Sacred Polyphony "not understandid" - EMH 29 (2010) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Early Music History, 2010
This study focuses on the ritual ‘conservatism’ of Henry VIII's Reformation through a new look at biblical exegeses of the period dealing with sacred music. Accordingly, it reconsiders the one extant passage of rhetoric to come from the Henrician regime in support of traditional church polyphony, as found in A Book of Ceremonies to be Used in the Church of England, c.1540. Examining the document's genesis, editorial history and ultimate suppression by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, it is shown that Bishop Richard Sampson, Dean of the Chapel Royal (1522–40), was responsible for the original drafting of the musical paragraph. Beginning with Sampson's printed commentaries on the Psalms and on the Epistles of St Paul, the literary precedents and historical continuities upon which Sampson's topos in Ceremonies was founded are traced in detail. Identified through recurring patterns of scriptural and patristic citation, and understood via transhistorical shifts in the meaning o...
Music, Church, and Henry VIII's Reformation (D.Phil. Thesis, University of Oxford, 2007)
MUSIC, CHURCH, AND HENRY VIII’S REFORMATION Dana T. Marsh The Queen’s College, Oxford Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Trinity Term 2007 The defining intellectual, historical and cultural influences on Henry VIII’s Reformation have remained virtually unchanged in musicological narratives since the 1960s. In recent decades, however, scholars in the field of Reformation historiography have completely revised their view of the same period. It is a chief aim of this study to address the resultant historiographical disjunction between the two disciplines. Typically, musicological investigations have focused first on specific institutional archives and their connected music manuscript evidence. The present thesis looks beyond these methodological foci via an interdisciplinary approach, supported by a range of primary source materials that incorporate musical, historical, cultural and sociological elements. The historical presuppositions conventionally taken for granted in framing the musicological narrative of Henrician reform will be reassessed in part one. Part two centres on changes in religious policy and doctrine: first, a fresh look at the musical consequences of the dissolution of the monasteries; second, an investigation of musical invective in printed evangelical polemics of the early 1540s; third, a reassessment of religious dissent among church musicians, with a new look at the heresy trial of John Merbecke. Part three offers for the first time a coherent rationale for the prevalent musical conservatism of Henry VIII’s church, deriving chiefly from Bishop Richard Sampson’s psalm commentaries (1539), and his ‘short explanations’ on St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (1546). These neglected texts are also deployed in a reexamination of musical guidelines in the document, Ceremonyes to be vsyd in the churche of Englonde (1540). A broader view of the circumstances surrounding the emergence of the King’s Litany (1544) further reveals a unique fusion of ‘traditionalism’ and ‘reform’ – an ostensible via media – finding elements of kingship, church and society brought together into a culturally integrated whole. N.B. - Chapter 5 has been expanded and published in Early Music History (2010)
The church of England’s use of liturgical texts from the perspective of ritual performance and flow
2000
Ian Peter Enticott The Church of England's Use of Liturgical Texts from the Perspective of Ritual Performance and Flow. For the Degree of Master of Arts University of Durham AD 2000 The Church of England makes extensive use of liturgical texts. These texts were never intended simply to sit on the page, but to be used or performed. This thesis examines the Church of England's use of its liturgical texts by applying criteria from the disciplines of both sociology and theology. Chapter One identifies the various ways in which this study could be approached. The methods of literary criticism, historical analysis and empirical study are all investigated. These are, however, of limited value for exploring what makes 'good' worship. I therefore follow an interdisciplinary study. Chapter Two looks at the nature of ritual performance from the perspective of sociology. I explore the areas of ritual, flow, symbol and performance by making reference to the works of Rappaport, Victor Turner, Csikszentmihalyi, Flanagan, Schechner and others. Chapter Three moves to an examination of the theology of ritual performance. Various authors from Protestant and Roman Catholic traditions are cited in an examination of the theological implications of the use of symbols and symbolic language. Fellowship (Koinonia) is linked with Turner's notion of communitas, and the link between music and word is examined. Chapter Four applies the insights from chapters two and three to examine some of the texts in use in the Church of England. The use of the Peace, and the development of the Eucharistic Prayers are investigated, and the use of symbol is explored with particular reference to the service of Baptism. Chapter Five looks at the possibilities for new directions in worship in the Church of England with particular reference to the Commentary in the Service of the Word. Sociological insights must be applied to the study of liturgy in order for the new texts being produced to meet people's needs in bringing them through worship to an encounter with God. THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND'S USE OF LITURGICAL TEXTS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF RITUAL PERFORMANCE AND FLOW IAN PETER ENTICOTT The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should he published in any form, including Electronic and the Internet, without the author's prior written consent. All information derived from this thesis must he acknowledged appropriately.
