Illuminated Sacred Music manuscripts

This collection consists of 13 individual leaves of rare 15th and 16th century original music manuscripts depicting portions of Catholic masses and prayers in Latin, hand drawn and beautifully illustrated with brilliant tempera paints on large vellum sheets. 

Each of these individual leaves originally formed part of various larger missals, or bound volumes containing all the words either said or sung in Catholic mass during the entire year, and including the ordinary, proper, and common votive masses and supplementary prayers and masses for certain localities or orders. Because they were removed from the original bound volumes, the specific location and date of their creation and use is difficult to determine.

The original materials are held by the Woodson Research Center in Fondren Library. Search the finding aid/inventory for the Illuminated Sacred Music Manuscript collection, MS 510.