The Politics of Sound and Song: Lectors and Cantors in Early Medieval Iberia

Abstract

In early medieval Iberia, Suevic and Visigothic conversions to Nicene Christianity in the 560s and 580s generated ongoing episcopal and royal attention to cathedral liturgies and to the clerics who performed them. This article turns to this Iberian context to illuminate how lectors and cantors and their aural duties became increasingly central to the production of Christian orthodoxy. It is argued that in the early 600s Visigothic anxieties over the production of correct liturgical sound eventually became a focal point of longstanding episcopal efforts to clericalise the minor officers of the Church.