On Easter Monday, 1 April 1532, the Paschal Candle, left alight after the Easter celebrations in St Lawrence Church, Vittoriosa, caused a fire which gutted parts of the church.

The church had over the past year or so been reserved for the Knights of the Order and barred to Maltese faithful who were made to use the Dominican Church of the Annunciation instead.

The fire burned the organ loft and a wooden balcony as well as several other objects.

This, it seems, was what decided Grand Master de l’Isle Adam to commission a new set of choral books apparently from a Parisian scriptorium.

L’Isle Adam had lost Rhodes and spent seven years wandering around Europe asking to be given a base. At the end, Emperor Charles V offered Malta to a rather reluctant Order and eventually L’Isle Adam and the Knights reached Malta in October 1530.

It was originally thought that what are known as the L’Isle Adam Graduals, this collection of choral books, was among the objects that the Order brought with it from Rhodes, but Martina Caruana has recently established that this collection dates from 1533, as proved by a date written on one book, and was thus commissioned after the Order reached Malta.

It is not known whether L’Isle Adam saw them finished before he died in 1534.

This wonderfully detailed and very informative book is based on a doctoral thesis on book conservation presented by Theresa Zammit Lupi at the University of the Arts London in 2009.

The author does not explain, however, how the books survived the 1565 Great Siege when Vittoriosa was one of the hottest spots under siege.

Somehow, the books survived and today form a very important part of the heritage that can be admired at the St John Co-Cathedral’s museum.

There are, one may add, other illuminated manuscripts both at St John’s and at the Mdina Cathedral but these L’Isle Adam Illuminated Graduals (as they are called) are not just the earliest but also the most beautifully decorated set of musical manuscripts in Malta.

 The collection consists of ten volumes. They contain the music for various feasts and Sundays in the liturgical year including proper feasts of saints and also the Common of Saints – that is, Masses than can apply to various (less-known) saints.

However, these volumes, dating from 1533, suffered many changes in their lifetime. The first change was that done in 1582, as a result of the decisions of the Council of Trent regarding singing in churches. Pages were cut from the original documents, and red rubrics outlined some of the changes made. What was cut out found its way, it seems, into backing parchments on the covers of notarial archives.

Other changes were made in the eighteenth Century in which paper was pasted over the parchment in parts of four volumes.

The last change was made in the 1950s, when Dom Mauro Inguanez, who had saved the great library of the Montecassino Abbey from destruction in World War II, then as librarian of the Royal Malta Library, undertook his own, rather amateurish restoration of the books, which ultimately caused further damage.

The author goes into many riveting details about the manufacturing techniques of the books.

The material used for the production of the L’Isle Adam graduals is calf skin. To use calf skin for writing on, the animal must be slaughtered at six months or less. Since the graduals are large in format, each leaf is made from one calf skin: there are, the author tells us, a total of 1181 individual skins used in the collection.

Each of the skins was then painstakingly scraped clean and stitched together. Then came the drawing of margins and of the rules for the music. The musical notation used was the 16th Century plainchant written with just four lines to the staff, as opposed to today’s five and with a system of square note-shapes called neumes, originating from Aquitaine. What was changed by the Council of Trent was the curbing of the long series of notes called melismas, which, as we have seen, necessitated the wholesale rearrangement of the books.

One fascinating detail regarded which came first, the notes or the text. It is still not certain, speaking generally, whether the text was written first and the music later.

The script, all rigorously handmade, was in the Gothic textualis script, all patiently inscribed by the scribes in such an exact manner that one thinks they are printed. In some places, the nib is clearly split, as can be seen from the text. In other places, especially on paper, we can still see sand that was sprinkled to dry the paint.

Then came the decoration. The book has a fascinating exercise to show the no less than 16 steps from a graphite outline, the bole, the gold leaf, etc until the final product shines across to us through all these centuries as crisp and clear as the day they were finished.