Download PDF | Elaine Stratton Hild - Music in Medieval Rituals for the End of Life-Oxford University Press (2024).
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Acknowledgments
Undertaking this research project has been possible because of the eleven years (and counting) that I have been a part of Corpus monodicum, a longterm scholarly program housed at the Universitat Wurzburg and dedicated to producing editions of previously unpublished medieval plainchant. It has been a privilege to learn the intricacies of medieval notations and scribal practices from leading scholars and from countless hours working with medieval manuscripts. My gratitude goes to my colleagues and mentors, most particularly Wulf Arlt, Charles Atkinson, Gunilla Bjérkvall, David Catalunya, Andreas Haug, Felix Heinzer, Gunilla Iversen, Ritva Maria Jacobsson, Isabel Kraft, Lori Kruckenberg, Michael Norton, Nils Holger Petersen, Andreas Pfisterer, Susan Rankin, Konstantin Voigt, and Hanna Ziihlke, for the standards you have modeled and the collegial co-learning.
Completing this research project has been possible because of the support I received from the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study, including the institute's leadership—Brad Gregory, Carolyn Sherman, and Donald Stelluto—as well as Harvey Brown, J. Patout Burns, Eric Chaisson, Francis X. Clooney, Xinyu Dong, Daniel Hinshaw, Luc Jaeger, Jarek Jankowski, Robin Jensen, Claire Taylor Jones, Henrike Lange, Yutong Liu, Janice Gunther Martin, Tom McLeish, and Finola Prendergast. During my semester in residence, the wider Notre Dame community provided a rich environment for study and conversation, and I am thankful to Lacey Ahern, Kimberly Belcher, Philip Bess, Jeffrey Bishop, Calvin Bower, Thomas Burman, Michael Driscoll, Margot Fassler, Jonathan Hehn, Daniel and Halle Hobbins, Peter Jeffery, Patrick Kronner, Stephen Little, Timothy O’Malley, Andrea Riedl, Artur Rosman, and Julia Schneider for their insights and encouragement.
This publication has benefited from presentations and discussions in several additional academic communities: North American Academy of Liturgy, particularly the Issues in Medieval Liturgy Seminar; Kenyon College, with Benjamin Locke and Lucy Barnhouse; IMS study group Cantus planus meeting in Vaxjo, Sweden, with Joseph Dyer, Luisa Nardini, and Rebecca Maloy; University of Saint Thomas (Houston), with Randall Smith and Tamara Nicholl-Smith; Loveland Classical Schools, with Ian Stout, Rebecca FaustFrodl, and Timothy Smith; Universitat Freiburg, with Konstantin Voigt, Janine Droese, and Konrad Kuster; Colorado State University, with Joel Bacon; the University of Colorado at Boulder, during Patrick Geary’s visit and lecture; and in my own neighborhood, during long walks with the evercurious and thoughtful Tobias Hild.
Katarina Ster, Lori Jones, and Nikhet Varlik supported my initial publications on medieval liturgies for the dying with their editorial guidance. I am also indebted to Miklds Istvan Foldvary (E6tvés Lorand University, Budapest) for generously allowing use of the Usuarium database to locate manuscript sources. Timothy Smith offered expert feedback on Latin translations, and my invaluable colleague Andreas Pfisterer reviewed the book’s music transcriptions and appendix. The music transcriptions were typeset by Thomas Weber of Notengrafik Berlin using customized engraving software.
Manuscript images and permissions were provided by Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Bibliotheque nationale de France, and Jean-Pierre Voutaz of the Archives du Gd-St-Bernard (facilitated by Alexis Deforge and Bryan Smith). I am also indebted to Anne Bagnall Yardley for facilitating access to images of the Cranston 2322 manuscript.
Norman Hirschy and Rachel Ruisard of Oxford University Press have offered skillful and timely editorial support, and I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this book’s earlier drafts. Their careful readings and thorough responses greatly improved the work.
Unfailing encouragement and good guidance from my academic mentors, Rebecca Maloy and Elissa Guralnick, and friends and family members Florian and Tobias Hild, Bryan and Allyson Smith, Arlene Seeber, Timothy and Delia Smith and Kathryn Harrison, John and Dorothy Stratton, and Catherine Stratton Treadway have nurtured the project from beginning to end.
