Monastic Church Research Articles

Demonstration Performance of the Cividale Planctus Mariae : A Report

Demonstration Performance of the Cividale Planctus Mariae: A Report Eric Strand (bio), Matthew Steel (bio), and Clifford Davidson (bio) Audrey Ekdahl Davidson’s transcription of the Planctus Mariae contained in Cividale, Reale Museo Archeologico Nazionale, MS CI, fols. 74r–76v, was originally prepared in 1986,1 but remained unpublished and used only for a performance in 2006 after being checked for accuracy by her a little more than six weeks before her death on June 11 of that year. Since she had been involved in directing nearly a dozen productions of medieval music dramas, including Hildegard of Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum, during her career,2 she was well aware of the sharp debates over how such dramas can or should be revived. Each performance for her was an experiment, and each was different in some way from the others that she directed. In this manner, albeit necessarily working with local singers essentially untrained in early music, she entered into the discussion about authenticity in performance that was being argued in the latter part of the twentieth century. The argument over authenticity tended to focus on a number of important matters, including vocal production and style, instrumental technique, choice of instruments, improvisation, articulation, phrasing, accurate regional pronunciation, and even fidelity to the notes as written. 3 At the heart of the discussion is the question of how to restore lost traditions, or indeed whether they should be restored. It is obvious that the expectations of original audiences, particularly in the case of a musicdrama sung within liturgical settings, could not be precisely replicated in our time. Chant techniques, which must have differed from region to region, and its notation have long been the subject of controversy. The project would require not only to resurrect what was heard but also to discover what was seen, the latter actually somewhat less problematic than the former in the case of the Cividale Planctus Mariae on account of the presence of extensive rubrics in the manuscript and the availability [End Page 287] of iconographic evidence for the laments at the foot of the Cross. What strategies should be taken to “show it as it really was,” as the saying is? How are these aims consistent with performances that are convincing as both music and drama? Should the music-drama, closely tied to the liturgy as it was, be expected to resume its connection to ritual in order to achieve its maximum effectiveness? That such medieval plays, separated from their normal religious context, can be tremendously effective as drama in our own time has been demonstrated on numerous occasions in the years since large audiences responded to The Play of Herod presented by Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica in the early 1960s—a production that powerfully staged the killing of the children from the Ordo Rachelis that was added to complete the story of the Herod, both edited from the Fleury Playbook in collaboration with William L. Smoldon.4 Greenberg and his company made significant compromises, however, not the least of which were to amalgamate these two separate plays from the same manuscript source into a single drama and to obtain the services of a stage director without the encumbrance of significant knowledge about the original presentation of these dramas. Yet these performances were very convincing at the time, while they also implicitly suggested a number of options for subsequent productions of other examples of this genre. After Greenberg, two directions were taken by those who produced the medieval music drama: (1) to attempt to achieve as much authenticity as possible, especially by embedding the plays in liturgy and producing them in locations that give the “feeling” of the original; and (2) to aim for musical and theatrical effectiveness in our time without concern for questions of authenticity. Fletcher Collins’s film of the Visitatio Sepulchri is a very effective example of the second direction, its setting in the monastic church of the Abbaye St. Benôit-de-Fleury at St. Benôit-sur-Loire providing atmospherics rather than a view of “how it was done” in the thirteenth century when the manuscript of the Fleury Playbook was compiled. The Society...

Holy Restraint: Religious Reform and Nuns' Music in Early Modern Rome

Suspicion of nuns’ music during the early modern period reflected both the Tridentine preoccupation with religious celibacy and traditional distrust of female religious autonomy. Church officials prohibited certain types of liturgical and musical expression in Roman convents as well as interaction between the sisters and male musicians. The authorities were well aware of the attraction of nuns’ music, an attraction comprised not only of the skill and virtuosity of the singers, but also the allure of the forbidden. To counteract some of that attraction, officials severely limited the use of any music but Gregorian chant in the convent churches. Archival documents reveal that enforcing enclosure in Roman convents occupied religious authorities throughout the post-Tridentine period. Yet, nuns continued to perform in the monastic churches, often with many of the members of the curial hierarchy present. This article explores those religious, financial, and societal forces that resisted enclosure in Roman convents.

