The aim of this project is to bridge the gap between the musicological study of the music itself and the study of its historical sources. While the latter is the subject of subdisciplines such as palaeography and codicology, the former is carried out by music historians and analysts working mainly from modern transcriptions of the original material. The proposed research brings together these approaches by focussing explicitly on musical notation. It will thoroughly examine the notational appearance of a well chosen repertoire (the early 16th-century Alamire manuscripts). This analysis is embedded in a solid theoretic foundation, based on research into the intellectual culture of the renaissance and its conception of musical notation. With connections to present day editorial undertakings, the results of the investigations will have bot academic and practical implications. In that sense, the project is both original (by its methodology) and relevant (by its applicability).