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Maricarmen Gomez Muntane, El Canto de la Sibila, I: Leon y Castilla. Madrid: Editorial Alpuerto, 1996. Pp. 77 + illustration, musical transcriptions.
The editor of the present book is one of the most successful of Spanish musicologists today, judging from Gomez Muntane's recent record of editions, ranging across ages of Spanish manuscript and printed collections, and her numerous articles reaching into the pages of this journal. Her twenty-eight-page Introduction treats the tenth-century origin, dramatization, vernacularization, and late cultivation of the "Song of the Sybil" in transpyrenean ritual practices beyond those of the Spanish March. Chief resources, appropriately used, are Higini Angles' La Musica a Catalunya fins al segle XIII (1935) and Richard B. Donovan's Liturgical Drama in Medieval Spain (1958).
Gomez edits the extra-Catalonian-Valencian witnesses of the famous prophetic praeconium of the Nativity in two formats: first, the texts with critical notes and source reference following each version, all concluded by a very serviceable bibliography; second, the edition proper in musical score. Her introduction deals with this and related quasiliturgical creations, notably the Pseudo-Augustinian Sermo de symbolo and the Ordo Prophetarum. She considers the case of ten text-music versions of the sibylline prophecy which she has edited in historical progression: I. Sigienza (Arch. Capit. 20, fol. 35^sup v^); II. Leon (Arch. Capit. 23, fols. 4^sup v^ -8^sup r^); III. Toledo (Arch. Capit. 48.10, fol. 40^sup r^-40^sup v^); IV. Madrid, B.N. 10069 (Cantiga No. 100), with El Escorial, B. del Monasterio B.I.2 (Song No. 12); V. Monastery of Silos (lost MS., accessed through a photograph in the private collection of J.M^sup a^ Lamana, fols. viii^sup v^-xiv); VI. New York, Hispanic Society of America, HC:380/897, fols. 101V-102r; VII. Madrid B. del Palacio Real II-1335, fol. ccl"; VIII. Sevilla, B. Colombina 7-1-28, fol. lxxxviii r; IX. Sevilla, B. Colombina 7-1-28, fols. ciiii ^sup v^ cv ^sup r;; X. Toledo, Arch. Capit. 21, fols. 29^sup v^-- sup v^ 30^sup r^. The last four versions are polyphonic: VII by Alonso de Cordoba, VIII anonymous, IX by Juan de Triana, and X by Cristobal de Morales (VII and IX edited by Angles, Table III). Included also, as discussed in the introduction, are the verses of Cristobal de Castillejo (c.1494 in Salamanca-c.1590 in Toledo).
In the Latin versions, I and II from...