Notes on the origin of a fragmentary pontifical

ABSTRACT This article examines a group of seventy-two fragments from a twelfth-century pontifical whose attribution is under discussion. They contain part of the dedication of a church, the ordo synodalis , and the ordines for the sick, marriage and baptism, and they display neumatic notation on red lines. The fragments are kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France: five of them are now in NAL 1989, while the remaining sixty-seven are kept in a temporary repository and have not been inventoried yet. As regards their origin, the fragments have been assigned either to northern France or to England. The article considers textual concordances, as well as palaeographical and musical features, in order to reconstruct their context of production, and leaves room for methodological observations.