My sincerest thanks and gratitude to each of you.
Introduction
Contemporary Approaches to Medieval Rituals for the Dying
We study the past for the ways it can shock us.”! Caroline Walker Bynum’s words resonate as I remember the beginnings of this research project. Shock—even disbelief—formed my first reaction when I learned of the medieval practice of singing for a person at the moment of death. The contrast with our contemporary end-of-life care, with its focus on technology, medications, and medical professionals, amazed me.
Yet extant manuscripts reveal clearly that for centuries of European history, a sung liturgy was considered the exemplary accompaniment to a life's ending.” Rituals for the dying were well developed, practiced widely, and thoroughly integrated with music. Indeed, through these rituals, music held a privileged position at the time of death. Melody was, ideally, the final sensation of a human life. It is this music—the chants intended to accompany the final agony and the final breath—that forms the subject of the following study. Through detailed investigations of liturgical manuscripts, this book examines and recovers, to the extent possible, the music sung at the end of an individual's life during the Middle Ages.
Medieval deathbed liturgies have been the subject of academic research, but previous publications have focused on aspects of the rituals apart from their music. Fundamental questions remain. Which melodies were sung at the time of death? Were these chants taken from other liturgies, or did they form a unique repertory, created specifically for the end of life? To what extent did the people of different geographic areas and religious institutions maintain their own, “local” versions of deathbed rituals and chants? Amid the diversity of rituals for the dying evident in medieval manuscripts, one commonality is the use of song. Why was music given such a prominent position within these liturgies? What functions did the chants perform? In other words: why did communities gather and sing when a loved one was dying?
The robust, high-quality corpus of scholarship on the rituals’ texts enables this study of their music. Frederick Paxton’s pivotal publication Christianizing Death traces the development of European deathbed rites from late Antiquity through the Carolingian era, when their overall structures became largely fixed. His work reveals significant innovations that occurred during the late eighth and ninth centuries in Frankish regions. Damien Sicard examined rituals in 139 manuscript sources, documenting the transmission patterns of individual prayers and chant texts and assessing the likelihood of their Roman origins.* Andrieu’s earlier edition of a medieval rite for the death of an individual (which he termed Ordo XLIX) provided an important impulse for Sicard’s work.
The extensive source base used by Sicard (which includes manuscripts from religious institutions and orders throughout Western Europe, dating into the seventeenth century) reveals the geographic breadth and longevity of the liturgical tradition. Early sources without music notation containing liturgical material for an individual’s death have been edited by Férotin, Chavasse, Mohlberg, Frank, Deshusses, Dumas, and Heiming, among others.° (Most of these early sources are sacramentaries; some are fragmentary Jibelli.) Van Dijk’s work establishes the earliest versions of the deathbed rituals of the Franciscan Order, and Donohue considers several medieval rites as sources for the ritual published by the Roman Catholic Church in the early 1980s.
Most recently, Paxton has produced an edition and in-depth analysis of the medieval rites for the dying from the abbey of Cluny, France, and Susan Boynton has done the same for the abbey of Farfa.® By identifying manuscript sources and establishing textual readings and transmission patterns, these publications provide a foundation from which to investigate and secure the rituals’ extant melodic content.’
Like many of the contributions cited above, this study limits itself to the European, Christian liturgical tradition that existed prior to the Ars moriendi publications of the fifteenth century; prior to the development of rites in vernacular languages prompted by the sixteenth-century reformation; and prior to the publication of the Rituale of 1614 by the Roman Catholic Church, which standardized deathbed liturgies and replaced local versions.'® The liturgical tradition studied in this book is also distinguishable from the meditations on death and the afterlife prescribed by theologians during the Middle Ages."
One further limitation of this study concerns the amount of material contained in the medieval sources. The manuscripts often present an extended series of items intended for the entirety of a life's ending: the final agony, death, the washing and preparation of the body, transporting the body to church, the vigil with the body, the funeral Mass, transportation to the grave, and burial, as well as commemorative services. Rubrics frequently coordinate sections of this material to specific moments in the progression from sickbed to grave, but the different sections seem to have been understood as parts of a whole.
