Arizona State University:
A book of liturgical chants, illustrated with geese, foxes, bears, dogs and cats, sounds like a Dr. Seuss creation – but the Geese Book actually is a 500-year-old liturgical manuscript that once was used in Nuremberg, Germany...
[ASU professor Corine] Schleif discovered the Geese Book when she was a doctoral student...
The book was created by artists and craftsmen in Nuremberg to preserve the complete liturgy used in the parish of St. Lorenz, as it was sung by the choir of young adults and schoolboys. The book survived World War II and came came into the hands of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, whose founders trace their roots back to a patrician family in Nuremberg. The Kress Foundation helped the church rebuild after Nuremberg was bombed. In return, the church presented the Geese Book to the foundation.
Eventually, the foundation gave the two-volume book to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York – where, at 30 inches by 50 inches, it is the largest book in the library’s collection. But it had to be large; when it was used in the church five centuries ago, the St. Lorenz choir members had to share it...The website for the scholarly project.
It is known that the cleric Friedrich Rosendorn was responsible for the writing, and it is thought that Jakob Elsner painted the incredibly detailed illustrations, but scholars can only guess at the meaning of the whimsical drawings.
The book takes its name from an enigmatic, self-referential, bas-de-page illustration that shows a choir of geese and a fox singing from a large chant manuscript with a wolf as their choirmaster, Schleif says.
A compact disk recording some of the music.
