The Bangor Pontifical Project, launched one year ago by Bangor University and Bangor Cathedral in Wales, has just reached its first significant milestone. Completion of phase one, funded by a Welsh Assembly grant, has enabled conservation and rebinding of the Bangor Pontifical and digitization of its 340 pages. The manuscript was photographed by the cutting-edge Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) last spring, and viewers may now zoom in on the excellent high-quality images via the open access Bangor Pontifical Project website.
The Bangor Pontifical is the only complete liturgical manuscript known to survive from the medieval diocese of Bangor, and one of just two extant books from medieval Wales as a whole to contain substantial plainchant notation. Inscribed as belonging originally to Anian, bishop of Bangor, it is now confidently dated to the first quarter of the fourteenth century.
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