17th-Century Printed Anthologies: The First Decade is Now Online
Thursday, March 28, 2019
Have you ever been annoyed that you can’t consistently find entries for 17th-century printed anthologies in the RISM catalog? We are working on changing that!
The project to revise entries from 1500 and later in RISM’s series B/I, which has been underway since April 2017 and which has in the meantime reached well into the second half of the century, has – since November 2018 – been extended to the entries dating from 1601 and later. The first 217 of around 1,100 total entries, meaning years 1601-1610, can now be found online.
As is also the case with the entries from the 16th century, many of the B/I records must be merged with duplicates from A/I that are already published in the catalog; an entry also has an A/I number when, with few exceptions, all compositions in the print are by the same composer. Information from the B/I record has been integrated into the duplicate A/I record – and of course you find both series numbers in such revised records, as in 1607|122 and P 5352; PP 5352.
Our focus is on ensuring improved clarity of the RISM records when merging entries, but we also place a special emphasis on updating and correcting the records. After all, pure B/I records (that is, those without A/I duplicates) reflect the state of knowledge in 1960. The online catalog offers the possibility to go beyond the print publication by providing more details: Shelfmarks and provenance notes of individual copies as well as diplomatic transcriptions of the title pages are added whenever possible. Since a number of large libraries are increasingly digitizing their collections (for example the Bavarian State Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Museo internazionale e biblioteca della musica di Bologna, the KBR in Brussels), our adding title pages is increasingly common. Bibliographic studies of publishers and other secondary literature, on the other hand, are often in short supply; in case you are interested in music publishers of the 16th/17th century and need a dissertation topic, a publishers’ bibliography on Giacomo Vincenti would be absolutely worthwhile!
The Union Catalogue of Books Printed in German Speaking Countries in the 17th Century (VD 17) has also proven to be a gold mine. When we look there for shelfmarks and digitized copies, it is not a rare occurrence to discover exemplars in VD 17 that have not even been reported in RISM. A good example is Ludwig Helmbold’s_Crepundia Sacra_ (Erfurt: Singe, 1608; B/I 1608|6 and A/I B 4976). Whereas B/I only listed copies in Halle/Saale (D-HAu), Wolfenbüttel (D-W), and London (GB-Lbl), A/I was able to add a copy from the Schneider private collection (D-Fschneider). Upon consulting VD 17 (39:149280Z) we now have three additional copies: in Munich (D-Mbs), Göttingen (D-Gs), and Gotha (D-GOl); at the same time, VD 17 does not list the Schneider and London copies. So where can you look in the future when you want to see all (known) copies of an anthology? That’s right! In the RISM catalog.
We are always happy to hear from you when you notice mistakes or know of additional copies and indispensable secondary literature. Just send an email to contact@rism.info.
Image: Ludwig Helmbold, Crepundia Sacra (Erfurt: Singe, 1608). RISM ID no. 990007573. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (D-Mbs) Liturg. 1467 g. Available online.
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