Bernard, Suger, and Henry I's Crown Jewels

Bernard and Suger are familiar to all students of medieval art and architecture as exemplifying, in both their writings and their building projects, two radically opposed tendencies within Western monasticism toward the role of art within the church. It comes as something of a surprise, therefore, that in the early 1140s Bernard was involved in supplying Suger with a huge quantity of jewels and gold, which were incorporated into the precious monumental cross at the very heart of the rebuilt abbey church of Saint-Denis. The jewels and gold came from two immense gold cups that had been commissioned by Henry I of England, who had displayed them at his crown-wearing ceremonies. They had subsequently passed into the hands of Count Thibault of Champagne, Bernard's friend and mentor, who had ordered them to be broken up. To explain Bernard's and Suger's involvement in this curious tale, it is necessary to explore the political context of the early 1140s. Count Thibault had fought a disastrous military campaign against Louis VII of France. In the delicate peace negotiations that followed, Suger acted as one of King Louis' chief negotiators, while Bernard performed the equivalent role for Count Thibault. The sale of the gold and jewels that ended up on Suger's great cross was associated with the diplomatic negotiations that were concluded by a peace agreement between the king and the count, which was solemnized at Saint-Denis in the autumn of 1144, just a few months after the famous ceremony of consecration of Suger's new chevet. Against this background, it becomes possible to assess the significance of this episode for our understanding of the attitudes of both Bernard and Suger toward the ornamentation of the monastic church.

Women's Space: Parish, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church (review)

Women's Space: Parish, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church. Edited by Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury. (Albany: State University of New York Press. 2005. Pp.x, 261. $85.00.) This welcome volume of essays addresses the neglected topic of women's space in the medieval parish, in order to balance previous studies that have focused on female monastic or domestic space. The papers present historical, literary, and art historical perspectives, drawing inspiration from spatial studies in geography, anthropology, and archaeology, with the influence of Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler particularly evident. The authors focus predominantly on later medieval England, with one case study of fourteenth-century Florence, and two wide-ranging discussions of medieval spatial practices cross-culturally. Three themes unite these diverse studies: spatial metaphors of the body; the control of access to space according to gender; and the segregation of space in relation to gender concerns. In a discussion of the shrine of St. AEthelthryth at the cathedral priory of Ely, Virginia Blanton explores how the enclosure of the body of the female saint is emphasized and developed as a symbol of the boundaries of the male monastic institution. Sarah Stanbury considers the corporeal quality of female religiosity, and how Margery Kempe presented her own body as sharing the suffering of Christ. Corine Schleif reviews the common tendency in Christian imagery to represent men on the right side of the church (the south) and women on the left (the north). She argues that this presupposes an embodied subject position for the viewing audience, framed by conventions for depicting the Crucifixion. She explores the meaning of church space as both a microcosm of the body, and a macrocosm of the divine universe. Jane Tibbets Schulenburg gives a broad overview of evidence for the exclusion of women from male monastic churches from c. 500-1200, arguing that ecclesiastical control of women was motivated by clerical fears of female sexuality and the perceived uncontainability of women. A more comparative perspective would be useful to consider the extent to which female religious developed similar concerns to exclude men from their monastic space. The policies traced by Schulenburg were becoming more relaxed by the twelfth century, and recent scholarship has suggested that monastic space was more permeable than previously supposed. Virginia Chieffo Raguin explores this theme in relation to Margery Kempe's interaction with religious spaces. Kempe was able to contest spatial prohibitions to enjoy access to the choir of St. Margaret's, Lynn, a cell of Norwich Cathedral, even being allowed to take the sacrament every Sunday at the high altar. Further, she was able to disrupt male clerical control by using her episodes of weeping and shouting to rebel against the carefully managed soundscape of the medieval church. In their introduction, the editors raise the important issue of female control of the gaze, including the placement of squints, veils, and shutters in the parish church. …

The Liturgical Functions of Consecrated Women in the Byzantine Church

[Although the ordained order of deaconesses vanished in the Byzantine Church, some women continued to fulfill, either informally or formally, various liturgical functions in public church life. The author examines1 the art-historical and textual evidence of three groups of women: noblewomen who participated as incense-bearers in a weekly procession in Constantinople; matrons who helped organize and keep order in a monastic church open to the public in Constantinople; and the possibly ordained order of myrrhbearers in the Church of Jerusalem.]

