Clipped Initials

This project examines museum and archive collections of clipped initials to discover whether they were taken from music manuscripts. It began in Summer 2024 with the initial cataloguing work of Nimue Miles and Charlotte Smith, who examined the collection in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Their handbook for describing initial decoration will be published DIAMM Publications and made available here in collaboration with the V&A.

Clipped initials come primarily from Victorian collections of initials made by personal collectors, who created collections of initials cut from manuscripts. In all cases, after the decorations had been removed the original manuscripts were discarded. Many of these collections were sold to museums and are now part of a considerable number of manuscript fragments available for examination as art-historical objects. However since many came originally from music manuscripts (more often chant than polyphony) they represent the last surviving remnants of a large number of significant manuscripts -- the quality of the decoration is testament to their importance.

The first stage of work was to classify more than 500 images of clipped initials from the V&A collection which were available on their website to identify which may have come from the same manuscript and which have sufficient borders to ascertain whether they came from music manuscripts. This was completed in Summer 2024.

The second stage will be to ascertain, with the help of the museum curators, whether the backs of the initials are accessible and, if not, whether they could be lifted to allow researchers to establish the context for the clippings.

The third stage will extend the project to museums worldwide, and we are looking for researchers local to other collections who may be able to provide practical support for this part of the project.

Many collections were originally sold in parts or shared amongst private collectors, which means that initials from the same manuscripts were dispersed to several museums. Since the original manuscripts from which the initials were cut are now lost, the task of identifying the contents from the small remaining information on the backs of the initials is daunting, but work on the pasted initials in Bologna Q15 by Prof. Margaret Bent has shown that it is possible to reconstruct the original contents of the manuscripts even with very small fragments of music.