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According to legend, the Virgin appeared one Christmas Eve to an artless young man standing in one of Constantinople's most famous Marian shrines. She offered him a scroll of papyrus with the injunction that he swallow it, and following the Virgin's command, he did so. Immediately his voice turned sweet and gentle as he spontaneously intoned his hymn "The Virgin today gives birth." So was born the career of Romanos the Melodist (ca. 485-560), one of the greatest liturgical poets of Byzantium, author of at least sixty long hymns, or kontakia, that were chanted during the night vigils preceding major feasts and festivals. In The Virgin in Song, Thomas Arentzen explores the characterization of Mary in these kontakia and the ways in which the kontakia echoed the cult of the Virgin. He focuses on three key moments in her story as marked in the liturgical calendar: her encounter with Gabriel at the Annunciation, her child's birth at Christmas, and the death of her son on Good Friday. Consistently, Arentzen contends, Romanos counters expectations by shifting emphasis away from Christ himself to focus on Mary—as the subject of the erotic gaze, as a breastfeeding figure of abundance and fertility, and finally as an authoritatively vocal woman who conveys the secrets of her son and the joys of the resurrection. Through his hymns, Romanos inspired an affective relationship between Mary and his audience, bringing the human and the holy into dialogue. By plumbing her emotional depths, the poet traces her process of understanding as she apprehends the mysteries that she embodies. By giving her a powerful voice, he grants subjectivity to a maiden who becomes a mediator. Romanos shaped a figure, Arentzen argues, who related intimately to her flock in a formative period of Christian orthodoxy.
There is a striking similarity between Marian devotional songs and secular love songs of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Two disparate genres--one sacred, the other secular; one Latin, the other vernacular--both praise an idealized, impossibly virtuous woman. Each does so through highly stylized derivations of traditional medieval song forms--Marian prayer derived from earlier Gregorian chant, and love songs and lyrics from medieval courtly song. Yet despite their obvious similarities, the two musical and poetic traditions have rarely been studied together. Author David J. Rothenberg takes on this task with remarkable success, producing a useful and broad introduction to Marian music and liturgy, and then coupling that with an incisive comparative analysis of these devotional forms and the words and music of secular love songs of the period. The Flower of Paradise examines the interplay of Marian devotional and secular poetics within polyphonic music from ca. 1200 to ca. 1500. Through case studies of works that demonstrate a specific symbolic resonance between Marian devotion and secular song, the book illustrates the distinctive ethos of this period in European culture. Rothenberg makes use of an impressive command of liturgical and religious studies, literature and poetry, and art history to craft a study with wide application across disciplinary boundaries. With its broad scope and unique, incisive analysis, this book will open up new ways of thinking about the history and development of secular and sacred music and the Marian tradition for scholars, students, and anyone with an interest in medieval and Renaissance religious culture.
Young Romanos is devoted to Christ and His Mother and longs to be able to sing his praises to them. But when he tries, his voice croaks and the words won't come. The other cantors make fun of him--until one miraculous Christmas Eve. A picture book for children preschool age and up.
Images and texts tell various stories about the Virgin Mary in Byzantium, reflecting an important cult with strong doctrinal foundations.
First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters—beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys—commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.
Just as our society delights in citations, quotations, and allusions in myriad contexts, not least in popular song, late medieval poets and composers knew well that such references could greatly enrich their own works. In The Art of the Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut, author Yolanda Plumley explores the penchant for borrowing in chansons and lyrics from fourteenth-century France, uncovering a practice integral to the experiments in form, genre, and style that ushered in a new school of lyric. Working across disciplinary boundaries, Plumley traces creative appropriations in the burgeoning "fixed forms" of this new tradition to build a more intimate understanding of the shared experience of poetry and music in the generations leading up to, and including, Guillaume de Machaut. Exploring familiar and less studied collections of songs as well as lyrics without music, this book sheds valuable light on the poetic and musical knowledge of authors and their audiences, and on how poets and composers devised their works and engaged their readers or listeners. It presents fresh insights into when and in which milieus the classic Ars nova polyphonic chanson took root and flourished, and into the artistic networks of which Machaut formed a part. As Plumley reveals, old songs lingered alongside the new in the collective imagination well beyond what the written sources imply, reminding us of the continued importance of memory and orality in this age of increasing literacy. The first detailed study of citational practice in the French fourteenth-century song-writing tradition, The Art of Grafted Song will appeal to students and scholars of medieval French music and literature, cultural historians, and others interested in the historical and social context of music and poetry in the late Middle Ages.