A single liturgy accompanied the soul from its residence in a human body to its residence in the heavenly community, and this same liturgy guided the human community through the loss of a member and the appropriate handling of the corpse. This study focuses on the liturgical items prescribed specifically for the gathering at the deathbed and the time period immediately following death,’ rather than the services held in the church between death and burial or the items that accompanied the procession to the grave and the burial. The music indicated for this particular use—as an accompaniment to the final moments of life and the first moments after life—is least known in scholarship, having never been the subject of adedicated study.’ It also holds special interest, since it fulfilled additional functions than did the music of the Mass, Office, and processions. This music served not only as part of a liturgy, but also as a type of aid to a suffering person and the attending community.
As a musicological project, this study breaks new ground. With good reasons, chant scholars have focused primarily on the music sung at the liturgies of the Mass, Office, and processions. The music sung outside of these liturgies, and the music of liturgies sung outside of church buildings, is largely uncharted territory.'* This book attempts to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the historic deathbed rituals by integrating one of their essential elements—music. But it also brings a previously undiscussed repertory of medieval plainchant into scholarly discourse and provides editions of previously unedited and unanalyzed chants. For these reasons, I hope it provides a beginning for scholarly conversations and an impetus for further studies.
The good reasons that have confined musicologists to the study of the Mass, Office, and processions point to the difficulties of investigating the music in deathbed liturgies. While copious numbers of manuscript sources survive for the Mass, Office, and processional liturgies, the same is not the case for the deathbed rites. These rituals were often recorded in portable, unbound libelli, meant to be carried to the bedsides of the dying. Such documents survive in smaller numbers than bound manuscripts that were housed and protected in churches and libraries. In many instances, particularly with the laity, practices at the deathbed likely went entirely unrecorded. Surviving documentation of deathbed rites proves to be the exception, not the norm.
Three of the four manuscripts used in this study (SP F 11 in Chapter 1, Paris 934 in Chapter 2, and GSB 3 in Chapter 3) preserve the deathbed rites in a book type referred to asa “ritual” (a manuscript containing liturgies performed by a priest away from the altar). The Augustinian canonry of Klosterneuburg recorded its rites for the sick and dying in similar collections.!° The women’s community of Aldgate preserved its deathbed rites in a book intended for the use of a cantrix, the woman responsible for leading liturgical chant. (Manuscript Cranston 2322 is investigated in Chapter 4.) The rites for the sick and dying promulgated by the Franciscan Order were included in breviaries, in order to allow the friars to travel and maintain their own devotions, while also being ready to minister to the needy.
Convenience for each book’s intended user was likely the motivating impulse for including the deathbed rituals within these manuscripts. But the rituals’ incorporation into larger, bound collections of material also led to their preservation in these instances. Although melody was an essential part of the deathbed rituals, the surviving sources often contain no music notation, or notation that provides only a partial representation of the melodies. These documents tended to be created and notated pragmatically. Scribes generally included only what a celebrant was expected to need in order to conduct the ritual successfully. If the melodies were considered well-known, a scribe did not need to include them.
Such documents rarely provide descriptive information for someone unfamiliar with the rituals and their chants. The relatively late development of pitch-specific notation places an additional constraint on the available source material: only with documents created after the mid-eleventh century can one expect to find music notation that indicates the specific pitches of melodies, and is thus transcribable into contemporary notation.'” These conditions greatly reduce the source material available for a study of the deathbed rituals’ music. From a small pool of eligible sources, I have chosen four of the earliest available that represent a diverse range of communities within the liturgical tradition.
Structure of the Book
Close readings of the deathbed rituals in these four manuscripts provide the foundation for the following study. The book is structured to offer a view of a repertory—the chants of the medieval deathbed liturgies—through the sources of individual institutions. The first four chapters thus contain a series of “case studies”: analyses of single rituals, each as it appears in a single source. The rituals’ chants are transcribed into modern notation and analyzed, both for their relationships between text and melody and for their functions within the rituals. Rather than conflating multiple manuscript versions into critical editions, I have chosen to edit chant texts and melodies as they appear in these single sources.
