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The "rhymed office" consists of a series of versified antiphons and responsories sung at certain fixed hours of the day as part of the liturgical worship of the Christian church. A special variety of rhymed office is the office in acrostic form, in which the initials of the individual items when read in sequence form a secondary text. The forty-two known acrostic offices were composed throughout continental Europe from the eleventh to sixteenth centuries. The acrostics themselves usually name the feast, the author, or both. Complex acrostics are generally prayers or assertions of authorship. The acrostic can travel through all items of the work in the sequence of their performance, or join together only parts of the office (antiphons only, responsories only, Vespers service only, etc.). Both kinds of acrostic strive to lend unity to the discrete poetic items of the office: the first method compiles the diverse elements into one; the second orders the work into parts reflective of larger liturgical units. The two tendencies towards unification are also seen in the treatment of the metre and of the narrative material. The significance of the acrostic form is difficult to assess. The variety seen in the repertoire, and the virtual lack of interconnections between the various specimens, make it inappropriate to speak of a "tradition" of acrostic office composition. In the sources, the device is rarely evident to the eye. Moreover, the items have often been altered, rearranged and replaced, with the result that the acrostic is disrupted. No medieval account of the acrostic is known. The acrostic's focus on names (of author, saint, and feast) suggests that the hidden device is best understood as a prayer akin to the litany and the petition, whose essential movement is at once communal and inward. Style and subject matter of these offices are various. Metres may be regular accentual stanza forms, variations of these, or a freer assemblage of lines. Saints from the Bible, the early church, and the entire middle ages up until the fifteenth century were so celebrated. The manuscript and early printed liturgical books which transmit the acrostic offices are in some cases extremely numerous and widespread, whereas other offices are known from a single extant source.
In the Middle Ages, relic cults provoked rich expressions of devotion not only in hagiographic literature and visual art but also in liturgical music and ritual. Despite the long-recognized inter-play between these diverse media, historians of the period rarely integrate analysis of sacred music into their research on other modes of worship espoused by relic cults. Holy Treasure and Sacred Song situates this oft-neglected yet critical domain of religious life at the center of an examination of relic cults in medieval Tuscany. Long recognized as a center of artistic innovation during the Renaissance, this region also boasted the rich and well documented veneration of holy bishops and martyrs buried in the cathedrals and suburban shrines of its principal cities. Author Benjamin Brand reveals that the music composed to honor these local saints - no fewer than ninety chants for the Mass and Divine Office - were essential components of larger devotional campaigns that included the recording of their life stories and the building and decoration of their shrines. Furthermore, the local Tuscan clerics who assumed control of these campaigns with the intent of gaining both temporal and spiritual power drew on influential global models - literary, architectural, musical, and ritual - from preeminent European powers, Rome and the Carolingian Empire. By integrating detailed analyses of plainsong and sacred ritual into this rich panorama, Brand traces the dialectic between local, regional, and pan-European trends, revealing the centrality of the liturgy in the development of medieval relic cults and, in a broader sense, medieval European culture and politics. Offering a rich topography of music, liturgy, and devotion through an interdisciplinary approach ideal for the multifaceted nature of medieval relic cults, Holy Treasure and Sacred Song will find a broad audience amongst musicologists and medievalists alike.
It has become widely accepted among musicologists that medieval music is most profitably studied from interdisciplinary perspectives that situate it within broad cultural contexts. The origins of this consensus lie in a decisive reorientation of the field that began approximately four decades ago. For much of the twentieth century, research on medieval music had focused on the discovery and evaluation of musical and theoretical sources. The 1970s and 1980s, by contrast, witnessed calls for broader methodologies and more fully contextual approaches that in turn anticipated the emergence of the so-called 'New Musicology'. The fifteen essays in the present collection explore three interrelated areas of inquiry that proved particularly significant: the liturgy, sources (musical and archival), and musical symbolism. In so doing, these essays not only acknowledge past achievements but also illustrate how this broad, interdisciplinary approach remains a source for scholarly innovation.
The first and one of the finest Latin poets of Anglo-Saxon England, the seventh-century bishop Saint Aldhelm can justly be called “Britain's first man of letters.” Among his many influential poetic texts were the hundred riddles that made up hisAenigmata. In Saint Aldhelm's Riddles, A.M. Juster offers the first verse translation of this text in almost a century, capturing the wit, warmth, and wonder of the first English riddle collection. One of today's finest formalist poets, A.M. Juster brings the same exquisite care to this volume as to his translations of Horace (“The best edition available of theSatires in English” –Choice), Tibullus (“An excellent new translation” –The Guardian), and Petrarch. Juster's translation is complemented by a newly edited version of the Latin text and by the first scholarly commentary on theAenigmata, the result of exhaustive interdisciplinary research into the text's historical, literary, and philological context.Saint Aldhelm's Riddles will be essential for scholars and a treasure for lovers of Tolkien,Beowulf, and Harry Potter.
This book discusses and analyzes a repertory of poetry and chant that was used during the late Middle Ages in church services of the Divine Office, a repertory mostly unexplored to date.
Poesis artificiosa was known in the literary heritage of ancient Greeks and Romans, and in the Far and Middle East. Its tradition was preserved in the Middle Ages and practiced later. Poesis artificiosa gained an unprecedented popularity in the Baroque - a period most inclined towards all manner of special effects. The aim of this book is to present problems related to the Neo-Latin pattern poetry created from the 15th to the 18th century in Central Europe, mainly in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, German Pomerania, and Silesia. In the initial chapters, the authors discuss the practical application of pattern poetry in religious works, in compositions intended for the commemoration of the departed, and in poems featuring panegyric content. The remaining chapters refer to its theoretical aspects.