Simple Multi-Column Format
Western MS 097 more frequently presents lists and blocks of incipits in a multi-column format. In most of these instances, the text of the left-most column is read from left to right, top to bottom, before proceeding to the column to its right. Such an arrangement requires more planning than a long-line arrangement, because the scribe must decide in advance not only how much space is necessary for the block of incipits as a whole, but also how much space to allot to each column. This format is also often inefficient—if one column is longer than the other, it is necessary to leave space blank at the bottom of the shorter column. However, the multi-column layout has the potential to allow for clearer visual distinction between the chants for different feasts, dividing each feast into its own space instead of running continuously from feast to feast.
Most instances of this multi-column arrangement in Western MS 097 are brief and straightforward, including only a single feast in each column. In the following typical example, from fol. 241r, chants for the feast of Saint Paul occupy the left column, and are followed by chants for the Octave of Peter and Paul in the right column. The right column is one line longer than the left column, but because these columns fall at the bottom of the folio, no space is wasted by this mismatch in length. The columns are clearly separated from the preceding chant and from each other by vertical lines.
Even in brief instances of the multi-column layout, planning errors and ambiguities could occur. On Western MS 097 fol. 188v, the scribe and rubricator experienced some difficulties in arranging incipits of the offertory and communion for the sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost alongside the rubric for the introit for the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. The incipit of the offertory appears immediately following the previous chant, in column format, reading top to bottom. The scribe then began to write the incipit for the communion under the offertory in the same column, but only had enough space for the first word, “domine.” The scribe resolved this problem by beginning a second column to the right of the first, in which the following word, “memorabor,” is broken into syllables and written, unusually, from bottom to top. This arrangement is further confused by the fact that the line dividing the first and second columns separates the communion incipit from its rubric, falsely suggesting that it is a different chant. The communion column is followed to its right by the rubric for the introit for the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, in typical column format.
Contrast the issues resulting from the arrangement of these chants in a multi-column format with the clarity of their arrangement in long-line format in Princeton MS 245, fol. 113v, in which the entire block of incipits and rubrics reads from left to right and from top to bottom: