The Family Library of the noblemen Nostitz and Rieneck has been housed in the Nostitz Palace in Prague since the 1770s, now administered by National Museum Library. Some of the 14,000 copies reused a parchment book binding which had been originally used in liturgical books from the 14th and 15th centuries. The article dissects sixty-six parchment book bindings with notations: the key part of the study provides a list of these book bindings with details about each book: the musical content of fragments, their notation, and dating. This list is introduced by a text on the history of the Nostitz Library, paying special attention to the incorporated Castle library of Otto Jr. of Nostitz (1608–1665), originally from Jawor in Lower Silesia. Since the vast majority of the notated bindings were detected on books signed by Otto Jr. of Nostitz, the musical-palaeographical analysis of the fragments also examines possible influences of the Polish notation tradition.
This study presents to the professional public a previously-unknown source for the history of Czech Renaissance music, deposited in the Ondfiej Horník collection in the Music History Division of the Czech Museum of Music (of the National Museum) in Prague under the designation NM-ČMH XXIX D 139. In 2009 this set of twenty folios was restored and then divided into five unrelated parts, namely: (a) a fragment of a part book from Rakovník, (b) a torso of polyphonic motets with the Psalm texts Chval duše má Hospodina (Praise the Lord, My Soul) and Blahoslavený každý, kdo se bojí Hospodina (Blessed Are Those Who Fear the Lord), (c) the alto part from a motet Slunéčko krásné vzešlo jest (The Beautiful Sun Has Risen), (d) a torso of the alto part from a Christmas motet, and (e) a draft of a request with the textual incipit ‘Benedictus’. The fragments come approximately from the years 1580–1620 and are of Czech origin.