Each manuscript’s idiosyncrasies of melody and textual orthography are preserved in the transcriptions and discussions. (Standardized spellings are used in discussions of a chant’s broader transmission patterns.) This approach seems necessary and preferable for several reasons. The rituals for the time of death, along with their constituent chants, differ substantially from one another. Even when the same chant text is found in multiple manuscripts, the melodic contents of the different versions vary significantly. Yet each deathbed liturgy, and each chant, functioned as a coherent whole for the scribe who recorded them and the community that used them. Investigating each ritual and chant as an entity in its own right provides the greatest insight into the liturgical ideals—and possibly the liturgical practices—of individual communities.
The deathbed rituals have nothing to do with the precise boundaries separating our contemporary academic disciplines; they fall within the interest and purview of many fields of study. For this reason, I have tried to keep specialized musicological vocabulary to a minimum, without sacrificing the detailed observations necessary for credible argument and insight. Parenthetical comments supply basic definitions for the few musicological terms that appear; footnotes cite reference works that can give interested readers more information on musical topics. An appendix at the end of the volume provides a concise overview of each ritual: an inventory of contents, including rubrics, individual items, and the positions where music notation appears.
Each of the sources examined in Chapters 1 to 4 presents a different vantage point from which to observe medieval chants for the dying. Chapter 1 focuses on a manuscript connected with the most elite practitioners of medieval Christianity: Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Arch. Cap. S. Pietro F 11 pt. A (SP F 11). The twelfth-century manuscript is considered to be a witness to the “Old Roman’ tradition (associated with the most prominent religious institutions in Rome), and it contains a unique ritual. It shares none of its chant melodies and only one of its chant texts with other deathbed liturgies.1°
Chapter 2 examines the deathbed ritual in a late twelfth-century manuscript from the cathedral of Sens (Paris 934). It is the earliest manuscript I have found that preserves the melodies for the chants of the Ordo XLIX tradition.”° The chants of this widespread and influential tradition are evident in manuscripts from the late eighth century, but in these older sources, only the chants’ texts were recorded. With its clear, pitch-specific notation, Paris 934 is an important witness to the chants’ melodies.
The manuscript studied in Chapter 3 (GSB 3) contains no music notation with its deathbed ritual, but it provides significant insight into the practices ofa lay community far from urban centers. Scholars associate the manuscript with Orsiéres, a small village located in the Swiss Alps near the pass of GrandSaint-Bernard. Coming from a small, rural community, the manuscript gives substantive evidence for a topic of great interest to historians: whether a gap existed between the religious practices and understandings of elite practitioners (educated clerics and monastics of major religious institutions) and those of the laity (particularly those who were less educated). Manuscript GSB 3 indicates that the practices of the “folk” shared many essentials with the practices of the “elites”: their respective rituals share individual items, images of the afterlife, and tasks for the gathered community.
The deathbed ritual from a community of women—the Franciscan convent of Aldgate, England—forms the focus of Chapter 4. Manuscript Cranston 2322 contains a version of the thirteenth-century deathbed ritual promulgated by the Franciscan Order, complete with notated chants. This thirteenth-century Franciscan version became widely known throughout Europe—through the work of the friars—and later served as a source for the seventeenth-century version disseminated by the Roman Catholic Church. Cranston 2322 not only offers a detailed look at this influential ritual, it also provides an opportunity to see the adaptations made to it by a community of women. As contemporary scholars consider instances of autonomy practiced by women in the Middle Ages, the deathbed ritual in Cranston 2322 gives specific, credible insights.
Coming from such diverse communities, the four deathbed rituals studied in this book present an opportunity to observe liturgical similarities and differences among a variety of institutional types and societal groups. Created for the powerful and the poor, the educated and the uneducated, women and men, monastics, clerics, and laity, the rituals in these four manuscripts offer a glimpse into the religious practices that both distinguished communities from one another and bound them together within a single tradition.
Chapter 5 takes a broader analytical perspective, using the material and insights from the four case studies of Chapters 1 to 4 to consider questions that arise when comparing the rituals of individual communities. Did commonalities exist? To what extent did specific geographical areas and institutions maintain their own versions of the deathbed rituals? Conversely, to what extent did standardization occur?
