‘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).

In seeking to understand the disposition of personnel within early medieval religious communities, we can do far worse than to consult the famous confraternity books of Carolingian Reichenau and Sankt Gallen. In the lands around Lake Constance, where the modern states of Germany, Austria and Switzerland now converge, groups of ninth-century monks assembled (and their successors expanded) extensive inventories of the members of other Christian communities, both living and departed. The purpose of these compilations was to faciliate networks of reciprocal intercession right across Europe, in locations as widely dispersed as Provence, Normandy, Saxony, Bavaria and Lombardy, and as far from Constance as Jerusalem. Many of the entries were also accompanied by the specific ranks of those for whom prayer was offered: not only the monks we might expect, but also monarchs, dukes and counts, laymen, doctors, nuns, anchorites, priests, deacons, archpriests, chancellors, chaplains, clerics, deans, priors, bishops, popes, patriarchs – and cantors.

Confraternity books are not especially informative, as it turns out, about the specific role of cantors within religious communities of this early period. But what they lack in historical insight they make up for in methodological counsel, because their pages exemplify an important point of ambiguity. When we encounter the individual Purchart, who is titled ‘can’, or the individual Ruadheri, titled ‘ca’, there is more than one possibility for the expansion of these respective abbreviations. Does ‘can’ refer to the high office of ‘cantor’, who, as later medieval descriptions tend to concur, took charge of music and liturgy within a given institution? Does it simply refer to the lowly rank of ‘cantor’, literally ‘singer’, to which young clerics were sometimes ordained prior to the traditional entry-level position of door-keeper? Or might it refer instead to a ‘canonicus’ (or ‘canon’), a member of a community of priests associated with a cathedral or collegiate church, whose coveted existence had a reputation – at least until the reform movements of the eleventh and twelfth centuries – as a sinecure for the sons of the nobility? I cite this point of confusion not as a challenge to existing readings of confraternity books, but as a cause for reflection in this important collection of cantor-historian studies. To what extent can we be confident that the ‘cantor’ we find documented in a particular historical source was always in a position of high authority?