Music, Liturgy, and Confraternity Devotions in Paris and Tournai, 1300–1550 Sarah Ann Long.

Abstract

Scholarship on late mediaeval composition and liturgical creation in northern Europe has largely orbited around important cathedrals, monasteries, or courts, and has consequently overlooked the music of confraternities. Members of these voluntary communities, centred on shared spirituality and often trade-based, regularly gathered for communal prayer and were important sponsors of the music required for services. Sarah Ann Long’s fascinating Music, Liturgy and Confraternity Devotions in Paris and Tournai, 1300–1550 is the first study to investigate new music for the Mass and Office created for confraternity worship in northern Europe. In showing how lay piety and devotion became incorporated into sanctioned diocesan practices through these organizations, and exploring the impact on music of the political, commercial, and ecclesiastical networks that ran through and between Paris and Tournai, this study is a needed and most welcome addition to late medieval musicology. Long examines Paris and Tournai not just as important centres of musical-liturgical creativity but also as nodes in regional networks that facilitated the diffusion of devotions (such as to specific saints) and their requisite music. As a university city, Paris attracted an international body of students and supported a vast book production industry. Tournai, on the other hand, sat at ecclesiastical and secular crossroads: it was a city divided between two dioceses, whose cathedrals were located in different secular jurisdictions (the Dioceses of Tournai and Cambrai, under French and Burgundian rule respectively).