Ecclesiology, 2013
Richard W. Pfaff THE LITURGY in Mediaeval England – A History Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp xxviii + 593 ISBN 978-0-521-80847-7 Richard Pfaff, now Emeritus Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, has spent a professional lifetime working on the liturgy in Mediaeval England. This volume is both a testimony to these labours and an indispensible guide to the texts in this field that will be the standard map of the territory for many years to come. There is no other comparable resource, and this book is all the more valuable as it gives a summary of the history of the study of some of the primary sources and analyses the value of their nineteenth or early twentieth century editions. Pfaff’s particular interests give a slant to some of the material – not least in the choice of what to leave out. His earlier work [notably New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (1970), Liturgical Calendars, Saints, and Services in Medieval England(1998)] explored means of tracking regional links and dating additions and alterations to the calendar In this massive survey, ranging from what we know of pre-Augustine liturgy in England – not an enormous amount! – to the lavish printings on the eve of the Reformation, he consciously omits any study of pastoral rites and of the popular devotional literature – the books of hours and personal missals which frequently interest the romantic leanings of social historians and (rightly) excite the art historians; nor does he touch the complex area of pontifical liturgy. Rather, his work centres on the mass, the office, the liturgical year and the calendar – a huge body of material nonetheless. Pfaff starts with an important declaration: this is primarily a book about sources and editions, and so is concerned neither with the theological shifts as understandings of the relationship between God and his people change in response to experience of different models of kingship nor with the developing sense of personal rather than corporate spirituality over this long period. So students who turn to this tome in hopes of descriptive writing about how the developed liturgy of mediaeval England in Salisbury cathedral might have been experienced, for example, will be disappointed. And although he shows awareness of the architectural setting of the liturgy, he is more interested in what evidence above-ground archaeology can offer than how a particular liturgy might have been influenced by its architectural setting. Nor does he deal with the whole question of music – a significant feature of the developed Sarum Rite – and indeed how could he in a book this size? But although this may make it sound as if Pfaff’s book is dry and for the expert mediaevalist only, that is not entirely the case. In the two initial chapters on pre-Conquest liturgy, we are already being introduced to the key manuscripts and personalities – and their loyalties, influences and in many case eventual cults – who shape the early story. Alcuin, Wulfstan and Aelfric, the Leofric Missal and Aethelwold’s Benedictional, Swithun and Lanfranc form a weft for the worn tapestry of the interaction between the earlier ‘Northumbrian’ tradition and the continental reformers. After the conquest, the tracing of the patterns of cross fertilization leads to sections on the monastic liturgies – Benedictines, Cluniacs, Cistercians, Carthusians and the Augustinian canons regular, finishing with the various friars, and a section on the surviving book from nunneries. Independent of the local diocese, the European-wide network provided by these different orders provide the warp to the weft of the local uses – Sarum, York, Hereford and others, of which the most significant came to be Sarum. Interestingly enough, though we know a good deal about the how the Sarum rite was celebrated from the study of the buildings at Salisbury, the most detailed information as to the performance of the rite comes from Exeter, where that liturgical enthusiast with a sharp eye for detail, John Grandisson, was Bishop from 1328 until his death forty one years later. In his will he left his most highly prized missal not to the cathedral, whose substantial re-building he had overseen and to which he left his remarkable collection of vestments, but to his successor, thereby ensuring as far as possible that his achievement of liturgical stability and uniformity might survive. But little hard evidence survives to confirm whether Grandisson’s desire for liturgical uniformity survived in South-West England. And although the use of Sarum did become the principal English use, what texts cannot help us evaluate is how the liturgies were celebrated. However detailed, rubrics devised for a cathedral church with battalions of minor clergy, acolytes and choristers, give little indication of what might be experienced in a country church. The myth of monolithic liturgical unity, even in this small part of the Western