Medieval Cantors and Their Craft: Music, Liturgy and the Shaping of History, 800-1500

Description

Cantors made unparalleled contributions to the way time was understood and history was remembered in the medieval Latin West. The men and women who held this office in cathedrals and monasteries were responsible for calculating the date of Easter and the feasts dependent on it, for formulating liturgical celebrations season by season, managing the library and preparing manuscripts and other sources necessary to sustain the liturgical framework of time, and promoting the cults of saints. Crucially, their duties also often included committing the past to writing, from simple annals and chronicles to more fulsome histories, necrologies, and cartularies, thereby ensuring that towns, churches, families, and individuals could be commemorated for generations to come. This volume seeks to address the fundamental question of how the range of cantors' activities can help us to understand the many different ways in which the past was written and, in the liturgy, celebrated across the Middle Ages. Its essays are studies of constructions, both of the building blocks of time and of the people who made and performed them, in acts of ritual remembrance and in written records; cantors, as this book makes clear, shaped the communal experience of the past in the Middle Ages. List of Illustrations viii Contributors x Acknowledgments xiv Abbreviations xvi Introduction 1 Part I. The Carolingian Period 1. Historia: Some Lexicographical Considerations / David Ganz 8 2. Liturgy and History in the Early Middle Ages / Rosamond McKitterick 23 3. Notker Bibliothecarius / Susan Rankin 41 4. Singing History: Chant in Ekkehard IV's "Casus sancti Galli" / Lori Kruckenberg 59 Part II. The Eleventh Century 5. Adémar de Chabannes (989–1034) as Musicologist / James Grier 90 6. Cantor or Canonicus? In Search of Musicians and Liturgists in Eleventh-Century Constance / Henry Parkes 103 7. Shaping the Historical Dunstan: Many Lives and a Musical Office / Margot E. Fassler 125 8. Female Monastic Cantors and Sacristans in Central Medieval England: Four Sketches / Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis 151 9. Cantor, Sacrist or Prior? The Provision of Books in Anglo-Norman England / Teresa Webber 172 10. Symeon of Durham as Cantor and Historian at Durham Cathedral Priory, c. 1090–1129 / Charles C. Rozier 190 11. Reshaping History in the Cult of Æbbe of Coldingham / Lauren L. Whitnah 207 12. William of Malmesbury as a Cantor-Historian / Paul Antony Hayward 222 13. Lex orandi, lex scribendi? The Role of Historiography in the Liturgical Life of William of Malmesbury / Sigbjørn Olsen Sønnesyn 240 14. Of the Making of Little Books: The Minor Works of William of Newburgh / A. B. Kraebel 255 Part IV. On the Continent: Five Case Studies 15. The Cantors of the Holy Sepulchre and their Contribution to Crusade History and Frankish Identity / Cara Aspesi 278 16. Shaping Liturgy, Shaping History: A Cantor-Historian from Twelfth-Century Peterhausen / Alison I. Beach 297 17. The Roman Liturgical Tradition According to a Twelfth-Century Roman Cantor / Peter Jeffery 310 18. A Life in Hours: Goswin of Bossut's Office for Arnulf of Villers / Anna de Bakker 326 19. Writing History to Make History: Johannes Meyer's Chronicles of Reform / Claire Taylor Jones 340 Index of Manuscripts 357 General Index 361