Conference Agenda

The matter of “Netherlands Court Scribe B” remains complex and contentious. For almost a century, this scribe of some of the most important manuscripts from the early sixteenth century, such as the famous Chigi Codex and Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium, Ms. 9126, was thought to have been one Martin Bourgeois, a member of the Habsburg-Burgundian court chapel who was paid for the production of court music books. The apparent lack of substantiation for this initially tentative hypothesis has led in recent decades to this scribe’s eventual anonymization. Nevertheless, for the duration of these discussions in the relevant literature, the work of this scribe (named or not) has depended on the negative association with the more famous Netherlandish scribe, Petrus Alamire. Following the identification of Alamire's work in a larger corpus of manuscripts, scholars settled on Bourgeois/Scribe B as his predecessor at the court.

Yet only after this dichotomy had taken root did Flynn Warmington demonstrate how little Alamire's hand actually appears in "his" manuscripts, and that the script traditionally assigned to him was in fact the work of a long roster of anonymous assistants. Despite this fundamental revision, however, the implications for the identitiy of the copyist of the Scribe B manuscripts was never considered.

In this paper, I present paleographical evidence that the identity of Scribe B has been right in front of us all along: namely, that he was in fact Petrus Alamire himself. I lay out the historiographical circumstances that hid this ultimately unsurprising observation from view. I offer a new hypothesis for the date and production of Brussels Ms. 9126, and conclude by identifying the implications for the relationship among the “Scribe B” manuscripts, the Habsburg-Burgundian court, and the later corpus of manuscripts attributed to Alamire and his workshop.