Lorenzo Candelaria . The Rosary Cantoral: Ritual and Social Design in a Chantbook from Early Renaissance Toledo.(Eastman Studies in Music.)Rochester, N.Y. : University of Rochester Press . 2008 . Pp. x, 212. $55.00.

Abstract

Liturgy, as well as being a vital ingredient in both the exercise of power and the construction of local identities, is fundamental to understanding how music and ceremony actually worked in early modern civic and devotional contexts. This was most obviously true of the period before the Council of Trent, when the church resolved to abolish all local liturgies less than two hundred years old. Even after Trent, festal calendars could be revised to incorporate new cults, while patron saints of minor importance in the Roman calendar continued to assume greater weight in their specific geographical and institutional environments, much as they had done in the years before reform. Lorenzo Candelaria's high-quality manuscript, finely illuminated in the Franco-Flemish style, is a characteristic expression of this dynamic. Copied between 1500 and 1520 for the Rosary Confraternity of the Dominican monastery of San Pedro Mártir in Toledo, most of whose members worked in the silk trade, its original layer mostly consists of chants for the Ordinary of the Mass together with a handful of sequences, antiphons, and tracts. Unusually for the period, most of the chants are decorated by tropes, ornamental additions to the basic chant which by this date had largely fallen out of use. To this central core of melodies, which establish Toledan usage, further additions were made in the course of the sixteenth century, among them further tracts whose texts are in accordance with the reformed Medicean Gradual of 1614–1615. Finally, a third hand has inserted two pieces of four-voice polyphony, probably towards the end of the sixteenth century; one is an unidentified setting of the “Et incarnatus est” section from the credo section of an unknown Mass based on the popular “L'homme armé” melody, the other the setting of the same text taken from the Missa Sine Nomine by Josquin Desprez, a major composer whose works continued to be disseminated in Spanish sources long after his death in 1520. Now in the Beinecke Library at Yale, which bought it from the Connecticut book dealer Laurence Witten, who sold a great deal of early printed and manuscript material, the Beinecke Kyriale is in fact the only source for any of Josquin's music in North America.