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The
Talbot Manuscript was compiled at the end of the seventeenth century by
James Talbot, Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge University. It is probable
that he was intending to publish the work as a book, presumably as a means
of promotion at work, but for political reasons that promotion was denied
to him, and he ceased working on it.
The most interesting (or, at least, widely known) part of the manuscript
is a collection of notes about musical instruments, totalling 241 pages
with writing on them. The manuscript is now at the library of Christ
Church, Oxford, where a previous librarian has compiled the various parts
of it into 11 sections. There are, in fact, a number of sections as
compiled by Talbot, but they don't reflect the order of the librarian. The
librarian's order is as follows.
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Section
1
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Harpsichord
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Section
2
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Organ
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Section
3
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Organ
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Section
4
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Stringed
Instruments
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Section
5
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Instrument
Notes
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Section
6
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Instrument
Information Acknowledgements
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Section
7
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Wind
Instruments
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Section
8
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Instrument
Notes
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Section
9
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Instrument
Notes
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Section
10
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Tablature
and Fingerings
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Section
11
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Tablature
and Fingerings
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Two articles concerning Talbot and the manuscript can be found at this
website. They are:
Talbot,
Mersenne and Praetorius : the uses - and abuses - of documentary sources,
paper given at the Bowed String Instrument Symposium co-organised by the
Viol da Gamba Society, EUCHMI and the Early Music Forum of Scotland,
Edinburgh, June 2000.
The Talbot manuscript - better as it is than
the book it never was?, paper given as a post-graduate seminar,
Department of Music, University of Edinburgh, February 2005, and in an
altered form as a seminar at the Department of Music, Oxford University,
November 2005.
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