The Kaunas Plainchant Book from the Seventeenth Century: One More Riddle

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present the Kaunas plainchant manuscript from the seventeenth century, which was not known to scholars to date. It is preserved at the House of Mikas and Kipras Petrauskas of the Kaunas City Museum. The paper deals with both external and internal features of the manuscript by considering the characteristics of the binding of the book, the paper used in it, and the notation and the chants recorded in it. Special attention is given to the liturgical attributes and the system according to which the chants are distributed in the book. On the one hand, it demonstrates that the manuscript is a multifunctional chant book consisting of both proper and ordinary chants for the Mass (the first part) as well as the proper chants for the divine office (the second and bigger part of the manuscript). On the basis of the external features (binding, paper) and internal features, some presumptions are made regarding the provenance of this plainchant book. One of the possibilities is that this manuscript was made and used in the milieu of the Franciscan Observants, who had a number of monasteries all over the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, including one in Kaunas.