The most breakthrough aspect of SCRIBEMUS’s research is the conceptualisation of the idea of a ‘south Frankish’ notational family. Those names (Catalan, Novalesa, Bolognese) which scholars have been questioning for years make now much more sense as regional adaptations of a shared music script. Everything became also all the more interesting, since, unlike the West and East Frankish notational varieties (as described in Rankin 2018, Writing Sounds in Carolingian Europe. The Invention of Musical Notation) that may have been more or less loosely related to the reigns of the divisio imperii, and spread therefore along networks favoured by a geo-political dimension, the south Frankish tells us instead of other networks, favoured instead by other dynamics like language (I call it this area ‘the romance arch’), trade (northern mediterranean), and intellectual exchange, as we will hear from Patrick Marschner in a bit. In a sense, this is a more vital (perhaps even more ‘real’) scenario than the well-established narrative of a radial dissemination of everything from the central Carolingian court in Aachen. Moreover, what is particularly noteworthy about all this is that these newly revealed connections led us to the confirmation of a hypothesis I formulated some years ago about the existence of a Southern Frankish notational family, to be added to the West and East Frankish families already identified by Susan Rankin in her 2018 book Writing Sound. The project is, effectively, opening a whole new direction of studies in the writing of music in the northern Mediterranean in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