Robert Reid and the Early Involvement of the State in the Care of Scottish Ecclesiastical Buildings and Sites

As a result of the Act of Annexation of 1587, and the removal of bishops from the Scottish church in 1689, the Crown in Scotland incidentally acquired ownership of a large number of monastic and cathedral churches. By the late eighteenth century, as interest in medieval architecture grew, occasional grants were made towards their maintenance; but between 1827 and 1839, when a Scottish Office of Works was established under the architect Robert Reid, major efforts began to be made to stabilise considerable numbers of those buildings. The approaches to this work are of interest for what they tell us about emerging attitudes to architectural conservation.

The Tradition of Detached Bell Towers at Cathedral and Monastic Churches in Medieval England and Scotland (1066–1539)

Although it is generally well-known that a number of cathedrals and major abbeys in medieval England especially had detached bell towers, the towers themselves have never been considered as a group. Nor has a ‘complete’ listing been attempted. Their existence is difficult to explain because the majority of these buildings also had central towers and some had western towers. No doubt because so many of the detached towers have been destroyed, they are less well-known than the examples on the Continent, especially in Italy. Surprisingly, towers seem to have been rare in Romanesque and Gothic France and Germany. The Insular ones appear to have been less ‘standardized’ in their design and more variable in their location vis-à-vis the church building than those of Italy. The history of detached towers in England (and Scotland) is here traced from their earliest appearance, in wood in the 12th century and in stone c. 1200, to the end of the Middle Ages.

The Tradition of Detached Bell Towers at Cathedral and Monastic Churches in Medieval England and Scotland (1066–1539)

Although it is generally well-known that a number of cathedrals and major abbeys in medieval England especially had detached bell towers, the towers themselves have never been considered as a group. Nor has a ‘complete’ listing been attempted. Their existence is difficult to explain because the majority of these buildings also had central towers and some had western towers. No doubt because so many of the detached towers have been destroyed, they are less well-known than the examples on the Continent, especially in Italy. Surprisingly, towers seem to have been rare in Romanesque and Gothic France and Germany. The Insular ones appear to have been less ‘standardized’ in their design and more variable in their location vis-à-vis the church building than those of Italy. The history of detached towers in England (and Scotland) is here traced from their earliest appearance, in wood in the 12th century and in stone c. 1200, to the end of the Middle Ages.

Interim report on Khirbet Yattir in Judea: a mosque and a monastic church

Interim report on Khirbet Yattir in Judea: a mosque and a monastic church

The pinchbeck fen map: A fifteenth‐century map of the Lincolnshire Fenland

This paper examines the significance of a rediscovered medieval map (Public Record Office, MPCC 7) of part of the Fenlands of eastern England, previously dated to the mid‐sixteenth century but now recognized as mid‐fifteenth century. The map portrays realistically two important monastic churches, Sempringham Priory and Spalding Priory, which did not survive the Reformation and for which no other contemporary representations are known to exist. Documentary evidence suggests that the map was made at Spalding Priory to record rights to pasture animals in Pinchbeck Fen, and that it passed to the Duchy of Lancaster at the dissolution of the monasteries.

