Stringed Instruments of the Middle Ages by Hortense Panum

Stringed Instruments of the Middle Ages: Their Evolution and Development by Hortense Panum is a comprehensive organological study of musical instruments and their development over time. The book provides a detailed taxonomic and historical account of how modern stringed instruments evolved from antiquity through the medieval period.

With more than 400 illustrations, the work traces the movement of instruments across different regions and examines changes in their design, construction, stringing, and methods of performance. Panum’s original research was published across three volumes. This English edition brings the complete body of her work together in a single volume, incorporating her studies of stringed instruments without a fingerboard, stringed instruments with a fingerboard, and fingerboard instruments with a neck. Together, these sections represent decades of detailed research and scholarship. The book covers a wide range of instruments, including the lyre, harp, lute, gittern, guitar, fiddle, rebec, and early precursors to the viol and violin families, among many others.

This is an early English edition, published by William Reeves in the early 1940s and revised and edited from the original Danish by Jeffrey Pulver. It comes with its original terracotta-coloured dust jacket. The volume contains all 511 pages and is bound in black cloth-covered boards, with copper-coloured lettering to the spine. It is extensively illustrated, with more than 400 illustrations, including musical notation and a frontispiece.

There is some minor foxing to the page edges and the opening leaves; however, the remainder of the book is in very good condition, with the pages bright, clean, and showing little evidence of wear. The binding remains tight and secure. Overall, this book is in excellent condition.

It is being sold for £75.

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