Church, is revealed for what it is – a romantic dream. Not until the invention of printing would any enterprise of imposed unification, like the political and theological programme of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, become a possibility. Yet what this study reveals is that for all the muddles and diversity it is possible to chart tables of kindred and affinity in the complex web of liturgical influences that precedes this period, as the calendar undergoes incessant modification and feasts are up or down-graded. This romantic dream – the idea of an end-point of visible liturgical unity – is what Pfaff shows to be the presupposition, acknowledged or not, of many of the nineteenth century liturgiologists. His critique of their work, subjecting it to the same critical scrutiny as the mediaeval sources is a valuable part of his book: it is their editions, of which the volumes of the Henry Bradshaw Society are still the basic series of modern editions, that in many case are still the only texts available in printed form today, and we need to be aware of the largely Tractarian lenses through which the early editors viewed their subject matter. Students today will often come to a particular period or topic that interests them, without a general understanding of the subject, and this is where his five Excursuses, spread through the book with the health-warning that the knowledgeable need not read them, are a fascinating way of giving a brief tutorial on what the general student needs to know to make sense of what is being read. Here is a teacher – not just a scholar – at work; but it is hard work, and his pupils need that kind of detailed attention to minutiae that he admires in Bishop Grandisson. Perhaps what holds our attention most is Pfaff’s forensic skill in unraveling the complex threads of the evidence he has laid bare, and his ability – while never going beyond what the facts warrant – to open up lines of future enquiry. In an area of great complexity, where the social historians are re-examining our understanding of the code of chivalry and the conventions of courtly love and the rise of the significance of the individual in the twelfth century renaissance is still not fully understood, the contribution of liturgical studies is in its infancy. Pfaff makes it seem as inviting as a Dorothy Sayers’ detective story: the setting – indefinably English; the characters – a mixture of the natively intelligent and the effortlessly well-born; the plot – meticulously crafted on the available evidence; and the conclusions – well-crafted and somehow satisfying. It is a pleasure to accompany a scholar at work, to see where the chase will take you and to wonder at the myriad vistas opened up, even if those avenues demand another lifetime’s study to explore. David Stancliffe Stanhope 1232 words
The Medieval Low Countries, 2019
The liturgical evidence for bishops remains underexplored. What work there is tends to focus on those rites reserved to the bishop collected in pontificals and therefore ignores the potential of more mundane books in daily use. This case study of a sacramentary used by the bishop of Noyon in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries reveals, through a comparison with similar materials produced for contemporary communities within northern France, the ways in which the bishop's roles in the secular world were reflected in minor changes made to the liturgy in use in one of his churches. It thus casts fresh light on the less well-known see of Noyon, and at the same time demonstrates the importance of incorporating such mundane materials into modern studies of episcopacy in this period. Recent work on the early and central medieval episcopate has greatly improved our understanding of how bishops, and the clerical communities in which they participated, understood, constructed and reconstructed their own roles in this period. 1 It is striking, however, that almost all of this scholarship focuses either on the political and secular aspects of episcopal lordship, through the study of charters, vitae and other narrative writings, or upon the evidence of letters, sermons, church councils and church law for the development of episcopal office. What has been largely neglected from these studies are those texts produced to support the main business of episcopal communities, that of prayer. Similar criticisms have been made of research into monastic communities; as the musicologist Susan Boynton has observed, the 'privileging of property and politics' risks marginalising liturgical evidence. 2 1 The research for this paper was conducted with the support of funding for the 2016-19 project Humanities in the European Research Area: After Empire: Using and not using the past in the crisis of the Carolingian world, c. 900-c.1050 (HERA.15.076). I should like to thank Steven Vanderputten and especially Brigitte Meijns for her help as editor, and the reviewer for their constructive comments.
