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Medieval Cantors and their Craft
  • Medieval Cantors and their Craft
  • Music, Liturgy and the Shaping of History, 800-1500
  • Edited by Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, Margot E. Fassler, A.B. Kraebel
  • Published by: Boydell & Brewer
  • Published online: 25 October 2017
  • Print publication: 19 January 2017
  • View 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 wereresponsible 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.
    The contributions hereseek 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 acrossthe middle ages. Cantors, as this volume makes clear, shaped the communal experience of the past in the Middle Ages; the essays are studies of constructions, both of the building blocks of time and ofthe people who made and performed them, in acts of ritual remembrance and in written records.

    Contributors: Cara Aspesi, Alison I. Beach, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, Margot E. Fassler, David Ganz, James Grier, Paul Antony Hayward, A.B. Kraebel, Lori Kruckenberg, Rosamond McKitterick, Henry Parkes, Susan Rankin, C.C. Rozier, Sigbjoryn Olsen Sonnesyn, Teresa Webber, Lauren Whitnah,
  • Introduction
  • Edited by Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, Margot E. Fassler, A.B. Kraebel
  • Book: Medieval Cantors and their Craft
  • Published by: Boydell & Brewer
  • Published online: 25 October 2017
  • Print publication: 19 January 2017, pp 1-6
  • View extract

    Summary

    ‘History’, as it was understood by medieval Christians, was a broad concept with many meanings. It could be defined as a written record, compiled through processes inherited from classical Greek and Roman authors. But even when it proclaimed itself to be ‘factual’, the work of those who shaped the past in the Latin Middle Ages was different from that of their pagan ancestors. Although they often made claims about veracity, even when dealing with the miraculous, they did not ‘absolutize’ history (as de Lubac put it). Although they had a sense of universal history, time instead related to and unfolded within a framework conditioned by the Incarnation of the Word, and by the moral sense that this history-transforming event could impart to listeners and readers. The biblical orientation of history gave time a clear beginning and also predicted an apocalyptic end. But even as time moved relentlessly forward in this cosmic sense, the liturgy made it constantly spiral backward, rendering past sacred events present through ritual commemoration. Such liturgical celebration of time had many layers, mingled and arranged according to the calendar, with its varying and its fixed cycles of feasts, voiced through psalmody, readings from the Old and New Testaments and the lives of the saints.

    How the past was known, both by individuals and within communities, varied from one specific local community to another, for the liturgy was ever changing, especially as new feasts, and feasts of new saints, were added to suit particular needs. Some knew about certain past events from what they read, as had long been the case, but in the Middle Ages many more knew about the past from various reenactments: ritual actions, dramatic productions, sermons and tales they heard about biblical characters and saints, encounters with art and architecture and from contact with shrines and relics.

    Much of medieval history-making was thus memorial in nature, bringing the past forward, again and again, to recall its individual or communal significance. At the heart of the medieval Christian understanding of the past was a simple, foundational command from Christ: ‘Hoc facite in meam commemorationem’ [‘Do this in remembrance of me’] (Luke 22. 19).

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