TWO LITURGICAL RESPONSES TO THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION AT THE COLLEGIATE CHURCH OF SAINT MARY IN AACHEN, 1570-1580 (original) (raw)
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Charlemagne and the Consciousness of France in the Medieval Liturgy of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle)
International Medieval Society Paris Annual Conference, Paris, France, 2014
Nostalgia for Charlemagne’s reign was at the heart of the identity of Aachen’s Marienkirche, which he constructed and endowed. After his death, the institution developed enduring ways of expressing his legacy and the power of his successors, the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. The most important among these were the church’s role as the coronation site of German kings (from 936 to 1531); the veneration of the church as the site of Charlemagne’s interment and, eventually, of the ruler as a saint (from 1165); and the display in a septennial pilgrimage (beginning in 1349) of the so-called Great Relics, which Charlemagne had procured for the church. In creating rituals for these three expressions of Charlemagne’s legacy, the canons of Aachen’s Marienkirche, some of whom were educated in Paris, were conscious of the ruler’s legacy in France, and this paper explores the ways in which some Aquensian rituals were designed to emulate or even to compete with parallel French rituals. While the coronation rites seem to have endured much as they had always been, liturgical melodies and reliquaries associated with Charlemagne’s sainthood betray a French influence. The twelfth-century sequence for Charlemagne’s feast day is a contrafact of a melody by Adam of Saint Victor. A fourteenth-century bust reliquary containing the ruler’s cranium displays the fleur-de-lis above the imperial eagle and looks distinctly like one that contained the head of Saint Louis. Even the pilgrimage, a relatively late development in the church’s activities that was essentially centered on the Shift of the Virgin, can be viewed as a response to the pilgrimage of Chartres, the focus of which was a Marian veil. I argue that all of these responses to French traditions are self-conscious efforts to bolster the importance of Aachen’s Marienkirche in the face of waning prominence.
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