Codex Faenza Facsimile Edition

The Codex Faenza is one of the most important witnesses to late Gothic instrumental music and among the earliest surviving collections of keyboard repertory. Preserved in Faenza at the Biblioteca Comunale Manfrediana, the manuscript gathers a layered musical memory of the fifteenth century, where earlier vocal works were transformed into organ intabulations and later joined by theoretical writings.

A Manuscript in Two Voices

The codex was copied in different phases. Its earliest layer, probably from the second decade of the fifteenth century, contains textless arrangements of Italian and French compositions from the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. A later layer was added by Johannes Bonadies, a Carmelite friar, theorist, and composer, who used blank leaves in 1473-1474 to record treatises on musical theory and further compositions.

Music Recast for the Keyboard

The manuscript’s repertory reveals a world in motion. Vocal pieces by figures such as Francesco Landini, Guillaume de Machaut, Jacopo da Bologna, and John Hothby are reshaped as instrumental works, often in two-part diminutions. Their notation, written on red six-line staves, preserves not only melodies but also the art of embellishment, adaptation, and performance.

A Unique Musical Archive

The manuscript’s deepest significance lies in what survives only here. Apart from a direct copy made by Giovanni Battista Martini in 1753, six of Bonadies’s theoretical entries and as many as eighteen of his added polyphonic compositions are unique to the Codex Faenza. Even more remarkable, none of the fifty intabulations in the earlier layer is preserved in any other known source. The codex therefore safeguards an otherwise lost repertory: diminished instrumental versions of celebrated vocal models, rare polyphonic dances, and the three earliest surviving alternatim Mass pairs.

Its pages preserve a whole performance culture that would otherwise have disappeared. Silent on the page yet intensely performative, the codex testifies to the emergence of instrumental music as an art of intellect, memory, and invention.