Paper Types in 17th-and 18th-Century Portuguese Music Manuscripts: Braga, Arquivo Distrital, MS 964

A ‘paper type’ in a music manuscript is defined mainly by its watermark designs and other features resulting from the papermaking process, such as chain-lines. Identifying the paper types can assist when attempting to establish a manuscript’s collation and how it was put together. At a later stage in research, this information, together with other codicological data, can be amassed from several manuscripts, potentially enabling more precise datings than were possible simply from studying the contents and written information on manuscripts. This presentation will set out my research on the paper types in Braga, Arquivo Distrital, MS 964, a complex manuscript of over 250 folios with many paper types, which contains an important repertory of keyboard music and sacred vocal music for voice and continuo. Its complexity presents a number of challenges and has discouraged analysis of the manuscript as a whole; a complete inventory of the manuscript’s content has yet to be published. An analysis of the paper types in this source shows how its different parts relate to one another, and is a help when attempting to establish when they might have been copied and at what point the collection was assembled.