August 27, 1134 was a momentous day for the Benedictine monastery of Petershausen. It was the 139th anniversary of the death of the community's founder, Bishop Gebhard II of Constance (979–95), and after years of preparation the community stood ready to witness his canonization. At the invitation of Abbot Conrad (1127–64), Bishop Ulrich II of Constance (1127–38) and the abbots of seven of the area's monasteries gathered to take part in the festivities. ‘With tremendous joy and exultation, with hymns and praises’, the sarcophagus containing Gebhard's relics was carried at the head of a great procession of clerics, monks and lay people, starting at the soonto- be saint's old tomb, circling the entire monastic precinct and culminating with their placement with great honour in a newly prepared resting place in Petershausen's freshly restored basilica.

The occasion was clearly significant for all of the monks, lay brothers and religious women who comprised this dual-sex monastic community just across the Rhine from the city of Constance, but one among them stood at the centre of the day's liturgical events. Preparation had begun in the preceding months. There was an office for the new saint to compose, hymns and readings to choose, singers and readers to select and an order to set for the various processions. In the days just before, this monk would have presided over a dress rehearsal, checking the singing of the community's boys, readied for their role by his assistant, and correcting any errors in the music or in the pitch of the singers. On the day itself, he would have functioned as a kind of ‘master of ceremonies’, distributing the copes to all the members of the community in order of rank, ministering to the arriving bishop and intoning the chants. This anonymous monk was Petershausen's cantor (precentor or armarius), a person of high rank within the hierarchy of monastic communities in the central Middle Ages, following only the abbot, prior and claustral prior in importance.