Taking Notae on King and Cleric: Thibaut, Adam, and the Medieval Readers of the Chansonnier de Noailles (T-trouv) (original) (raw)

The serpentine flourishes of the monogram No ta in light brown ink barely catch the eye in the marginal space beside a wide swath of much darker and more compact letters (see .1). But catch the eye they do, if not in the first instance, then at some point over the course of their fifty-five occurrences throughout the 233 folios of ms. T-trouv., also known as the Chansonnier de Noailles.1 In most cases the monogram looks more like No ā -where the "a" and the "t" have fused into one peculiar ligature. Variations of the monogram indicate a range of more or less swift and continuous execution (see .2), but consistency in size and ink color strongly suggest the work of a single annotator. Adriano Cappelli's Dizionario di abbreviature latine ed italiane includes a nearly exact replica of this scribal shorthand for nota, which he dates to the thirteenth century.2 Thus the notae, and the act of reading they indicate, took place soon after its compilation in the 1270s or 1280s.