Ainard of Dives and the Ste-Catherine-du-Mont office for St Katherine of Alexandria: ‘Inter praecipuos cantores scientia musicae artis’

ABSTRACTOrderic Vitalis writes that Ainard, a monk of Ste-Catherine-du-Mont monastery, composed a historia for St Katherine of Alexandria for use at his institution, which possessed the saint's oil-secreting finger bones. Through a series of historiographical errors, throughout the twentieth century it came to be believed either that Ainard composed not a liturgical office, but a prose vita of the saint, or that the office he had composed was lost. This article presents a survey of the oldest extant offices for St Katherine, showing that the office widely disseminated in German-speaking lands can be traced to Normandy, and through palaeographical and codicological analysis of its earliest source, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. lat. 1083, to Ste-Catherine-du-Mont in the late eleventh century. The office contained in this manuscript juxtaposes newly composed proper chants for St Katherine with existing chants from a variety of liturgical sources that honoured established saints, and emphasises the power of St Katherine's relics. The contents and themes of the office suggest an agenda of legitimisation and cultic publicity on the part of its creator, which would be consistent with the aims of a monk of Ste-Catherine. If this manuscript is indeed from Ste-Catherine-du-Mont, it likely records the office that Ainard composed. This attribution is reinforced by a textual-melodic style and modal organisation that grounds it in a later style of chant composition, which Ainard – a south German by birth – would likely have been familiar with.

‘And lastly, one for Saint Blaise’: bishops, widows and patronage in a lost Office of Reginold of Eichstätt

ABSTRACTThis article concerns a fragmentary Office for Saint Blaise found in D-PREk Reihe V G1, a late fourteenth-century antiphoner from the Benedictine convent of Kloster Preetz. Despite the late date of the source, compositional similarities between this office and the Saint Nicholas office support the possibility that the former may be a lost Office attributed to Bishop Reginold of Eichstätt (r. 966–91) by the chronicler Anonymus Haserensis. I argue that Reginold may have written both the Office for Saint Blaise and the recension of the passio on which it is based for Pia of Bergen (Biletrud, Duchess of Bavaria), whom the chronicler names as Reginold's patron. This theory is supported by a consideration of the historical position and practices of Ottonian aristocratic widows, the development of saints’ cults in tenth-century Eichstätt and the text of the passio itself. These findings give new insight into the office compositions of Reginold of Eichstätt, the Ottonian veneration of Byzantine saints and female patrons’ involvement in the liturgical arts and establishment of cults in the late tenth century. These findings also provide hints to the origin of the liturgy of Kloster Preetz, whose mother house has never been identified.

Dealing with change: the Carthusians and Corpus Christi

ABSTRACTThe Carthusian Order is known for its conservative attitude towards liturgy and music. This article will explore how this attitude played out in practice when the Carthusians were confronted with the introduction of a major new feast. Since its origins in the late eleventh century, the Order incorporated several new feasts in its calendar. These additions were normally made with a significant delay, and almost always without any new chants created for these feasts. The feast of Corpus Christi provides an interesting case study. Contrary to their habit, the Carthusians were apparently quick to adopt it, and they included most of the chants that were compiled and edited for this feast. In doing this, they took the Cibavit eos Mass and the Sacerdos in aeternum Office, most famously found in a late thirteenth-century libellus (F-Pnm, lat. 1143) as a point of departure. The Mass Propers were largely taken over, but small variations in the melodies raise interesting questions about how they were transmitted. By contrast, the office chants were thoroughly reordered and melodically edited in various ways, giving us a tangible sense of how Carthusians dealt with change.