The Liturgical Context of the Quem Queritis Trope

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The Liturgical Context of the Quern Queritis Trope C. Clifford Flanigan I The practice of troping has always been associated with the medieval Latin ritual drama. Karl Young, for example, claimed that “the effectual beginnings of medieval religious drama” were to be found in this practice, and accordingly he devoted three chapters and sixty pages of his monumental study, The Drama of the Medieval Church, to it.l It was Young, of course, who solidified the argument which has since become orthodox in literary histories, that the Quem queritis trope became the basis for the independent dramatic ceremony called the Visitatio Sepulchri. More recently, Professor O. B. Hardison, Jr. has presented a major challenge to Young’s position. In his Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages,2 Hardison argues that the Quem queritis text, and consequently the liturgical drama itself, had its origins in the Easter liturgy proper rather than in an embellishment added to the rite. Both Young and Hardison marshal a good deal of evidence for their positions, and both afford us much insight into what we might call the pre­ history of medieval drama. Yet, paradoxically, neither of them has been able to help us understand the Quem queritis trope itself. For Young the trope is simply the almost accidental be­ ginning of a line of development that leads to the plays which are his prime concern. For Hardison, on the other hand, the combination of the Quem queritis text with the Easter introit represents only one of many possible uses of the dialogue, one which in his estimation has little to do with the drama of the medieval Church. The result of this neglect of the trope is that we actually know very little about the way it functioned within 45 46 C. Clifford Flanigan the broad context of the early medieval liturgy. As I hope to show, this lack of concern with the trope and its context has deprived us of important avenues of approach in understanding the medieval drama. It is perhaps not surprising that neither Young nor Hardison has been able to do much with the Quern queritis trope beyond chronicling its existence. Both labored under questionable meth­ odological presuppositions about the trope form. For example, both believed a consideration of the music which accompanies liturgical texts to be of secondary importance. In a recent arti­ cle Dr. William L. Smoldon has demonstrated how inade­ quate such an approach is, and in the process he has seriously called into question Hardison’s thesis. It now seems certain that the melody which accompanied the Quern queritis dialogue, whether it was performed as a trope or as an independent ritual, was distinctly a trope melody. On the strength of Smoldon’s musicological observations it must be concluded that “the Quern quaeritis dialogue, whenever and wherever invented, took its first form as a trope; one that was intended to belong (as it clear­ ly does) to the Introit of the Easter Mass.”3 Thus, despite the attractiveness of Hardison’s arguments, a detailed understanding of the trope form of the Quem queritis is more essential than ever. In addition to this disregard of the musical setting, the study of the Quem queritis has also suffered from a failure to under­ stand precisely what a trope is and how it functions. Hardison scarcely deals with this question, while Young, following the general practice, groups tropes and sequences together and views them both as unessential liturgical expansions having their origins in a desire to add a mnemonic text to a pre-existing melody. Such an understanding does not conform to distinctions actually made in ninth, tenth, and eleventh century manuscripts. It has been the great service of Heinrich Husmann, Richard Crocker, Paul Evans, and other musicologists to recover these earlier distinctions, and their efforts deserve our serious attention.4 According to these students of medieval music, in the earlier Middle Ages the word tropus was used for additions of text and music to liturgical chant, regardless of whether these additions were prefaces or line by line interpolations. In France and England the term sequentia was used only for the extended The Liturgical Context 47 melisma...