Early Music Recordings as Mythography: Monteverdi and the ‘Other’ Vespers

In 1989, at St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, John Eliot Gardiner conducted and recorded Claudio Monteverdi’s Marian Vespers, published in 1610. Despite the print’s dedication to Pope Paul V, the three-year gap between the print being issued and Monteverdi taking up the post of maestro di cappella at St Mark’s and the considerable stylistic diversity of the pieces contained in that print, Gardiner considers Monteverdi’s Vespers as one coherent whole, for which the Venetian basilica was the target venue. Gardiner’s project has undoubtedly played a major role in how present-day audiences conceive of the 1610 Vespers. It has thus made a permanent mark on contemporary musical culture, as evidenced by the numerous reissues of the 1989 album and, most of all, productions by other musicians that associate the 1610 Vespers with St Mark’s. This article discusses the concept of ‘Monteverdi’s Vespers’ as represented in contemporary record releases of the composer’s works. This concept refers both to Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine, published in 1610, and to various modern compilations of his works which musicians, musicologists and producers refer to as ‘Vespers’. The great wealth of Vespers-related pieces held in libraries and archives still considerably outweighs the number of performances and recordings of those works. Monteverdi’s Vespers, on the other hand, make up the majority of existing recordings of seventeenth-century polyphonic Vespers and thus constitute a key point of reference. I analyse around 500 albums (not only with Vespers music) released between 1952 and 2019, focussing on their iconographic and typographic content, as well as their graphic designs, in an attempt to show how the modern vision of this repertoire came to be formed and what persons and places are associated with this current in the history of early music recording.

“Are all diseases dead”: The Likelihood of an Attribution to Ben Jonson

Arents S288 (Acc. No. 5442), pp. 87–88, and Rosenbach 239/27, p. 327, attribute the poem that begins “Are all diseases dead nor will death say” to Ben Jonson. While A.S.W. Rosenbach (1876–1952) owned both of these manuscripts at one point, it was actually Edwin Wolf 2nd (1911–1991) who penciled in the Jonson attributions in both manuscripts. However, the poem is found in many other manuscripts without this attribution. This paper considers the origin and validity of Wolf's attribution, and then asks, apart from Wolf's attribution, if it is plausible that Jonson wrote the poem. Wolf's consistently correct attributions in Arents S288 and correct attribution in MS 239/27 indicate that he was not as unreliable as the Rosenbach Museum & Library suggests. Ludovick Stuart, the Duke of Lennox and Richmond, who is the subject of the poem, died on 16 February 1624. My research demonstrates that an attribution to Jonson is highly plausible in terms of biographical, manuscript, and stylistic evidence. Jonson knew the poem's subject: he lived with the Duke's brother, Esmé Stuart, Lord d'Aubigny, for many years, and d'Aubigny occupied the role of patron. While the poem is elsewhere attributed to Sir John Eliot (b. 1592) or John Donne, neither is a strong candidate. The Duke fulfills the categories that I establish as Jonson's motivations to write in this poetic form: he was a significant figure and he had a personal connection to Jonson. Moreover, Jonson wrote for d'Aubigny's family on repeated occasions – and at length – over many decades.

John Eliot, John Veniaminov, and engagement with the indigenous peoples of North America: A comparative missiology, part I

John Eliot was the 17th-century settler and Puritan clergyman who sought to engage with his Wampanoag neighbors with the Christian gospel, eventually learning their language, winning converts, establishing schools, translating the Bible and other Christian literature, even establishing villages of converted native Americans, before everything was wiped out in the violence of the King Philip War. John Eliot is all but forgotten outside the narrow debates of early American colonial history, though he was one of the first Protestants to attempt to engage his indigenous neighbors with the gospel. John Veniaminov was a Russian Orthodox priest from Siberia who felt called to bring Christianity to the indigenous Aleut and Tinglit peoples of island and mainland Alaska. He learned their languages, established schools, gathered worshiping communities, and translated the liturgies and Christian literature into their languages. Even in the face of later American persecution and marginalization, Orthodoxy in the indigenous communities of Alaska remains a vital and under-acknowledged Christian presence. Later made a bishop (Innocent) and then elected the Metropolitan of Moscow, Fr. John (now St. Innocent) is lionized in the Russian Church but almost unknown outside its scope, even in Orthodox circles. This 2-part article examines the ministries of these men, separated by time and traditions, and yet working in similar conditions among the indigenous peoples of North America, to learn something of both their missionary motivation and their methodology.

