Rossi Codex

The Rossi Codex is a music manuscript collection of the 14th century. The current manuscript is divided into two sections, one in the Vatican Library and another, smaller section in the Northern Italian town of Ostiglia. The codex contains 37 secular works including madrigals, cacce and, uniquely among trecento sources, monophonic ballatas. The codex is of great interest for trecento musicologists because for many years it was considered the earliest source of fourteenth-century Italian music. Although other pre-1380 sources of secular, polyphonic, Italian music have now been identified, none are nearly so extensive as the Rossi Codex.
Structure and history
Although the manuscript originally had at least 32 folios, only 18 survive today.
The largest part of the current Rossi Codex is in the Vatican Library (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rossi 215). This section comprises seven bifolios, ff. 1–8 and ff. 18–21. In the early nineteenth century...