2010
The information on this form will be published. To minimize any risk of inaccuracy, please type your text. Please supply two copies of this abstract page. Full name (surname first): Gill, Sylvia May School/Department: School of History and Cultures/Modern History Full title of thesis/dissertation: Managing Change in The English Reformation: The 1548 Dissolution of the Chantries and Clergy of the Midland County Surveys Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Date of submission: March 2010 Date of award of degree (leave blank): Abstract (not to exceed 200 words-any continuation sheets must contain the author's full name and full title of the thesis/dissertation): The English Reformation was undeniably a period of change; this thesis seeks to consider how that change was managed by those who were responsible for its realisation and by individuals it affected directly, principally during the reign of Edward VI. It also considers how the methodology adopted contributes to the historiography of the period and where else it might be applied. Central to this study is the 1548 Dissolution of the Chantries, the related activities of the Court of Augmentations and the careers of clerics from five Midland counties for whom this meant lost employment. In addition to the quantitative analysis of original documentation from the Court, counties and dioceses, the modern understanding of change management for organisations and individuals has been drawn upon to extrapolate and consider further the Reformation experience. The conclusions show how clerical lives and careers were or were not continued, while emphasising that continuation requires an enabling psychological management of change which must not be overlooked. The evidence for the state demonstrates that its realisation of its immediate aims contained enough of formal change management requirements for success, up to a point, while adding to the longer-term formation of the state in ways unimagined. For my Mother, Claire and Max Where to start with acknowledgements? Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor Professor Alec Ryrie for his help and advice which has been invaluable, and his patience which has been admirable; he has done his best with me, I take responsibility for all else. Secondly, I would like to thank Professor Robert Swanson who introduced me to the Chantry Surveys when I was working for my MA; to him must go the 'blame' for both my MA dissertation and this thesis but it is an introduction I am pleased to have had. I must also thank Dr Peter Cunich of the University of Hong Kong who, early in my research, provided valuable guidance on material in the National Archives. Like many researchers past and present, I have had help and assistance from archive staff in a number of locations and would like to thank those at the National Archives in Kew and the local record offices of Gloucester, Hereford, Lichfield, Warwick and Worcester and Hereford Cathedral Archives. In addition, thanks go to staff in the University of Birmingham's Main Library, in Special Collections and The Shakespeare Institute for their help and guidance. Administration staff in the College of Arts and Law also deserve acknowledgement and I would like particularly to thank Sue Bowen, Heather Cullen and Julie Tonks. This period of study has been my third at the University of Birmingham and, as ever with an undertaking such as this, it is the people you meet along the way who enrich the whole experience. I am grateful for the support I have received from my colleagues in the School of History and Cultures Postgraduate Forum and have enjoyed and profited from the discussions we have had and the experience of hosting our three one-day conferences.
This book testifies to the vitality of the liturgy in later tenth-and eleventh-century England. 1 New types of liturgical books were created, older rites were revised and new ones introduced. Occasionally, we have evidence for the individuals involved in reworking the liturgy and for whom it had such significance: Archbishop Wulfstan and his probable interest in the Chrism Mass; AEthelwold's attachment to the Psalterium Romanum; Wulfstan of Winchester's influence on the chant of the Old Minster, Winchester. 2 They are tantalizing reminders of the many men (and women) who compiled, collected, commissioned and performed the liturgy.
‘English Episcopal Acta and Thirteenth-Century Petitions to the Pope’, Archives 40 (2014): 16-22
The publication of the British Academy's English Episcopal Acta serieslaunched in 1973 to collect and edit English episcopal documents from the mideleventh to the end of the thirteenth centurywill soon draw to a close as the final volumes are prepared. 2 The series represents the gold standard of editorial practice and supplies the medieval historian with editions of a vast corpus of source material which the series' editors have hunted down in archives scattered across England and abroad. The actachiefly mandates, confirmations, grants, and indulgencesfill in the historical blanks for episcopal activity before the institution of bishops' registers, illustrating the day-to-day activities of bishops in administering their sees at a local level, their interaction with the English royal court, and their communication with the papal curia. 3 The acta have been utilised regularly by historians of medieval England, and have featured in studies on episcopal diplomatic, ecclesiastical government, and the forgery of documents, among other topics. 4 1 Thomas W. Smith is a postdoctoral researcher at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. I am extremely grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for the grant of a two-year Study Abroad Studentship to pursue postdoctoral research into papal petitioning. I also wish to thank the Institute of Historical Research and the Scouloudi Foundation for the grant of a one-year Scouloudi Junior