John Eliot, John Veniaminov, and Christian engagement with the indigenous peoples of North America: A comparative missiology

John Eliot was the 17th-century settler Puritan clergyman who sought to engage his Wampanoag neighbors with the Christian gospel, eventually learning their language, winning converts, establishing schools, translating the Bible and other Christian literature, even establishing villages of converted native Americans, before everything was wiped out in the violence of the King Philip War. John Eliot is all but forgotten outside the narrow debates of early American colonial history, though he was one of the first Protestants to attempt to engage his indigenous neighbors with the gospel. John Veniaminov was a Russian Orthodox priest from Siberia who felt called to bring Christianity to the indigenous Aleut and Tinglit peoples of island and mainland Alaska. He learned their languages, established schools, gathered worshiping communities, and translated the liturgies and Christian literature into their languages. Even in the face of later American persecution and marginalization, Orthodoxy in the indigenous communities of Alaska remains a vital and under-acknowledged Christian presence. Later made a bishop (Innocent) and then elected the Metropolitan of Moscow, Fr. John (now St. Innocent) is lionized in the Russian Church but almost unknown outside its scope, even in Orthodox circles. This article examines the ministries of these men, separated by time and traditions, and yet working in similar conditions among the indigenous peoples of North America, to learn something of both their missionary motivation and their methodology.

John Eliot’s pastoral theology of poverty and an “obscure low condition”—including that of being “a worm”—in his Harmony of the Gospels (1678) published two years after Metacom’s War

Roughly two years after Metacom’s War, John Eliot published a Lord’s Supper preparativo titled, The Harmony of the Gospels, in the Holy History of the Humiliation and Sufferings of Jesus Christ from his Incarnation to his Death and Burial (1678). The book’s 130 pages provide a copious survey of various sufferings undergone by Jesus which Eliot parsed out of his reading of Scripture. Eliot posed several parallels between the experiences of Jesus, on one hand, and those of genuine Christians on the other. One of these parallels is the experience of poverty and what Eliot repeatedly called an “obscure low condition” that obtains from poverty. Considering Eliot’s long experience in cross-cultural ministry in a tenuous colonial context, this is one of the most striking features of the book. I believe it resonates with the Native Christian experience more than the white colonial Christian experience. Time and again Eliot makes an authorial movement from Gospel narrative and biblical commentary to contemporary application for Christian readers. I suggest that Eliot intended to voice comfort at times in The Harmony specifically to Native Christians by assuring them their experience of marginalization and suffering did not negate their status as a part of God’s people. What Eliot wrote about the low condition of being “a worm” reflects convictions likely forged in the fires of cross-cultural ministry in colonial context. Eliot’s multifaceted and expectant vision for the praying towns was a casualty of Metcom’s War. He seems to have changed his interpretation of 1 Corinthians 1:26–29. The theological motif of Zechariah’s temple rebuilding mission was replaced by the suffering Messiah’s rejection as the prominent biblical type informing Eliot’s expectations for the development of Native Christianity. In this carefully nuanced pastoral theology of poverty is also a prophetic critique of injustice toward the poor and marginalized.

The Archaeology of Magunkaquog

Chapter 3 details the history of the Magunkaquog site from the features and material culture recovered through archaeological investigations in the late 1990s, combined with information from documentary records. With this site, the location of a seventeenth-century praying town meeting house, collaboration began between the archaeologists and the Nipmuc Nation. Certain practices revealed through archaeology conducted at this site provide clear evidence of a continuum between the post-contact inhabitants at Magunkaquog and their pre-contact cultural practices. Connections to other Native sites in southern New England also exist. Analyses of soils, ceramics, metals, glass, pipes, lithics, buttons and other artifacts provide a glimpse into the everyday lives of the site’s inhabitants 350 years ago as they encountered intense cultural changes with the arrival of John Eliot and other European settlers coupled with the adoption of European products into their lives.