boydell Press deserve sincere thanks for making publication possible. It seems appropriate that the PMMS, with its long history of promoting research into English chant sources, should have taken Hartzell's work under its wing. Perhaps Hartzell and the PMMS might also consider setting up an online bibliography of the sources, to supplement Hartzell's entries as new items of research are published.

In the meantime, let us be grateful for what we have been given here. At the entrance to the scriptorium in Fulda were inscribed verses by Alcuin: ‘Fodere quam vites melius est scribere libros’ (‘It is more meritorious to copy books than to tend the vines, for the latter serve one's belly, the former one's soul’) – a theme expounded many times in the Middle Ages, for example by Peter the Venerable: ‘He cannot take to the plough? Then let him take up the pen; it is much more useful. In the furrows he traces on the parchment he will sow the seeds of the divine words.’Footnote ³ The books Hartzell describes with such dedication were indeed held in the highest reverence by our medieval forebears. There can scarcely be more valuable work than cataloguing them for present and future generations.