H. van Harten-Boers, Z. van Ruyven-Zeman, C.E. Coebergh-Surie, The stained-glass windows in the Sint Janskerk at Gouda. The glazing of the clerestory of the choir and of het former monastic church of the regulars

H. van Harten-Boers, Z. van Ruyven-Zeman, C.E. Coebergh-Surie, The stained-glass windows in the Sint Janskerk at Gouda. The glazing of the clerestory of the choir and of het former monastic church of the regulars

Westminster Abbey and its People, c.1050-c.1216 (review)

236 Reviews Mason, E m m a , Westminster Abbey and its People, C.1050-C.1216 (Studie in the History of Medieval Religion 9), Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 1996; cloth; pp. xU, 395; R.R.P. £55.00, US$81.00. The first four chapters of this thorough and painstakingly researched book trace the history of Westminster Abbey from its origins to 1222. Westminster has a great wealth and variety of documentation avaUable to the historian, and Mason's focus is on the people of the abbey: those known by name such as the abbots and priors and the nobility and royalty they interacted with; and those w h o exist more as classes than individuals, the monks, scribes and clerks, and the tenants and neighbours of Westminster. The review of the abbey's history covers its purported R o m a n foundation, promoted by John Flete in the fifteenth century; its more probable East Saxon foundation and subsequent transformation from a minster to a monastic church in the late tenth century; the unstable political climate during the reign of Cnut and his heirs; Edward the Confessor's programme of rebuilding; and the fortunes of the church after the Norman Conquest. The book is densely written and filled with detail, yet Mason keeps the reader's attention, and several of the character portraits she gives of the abbots are vivid and memorable. There is detective work aplenty in her discussion of the abbacy of Gervase de Blois (c.l138c .1157), iUegitimate son of King Stephen. Deposed after twenty years, Gervase had a bad reputation from the tune of his successor onward. Recent scholarship, chiefly by Barbara Harvey, suggests that the one papal buU which rebukes him is a forgery, and that the complaints of John Flete about grants of land in fee-farm aUegedly made by Gervase are grossly exaggerated. Chapter 3, 'The Abbots, c. 1138-1173', ably demonstrates the intimate relationship between religion and poUtics in the twelfth century, and the deposition of Gervase in 1157 is seen against the backdrop of the change of power after Stephen's death. Henry II was engaged in a programme to confirm his authority as king, and this involved the deposition of a number of senior churchmen. Gervase, as Stephen's son, was not acceptable to the new king; and Flete's allegations of economic mismanagement leveUed against Gervase are seen to be a misperception of the fact that Reviews 237 Westminster did suffer territorial losses. ... in consequence of [Gervase's] deposition' (p. 51). Several other abbots are investigated in similar detail, and Mason demonstrates particular interest in the abiUties of the abbots to procure royal charters and to enhance the territorial holdings of the abbey. Chapters 5 and 6, 'The Visible Monks' and 'Scribes and Clerks of Westminster Abbey', focus on the monastic community. Several priors are known from the records and their activities reviewed; and the more generaUy anonymous scribes and clerks are surprisingly interesting subject matter, as the career of the notorious forger Prior Osbert de Clare is uncovered. Charters were vital to religious establishments in the Middle Ages, as they usuaUy confirmed grants of land or other income. Mason's discussion of the Westminster forgeries interestingly paraUels that of GUes Constable in Culture and Spirituality in Medieval Europe, in that she describes Osbert as a 'man with a mission', and notes his 'zealous promotion of the cult of Saint Edward, and of the privUeged status of his great church' (p. 102). It is understood that the medieval notion of authenticity varies from the modem: forgery in support of such a great cause m a y not only be excusable, but actuaUy necessary. Chapters 7 through 9 explore the relationships between Westminster Abbey and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the royal court, and the courts of the legal system. The prevailing theme is the efforts of the officials of the abbey to gain further and greater privileges: the royal grants were generaUy of a traditional nature and form; but the growing city of London offered commercial rewards which required careful thought. The abbey was formally exempt from the jurisdiction of the courts of the City, but a series of able...

Aproximación a los espacios liturgico-funerarios en Castilla y León: porticos y galileas

The object of the present study is to consider some Romanesque buildings, unknown or insufficiently known, which permit a new understanding of the material presence of the first Romanesque buildings in the kingdom of Castile-León. This study focuses on the western spaces in the Benedictine monastic churches of Sahagún, San Zoilo in Carrión, and San Isidoro de Dueñas. In many of these cases the absence of archeological evidence calls for a certain caution in the formulation and assessment of hypotheses. A discussion of the genesis, significance, and evolution of facade-structures during the high middle ages is followed by a thorough study of the above-mentioned remains.

