VoH-Heritage Database

This digital platform is dedicated to the consultation, analysis, and enhancement of the manuscript and musical heritage related to medieval Beneventan liturgical chant. The system allows users to explore manuscripts, chants, and melodies in an integrated way, linking codicological data, textual content, and musical structures.

The platform is designed as a research and consultation tool that provides access to sources through different but interconnected paths: manuscript search, chant search, and melody search. In this way, it is possible to study the material either starting from the manuscript as a physical object or from the individual text or its musical configuration.

Manuscript Search

The manuscript section allows users to query the corpus using specific filters such as RISM siglum, repository, location, liturgical typology, century, place of origin, and script type. The results return a selection of manuscript witnesses included in the system, offering quick access to the main identifying and descriptive data.

Each manuscript record gathers detailed codicological and historical information, including shelfmark, holding institution, location, dating, origin, content typology, script characteristics, and musical notation. The record also includes an index of liturgical occasions found within the manuscript, useful for understanding its internal organization and for navigating the associated chants.

Chant Search

The platform also allows users to search for individual chants through descriptive and liturgical-musical fields such as chant type, feast or liturgical occasion, language of the text, ritual, and form of the Latin text. This level of access makes it possible to isolate specific pieces and study them as independent units, while maintaining their connection to the source manuscript.

Each chant record presents the incipit, liturgical-musical genre, liturgical feast, ritual, language, different textual forms, references to the manuscript and folio, as well as a representation of the melody. The relationship between chant and manuscript source allows for contextual reading of the data, useful for both textual and musical analysis.

Melody Search

One of the central tools of the platform is melodic search. Through a dedicated interface, users can select a sequence of notes and query the database based on the musical profile of the chant. The system interprets the entered sequence and returns matching chants within the corpus.

Melodies are encoded in Volpiano format and visually rendered, allowing immediate reading of the musical contour. This approach makes it possible not only to identify chants through their melodic structure, but also to compare similar forms and identify relationships between different manuscript witnesses.

An Integrated Environment for Sources, Texts, and Music

The platform is designed to connect multiple levels of analysis: the manuscript as an object, the chant as a textual and liturgical unit, and the melody as a musical structure. The integration of these elements enables cross-navigation between resources and supports a broader and more articulated study of the medieval liturgical chant tradition.

The aim is to provide a reliable tool for research, cataloguing, and the enhancement of musical and manuscript heritage, capable of supporting musicological, philological, liturgical, and historical-codicological approaches.