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First published in 2004, Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia provides an introduction to the many and diverse facets of Italian civilization from the late Roman empire to the end of the fourteenth century. It presents in two volumes articles on a wide range of topics including history, literature, art, music, urban development, commerce and economics, social and political institutions, religion and hagiography, philosophy and science. This illustrated, A-Z reference is a cross-disciplinary resource and will be of key interest not only to students and scholars of history but also to those studying a range of subjects, as well as the general reader.
The area whose capital was the southern Lombard city of Benevento developed a culture identified with the characteristic form of writing known as the Beneventan script, which was used throughout the area and was brought to perfection at the abbey of Montecassino in the late eleventh century. This repertory, along with other now-vanished or suppressed local varieties of music, give a far richer picture of the variety of musical practice in early medieval Europe than was formerly available. Thomas Forrest Kelly has identified and collected the surviving sources of an important repertory of early medieval music; this is the so-called Beneventan Chant, used in southern Italy in the early middle ages, before the adoption there of the now-universal music known as Gregorian chant. Because it was deliberately suppressed in the course of the eleventh century, this music survives mostly in fragments and palimpsests, and the fascinating process of restoring the repertory piece by piece is told in the studies in this book. A companion volume to this collection also by Professor Kelly details the practice of Medieval music.
"The liturgical chant that was sung in the churches of Southern Italy between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries reflects the multiculturalism of a territory in which Roman, Franks, Lombards, Byzantines, Normans, Jews, and Muslims were present at various titles and with different political roles. This book examines a specific genre, the prosulas that were composed to embellish and expand pre-existing liturgical chants of the liturgy of mass. Widespread in medieval Europe, prosulas were highly cultivated in southern Italy, especially by the nuns, monks, and clerics the city of Benevento. They shed light on the creativity of local cantors to provide new meanings to the liturgy in accordance with contemporary waves of religious spirituality and to experiment with a novel musical style in which a syllabic setting is paired with the free-flowing melody of the parent chant. In their representing an epistemological 'beyond' and because of their interconnectedness with the parent chant, they can be likened to modern hypertexts. The emphasis on universal saints of ancient lineage stressed the perceived links with the cradles of Christianity, Africa and the Levant, and the centre of the Papal power, Rome, while the high number of Christological prosulas in manuscripts used in nunneries might be tied to the devotion to Jesus as 'spiritual spouse' that was typical of female religiosity. Full edition of texts, melodies, and manuscript facsimiles in the companion website enrich the study of the stylistic features and the cultural components of this fascinating genre"--