The End of Alamannic Princely Forts and the Supposed Merovingian Hegemony

AbstractThis paper summarises German archaeologists' interpretation of hillfort occupation and abandonment in south-western Germany from the fifth to ninth centuries AD. It argues against the dominant belief that hillfort occupation ended around AD 500 and that it was related to Merovingian conquest. The archaeological changes enumerated by Konrad Weidemann are shown to be fortuitous, illusionary, or of the wrong date, while the strongest contacts archaeologically documented continued to be with northern (Gothic then Lombardic) Italy. Merovingian hegemony is argued to have had little impact on Alamannic lordship. The lack of coinage, diocesan and monastic church organisation, and royal estates east of the Rhine during the Merovingian period are taken as proof of a less 'advanced' form of lordship. Changes in lordship during the Carolingian period are finally suggested to have parallels in Scotland, where hillforts much like the Alamannic Runder Berg were abandoned for 'manors' or villae/curtes as they app...

The Musicians of the Lady Chapel of Winchester Cathedral Priory, 1402–1539

In any evaluation of the character and accomplishments of the English Reformation, an essential ingredient must be a sympathetic but, so far as possible, objective assessment of the nature – in all its strengths and weaknesses – of the unreformed Church and religion upon which the Reformation was wrought. Among the multifarious operations of the pre-Reformation Church, perhaps the most central to its fundamental purposes was the conduct by its clergy of the worship of God and the celebration of the sacrifice of the mass, as effected on the small scale by the parish clergy and on the grand scale by the priests and clerks of the greater collegiate churches and the religious of the monasteries. As acts of worship, commemoration and intercession, the efficacy of these rituals lay in the simple fact of their enactment by those to whom their conduct was committed, irrespective of the grandeur of the setting or the presence or absence of any congregation or other attendance. Nevertheless, credit both terrestrial and celestial was perceived to redound upon those institutions which endeavoured to clothe their acts of devotion and worship with the finest products that the artisans of the day could create, within the grandest achievements of their contemporary architects. In respect of the conduct of the liturgy, it was, in the event, those institutions which had carried these arts to their highest levels that eventually proved to be the principal casualties of the Reformation process; a period of less than fifteen years (1535–49) sufficed to effect the extinction of all the monastic churches, and of all the collegiate churches except for some thirty which enjoyed cathedral status, academic function or extremely close royal connection.

The Madonna delle Carceri in Prato and Italian Renaissance Pilgrimage Architecture

I shall deal first of all with private houses, and then with public buildings; and I shall briefly discuss roads, bridges, squares, prisons, basilicas which are places of judgement, xisti and palestre which were places where men took exercise, temples, theatres, amphitheatres, arches, baths, aqueducts, and finally the way to fortify cities and ports. (Palladio, Quattro Libri , Preface, 1570) Architectural theorists from Alberti to Palladio thought about architecture typologically. For them buildings were identified principally by their function rather than their form. This way of categorizing architecture has long been recognized by scholars and it has been profitably applied to the study of Italian fifteenth- and sixteenth-century architecture, especially that of villas and palaces. And yet the church, together with its typological subdivisions, such as the oratory, the monastic church, and the pilgrimage church, has remained relatively neglected. As a consequence many aspects of the design of individual churches have been ignored or misunderstood. One example is the church of the Madonna delle Carceri in Prato (Figs 1 and 2). It has generally been discussed either as one of the most beautiful of fifteenth-century centralized churches, or as part of an attempt to characterize the style of its Florentine architect, Giuliano da Sangallo. Although these approaches have revealed much about how the Madonna delle Carceri’s design came into being, when the building is seen from a different perspective, that of its function as a pilgrimage church, it becomes easier to explain aspects of its form, and to suggest alternative models for its design.

