Book Review: Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida y Mª V. Curto, El Libro de la oración de María de Santo Domingo. Edición y estudio, Iberoamericana –Vervuert, 2019. (original) (raw)

The Revelations of Sor María de Santo Domingo: A Study and a Translation

2023

This volume is both the first extensive study in English and the first translation into English of the Spanish turn-of-the-fifteenth-century manuscript Las revelaciones de María de Santo Domingo. The source text for the translation is Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida and María Luengo Balbas’s scholarly edition. This English edition has two distinct parts. Beginning with her life and role as a reformer, the first part examines Sor María’s spirituality and provides a profile of the example she closely imitated, that of St Catherine of Siena. This is followed by an analysis of the sources, authorship and subjects of Las revelaciones. The second part offers a translation of the work into English.

Towards a Critical Edition of the Libro del Conorte of the Abbess Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534)

Observant Reforms and Cultural Production in Europe, B. Roest and P. Delcorno (eds.), 2023

This article constitutes a first effort to organize the materials, reflections and unresolved questions that have emerged from my recent years of study of Juana de la Cruz and the Conorte. If all goes according to plan, this will culminate in both the first critical edition of the text and a monograph on the transcription and collection of her sermons. I would like to offer some preliminary reflections on the material evidence of this case in order to highlight specifically the need for a re-evaluation of the codices containing the Conorte and also of the discourse containing the actual words uttered by Juana. In the first part of the paper therefore, I present the two different manuscripts that include Juana’s sermons and revisit their implications in the history of Juana’s canonization process in order to address certain codicological, philological and ideological issues that need to be urgently re-considered before a hermeneutic reading of the text can take place. In the second part, I try to identify what we understand by the Conorte or, in other words,what we know and do not know about its collective writing, compilation, and use by the community of the Convent of Santa María de la Cruz.

[2023] «Senhoras que cantan y no cantan caresciendo de la theorica y pratica». Musical Theory and Liturgical Practice in the Monastery of Lorvão»

Textus & Musica [En ligne], Les numéros, 7 | 2023 - Performance of Medieval Monophony: Text and Image as Evidence for Musical Practice, Performance of Medieval Monophony: Text and Image as Evidence for Musical Practice, 2023

This article addresses the transmission context of a formerly unknown text on music theory, copied on the verso of the last folio of a gradual (Lisbon, BnP, L.C. 238), which was part of a set of choirbooks commissioned by Catarina d’Eça, abbess of Santa María de Lorvão (1471-1521). The article discusses this source within the broader context of the production and circulation of liturgical books, particularly among Cistercian nuns. It reviews some assumptions concerning women’s agency in creating and performing liturgy and the negotiation between nuns and priests over nearly every aspect of liturgical care. It shows how the role of both lay and religious women as mediators across and between religious orders and kingdoms or territories can no longer be overlooked. The last section examines the theoretical sources of this brief musical treatise to determine whether the author of the text drew on the tradition of the Bernardian reform, or on other kinds of musical sources from outside the Cistercian tradition. Both the sources and the use of the Castilian language shed light on the origins of the text’s author.