Cantors made unparalleled contributions to the way time was understood and history was remembered in the medieval Latin West. The men and women who held this office in cathedrals and monasteries were responsible for calculating the date of Easter and the feasts dependent on it, for formulating liturgical celebrations season by season, managing the library and preparing manuscripts and other sources necessary to sustain the liturgical framework of time, and promoting the cults of saints. Crucially, their duties also often included committing the past to writing, from simple annals and chronicles to more fulsome histories, necrologies, and cartularies, thereby ensuring that towns, churches, families, and individuals could be commemorated for generations to come.
This volume seeks to address the fundamental question of how the range of cantors' activities can help us to understand the many different ways in which the past was written and, in the liturgy, celebrated across the Middle Ages. Its essays are studies of constructions, both of the building blocks of time and of the people who made and performed them, in acts of ritual remembrance and in written records; cantors, as this book makes clear, shaped the communal experience of the past in the Middle Ages.
Author(s): Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, Andrew B. Kraebel, Margot E. Fassler (eds.)
Series: York Medieval Press. Writing History in the Middle Ages, 3
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: XVIII+374
City: Woodbridge
List of Illustrations viii
Contributors x
Acknowledgments xiv
Abbreviations xvi
Introduction 1
Part I. The Carolingian Period
1. Historia: Some Lexicographical Considerations / David Ganz 8
2. Liturgy and History in the Early Middle Ages / Rosamond McKitterick 23
3. Notker Bibliothecarius / Susan Rankin 41
4. Singing History: Chant in Ekkehard IV's "Casus sancti Galli" / Lori Kruckenberg 59
Part II. The Eleventh Century
5. Adémar de Chabannes (989–1034) as Musicologist / James Grier 90
6. Cantor or Canonicus? In Search of Musicians and Liturgists in Eleventh-Century Constance / Henry Parkes 103
7. Shaping the Historical Dunstan: Many Lives and a Musical Office / Margot E. Fassler 125
8. Female Monastic Cantors and Sacristans in Central Medieval England: Four Sketches / Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis 151
9. Cantor, Sacrist or Prior? The Provision of Books in Anglo-Norman England / Teresa Webber 172
10. Symeon of Durham as Cantor and Historian at Durham Cathedral Priory, c. 1090–1129 / Charles C. Rozier 190
11. Reshaping History in the Cult of Æbbe of Coldingham / Lauren L. Whitnah 207
12. William of Malmesbury as a Cantor-Historian / Paul Antony Hayward 222
13. Lex orandi, lex scribendi? The Role of Historiography in the Liturgical Life of William of Malmesbury / Sigbjørn Olsen Sønnesyn 240
14. Of the Making of Little Books: The Minor Works of William of Newburgh / A. B. Kraebel 255
Part IV. On the Continent: Five Case Studies
15. The Cantors of the Holy Sepulchre and their Contribution to Crusade History and Frankish Identity / Cara Aspesi 278
16. Shaping Liturgy, Shaping History: A Cantor-Historian from Twelfth-Century Peterhausen / Alison I. Beach 297
17. The Roman Liturgical Tradition According to a Twelfth-Century Roman Cantor / Peter Jeffery 310
18. A Life in Hours: Goswin of Bossut's Office for Arnulf of Villers / Anna de Bakker 326
19. Writing History to Make History: Johannes Meyer's Chronicles of Reform / Claire Taylor Jones 340
Index of Manuscripts 357
General Index 361