Living in the tenth century: mentalities and social orders

delivers a fascinating view of tenth-century Europe on the eve of the second millenium. He writes this hoping we, on the eve of the third millenium, will take time also to look at who we are and at our world. . . . This engaging book lucidly carries the reader through an amazing amount of material. Medieval scholars will find it resourceful and challenging; the nonscholar will find it fascinating and enlightening.--A. L. Kolp, Choice offers a magnificent survey of all the main spheres of life: the social order, the rural economy, schooling and religious belief and practice in both the secular and monastic church. His command, especially of the narrative sources, their fine nuances of attitude emotion and underlying norms, is masterly and he employs them here with all the sensitiveness and feel for the subject that have always been the hallmarks of his work.--Karl Leyser, Francia Patrick Geary's translation of Fichtenau belongs to that most admirable of scholary genres, great works of scholarship translated by great scholars. It ranks with Contreni's translation of Riche and the Taylor-Little translation of Chenu. This book will be a delight to scholars and students of all phases of European history.--Edward M. Peters, University of Pennsylvania Heinrich Fichtenau, best known to English audiences for Carolingian Empire: The Age of Charlemagne, was president of the Institute for Austrian Historical Research at the University of Vienna from 1962 until his retirement in 1984. He is the author of a dozen books in medieval studies and is the editor of several journals.

Orford Castle, Nostalgia and Sophisticated Living

Medieval architecture, considered specifically as architecture, has been unevenly treated by its historians. The vast majority of the literature is devoted to churches, for the most part large cathedral or monastic churches. The implication that other types of building either do not survive or are not architecture is patently false since there are many of them, and not a few manifest a degree of complexity in design and detail equal to a major ecclesiastical building. In particular there has been no strong tradition among architectural historians for discussing the planning, iconography and aesthetics of eleventh- and twelfth-century secular structures. Perhaps this is because they fit uneasily within the style categories of Romanesque and Gothic, which were largely devised and developed through the analysis of ecclesiastical buildings.

The Barnabas Altarpiece: A Possible Link with Southern France, St. Louis and Cyprus

SummaryThe provenance and purpose of the Barnabas Altarpiece, acquired in 1971 by the Kimbell Art Museum and exceptional for being a large early gothic retable on panel, has baffled art historians since 1950, when it became better known;it has since been dated to 1250-60. It was catalogued in 1972 on rather slender grounds as being English (a view that has become increasingly suspect) and it was proposed in 1965 that a bishop Barnabas (at that time not identified) was the donor. The panels are of willow, a wood occasionally used in medieval times for large panels in Mediterranean areas around the Gulf of Lyons, but never in northern Europe or Spain. A priest named Barnabas was made bishop of Osma by King Alphonso of Castile to whom he was physician. He held the see until his death in c. 1351 and founded a chaplaincy in the cathedral in 1350. However, neither that date nor the identification of the panels as willow is consistent with the hypothesis that he was the donor. It is here proposed that the panels were made in the south of France and that the inscription—Barnabas: Eps—applied to St. Barnabas, the apostle born in Cyprus and the first of a long line of archbishops; furthermore that this altarpiece was painted by a southern French artist for a church in Cyprus, probably that dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul in the royal complex at Nicosia which included the castle/palace and Dominican monastery. It had been the wish of St. Louis, while making preparations in Cyprus in 1248/9 for his crusade, that a new monastic church should form the royal mausoleum for the Lusignan dynasty.

The Division of Some Mexican Haciendas during the Liberal Revolution, 1856-1862

In the middle of the nineteenth century, ecclesiastical wealth in Mexico consisted basically of real estate and mortgages. The Church avoided investments in mining, industry and commerce. There were regional differences, the Church being richer in some parts of the country than in others: in the two most important cities, Mexico and Puebla, the different ecclesiastical corporations owned about half of the total real estate, whereas in some of the smaller cities, such as Veracruz, Jalapa, Orizaba, Córdoba and San Luis Potosí, the Church was proportionately much poorer. The urban real estate consisted of houses rented on fairly favourable terms to both rich and poor, monastic buildings and churches. In the countryside, the Church was considerably poorer than in the cities: its haciendas were few compared to the number of those privately owned, and their value amounted to about 5 per cent of that of all rural estate. Real estate formed about one-half of Church possessions; the other half consisted of mortgages.