Photographic reconstruction and analysis of a twelfth-century liturgical manuscript from the Austrian monastery in Lambach.

The early-fourteenth-century St Gall Passion Play comes from the Central Rhineland. Unfortunately its music (over one hundred Latin and German chants) is given in the manuscript only as brief incipits, without any musical notation. This interdisciplinary study reconstructs the musical stratum of the play. It is the first full-scale musical reconstruction of a large German Passion play in recent times, using the latest available scholarly data in drama, liturgy and music. It draws conclusions about performance practice and forces, and offers a sound basis for an authentic performance of the play. The study applies musical and liturgical data to the problem of localizing the play (the first time this has been systematically attempted), and assesses how applicable this might be to other plays. It presents a detailed study of the distinctive medieval liturgical uses of three German dioceses, Mainz, Speyer and Worms. The comparative approach suggests how the music of other plays might be reconstructed and understood, and shows that a better understanding of the music of medieval drama has much to teach us about other aspects of the genre. The book should be of interest to literary scholars, theatre historians, musicologists, liturgical scholars, and those involved in the performance of early drama.

Recounts the history of an exceptional ninth-century religious outlaw, Gottschalk of Orbais-a priest who developed a controversial, Augustinian-based theology of predestination that directly contradicted Carolingian beliefs, showing how the Carolingian Empire preserved order within the Frankish Christian church through coercive reform.

James Grier documents the musical activities of Adémar de Chabannes, eleventh-century monk, historian, homilist and tireless polemicist for the apostolic status of Saint Martial, patron saint of the abbey that bore his name in Limoges. Adémar left behind some 451 folios of music with notation in his autograph hand, a musical resource without equal before the seventeenth century. He introduced, at strategic moments, pieces familiar from the standard liturgy for an apostle and items of his own composition. These reveal Adémar to be a supremely able designer of liturgies and a highly original composer. This study analyses his accomplishments as a musical scribe, compiler of liturgies, editor of existing musical works and composer; it also offers a speculative consideration of his abilities as a singer; and finally, it places Adémar's musical activities in the context of liturgical, musical and political developments at the abbey of Saint Martial in Limoges.

Musical notation is a powerful system of communication between musicians, using sophisticated symbolic, primarily non-verbal means to express musical events in visual symbols. Many musicians take the system for granted, having internalized it and their strategies for reading it and translating it into sound over long years of study and practice. This book traces the development of that system by combining chronological and thematic approaches to show the historical and musical context in which these developments took place. Simultaneously, the book considers the way in which this symbolic language communicates to those literate in it, discussing how its features facilitate or hinder fluent comprehension in the real-time environment of performance. Moreover, the topic of musical as opposed to notational innovation forms another thread of the treatment, as the author investigates instances where musical developments stimulated notational attributes, or notational innovations made practicable advances in musical style.

Each of the studies in this volume draws upon a manuscript, or a group of manuscripts, that shed light on the practice of monastic life during this period of reform. Many, but not all, of the papers focus on the monastery of Admont in central Austria. Admont was one of the most important spiritual, cultural, and intellectual centres in the high Middle Ages, and its magnificent library still houses an extensive collection of manuscripts - a rich resource both for the history of the monastery and for the broader history of medieval religious life. The book brings together the work of an international group of scholars whose work touches on various aspects of twelfth-century Admont, and the broader movement for reform and renewal in Germany and Austria. With the publication of Charles Homer Haskin's important work, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1933), came a new way of looking at the civilization of the high Middle Ages. Scholars have since investigated many aspects of this revival: the rise of the universities, the development of canon law, the emergence (or re-emergence) of a heightened sense of human individuality, and the revival of religious fervour that has been labelled a reformation before the Reformation. Much of this scholarly work has focused on north-central Italy, France and England. Germany, however, has been little studied in this context, in part because the nature and trajectory of the reform there differed from that seen elsewhere in Europe. The essays in the book both explore connections between Germanic lands and the wider western European context, and consider the unique spiritual and intellectual climate of Germany's monasteries.

This innovative study investigates the reception of medieval manuscripts over a long century, 1470–1585, spanning the reigns of Edward IV to Elizabeth I. Members of the Tudor gentry family who owned these manuscripts had properties in Willesden and professional affiliations in London. These men marked the leaves of their books with signs of use, allowing their engagement with the texts contained there to be reconstructed. Through detailed research, Margaret Connolly reveals the various uses of these old books: as a repository for family records; as a place to preserve other texts of a favourite or important nature; as a source of practical information for the household; and as a professional manual for the practising lawyer. Investigation of these family-owned books reveals an unexpectedly strong interest in works of the past, and the continuing intellectual and domestic importance of medieval manuscripts in an age of print.