Manuscripts in Cortona: fragments and liturgical books in the Archivio storico diocesano

The paper presents an important set of virtually unknown manuscripts and fragments that are conserved in the Archivio Storico Diocesano in Cortona (I-CTd). The Cortona manuscripts deserve to be rescued from their relative obscurity and taken duly into consideration and researched. I-CTd mss. D and E consist of graduals, and were written by a single scribe before 1317, probably in the first years of the fourteenth century. They present a Dominican format but occasionally employ Roman rubrics, which is unusual for the liturgical sequence of this order. The homogeneous antiphonaries (I-CTd mss. A, B, C, F and G) present a documented date (1331) and were written by several copyists following the Dominican exemplar. Although their format proves that they were intended to be illuminated, they were decorated with just a few bare capital letters and occasional ornamentation. The scribes of the antiphonaries are different from those of the Perugia manuscripts, which are also older and come from a much more organized and wellfunded scriptorium. But comparison of the manuscripts with the well-known Perugia corpus could lead to interesting discoveries and developments in the knowledge of this fascinating topic of Dominican liturgy.The order of both sets of manuscripts was rearranged during the second half of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century, and marginal notes were added.