Ave maris stella (Nr. 48 from: Codex Faenza 117, fols. 96v–97r)

One of the earliest and most important sources of music for keyboard instruments is a 15th-century manuscript partly written around 1420 by an unknown scribe and completed in 1473/74 by the Carmelite monk Johannes Bonadies (fl. 15th century). Probably compiled in the Carmelite monastery of San Paolo in Ferrara, it later entered the Biblioteca Manfrediana in Faenza and is therefore known today as Codex Faenza 117.

Across 98 parchment leaves, the manuscript preserves 11 vocal compositions, excerpts from various medieval music treatises, and 52 two-part instrumental pieces. Most of these are intabulations of secular vocal works from the Ars nova and Trecento traditions (including pieces by Guillaume de Machaut, Antonio Zacara da Teramo, Jacopo da Bologna, Bartolino da Padova, and Francesco Landini), alongside settings of sacred cantus firmi. Although, in line with late medieval practice, the pieces could be played on various instruments—organetti, lutes, harps, rebecs, shawms, cornets, etc.—they appear to have been intended primarily for a solo keyboard instrument such as organ, clavichord, or clavicymbalum. This makes the Codex Faenza the most extensive and—after the Robertsbridge Fragment (c. 1360)—the earliest source of keyboard music from before 1450.

The pieces are written on six-line staves in black/red Italian mensural notation, not separated as in a choirbook but arranged in two staves in score-like fashion and divided into bar-like units by distinction lines—clear evidence that these are instrumental settings.

The pieces do not bear any attribution, but some contain text incipits that enable the underlying vocal compositions to be identified and — insofar as these sources are not anonymous — their composers to be reconstructed. For others, scholars have been able to trace the musical models or, in the case of liturgical works, the cantus firmi on which they are based, as with piece no. 48, whose tenor derives from the Gregorian hymn “Ave maris stella”.