The chapter also uses evidence provided by the musical material to revisit questions that scholars have previously posed to the deathbed rituals. To what extent is it possible to determine the practice (or practices) of the medieval Roman church? Is there a particular ritual (and accompanying chant repertory) that seems to have originated in Rome? Were the chants prescribed in the rituals for the dying borrowed from other liturgies, or were they created specifically for the time of an individual’s death?
Additionally, Chapter 5 considers the ways in which the deathbed rituals intersect with queries of current interest in scholarly discourse. As one example, the rituals allow for investigations into medieval conceptions of the afterlife. In their texts, the deathbed liturgies convey depictions—“imaginative structures”—of the soul’s experiences following the death of the body.” Ottosen, in particular, has considered the extent to which sung liturgical texts can be used as sources for understanding the multiple, changing conceptions of the afterlife that existed in the Middle Ages.’? While Ottosen’s work focuses on chant texts in the Office of the Dead, the rituals for the dying also provide insights. As discussed in Chapter 5, this study shows that the chants of the deathbed liturgies continued to convey older, positive images of the afterlife, even when conceptions of purgatory and particular judgment had become widespread.
Furthermore, the chants of the deathbed rites have much to contribute to a topic of perennial interest for musicologists: the relationships between melody and text in medieval plainchant, specifically, the ways in which melodic material articulates sung words.”? Singing is a performance of a text, and a melody tightly controls the manner in which a text is delivered. Musicologists consider which textual aspects a melody orients itself toward and thus, underscores, in performance. As one example, musical settings can articulate individual syllables of words. When a melody emphasizes the syllables typically accented in a spoken performance, it creates a speechlike declamation of a text (promoting its comprehensibility during the sung performance). Melodic elements can also emphasize meaningful groups of words—a text’s syntactic units, such as clauses and sentences. With poetic texts, melodies can articulate aspects of verse structure, such as line endings, rhymes, or internal caesurae. It is also possible for plainchant melodies to orient themselves toward the semantic contents of words. A melody can even create a “mimetic” relationship by sonically imitating an aspect of a textual image. (This is sometimes referred to as “word painting.)
Indeed, the musical layer of a chant forms a dynamic and prominent element that decisively influences a text’s performance, including which words, images, and ideas are emphasized. Musical settings have multiple ways of creating emphasis:
1. The number of pitches conveying syllables. If a syllable is conveyed with multiple pitches, while the surrounding syllables are conveyed with single pitches, the syllable sung with multiple pitches gains prominence in performance. (The term melisma refers to the multiple pitches that convey a single syllable.)
2. Melodic movement. The progressions between notes (technically termed intervals) can consist of steps or leaps, and leaps—particularly large ones—are attention-getters in performance, emphasizing the words they convey.
3. Relative pitch content. Each note in the melody is either higher, lower, or the same as those that precede and follow. A melody draws attention to syllables conveyed with relatively high or low pitches. Such micro-level changes in pitch content—particularly changes to higher pitches—can underscore syllables and words in performance.
4. Relative pitch content, large-scale changes. The pitch content of a musical setting can engage in macro-level changes as well. A melody can inhabit one area of pitch content—a particular range of pitches—to convey one portion of a text, and then make a large-scale change to convey the next portion of text with an area of pitch content that is relatively higher or lower. Such shifts in pitch content can create distinctive sonic “spaces” in the performance, providing audibly different conveyances for different portions of the text. (The term ambitus refers to the range of pitches presented in a chant.)
5. Musical endings. Each genre of music—including the medieval plainchant examined in this study—has characteristic gestures that appear at the endings of sections. (These are often referred to as cadential gestures). Where such gestures occur, they create a type of musical ending, lending a sense of finality and closure to the words they convey.
6. Repetition. Repeated musical gestures can create connections between words. By conveying different words with the same (or similar) music, the melody relates the words to one another in performance and creates an impulse for listeners to consider their connections.
With all these musical elements, it is important to note that scholarly analysis of medieval plainchant focuses solely on the music reflected in a manuscript’s notation. The analyses in the following chapters are not assumptions about how a chant was actually sung, but rather observations on a written record. The notation for each chant documents only one performance: that which occurred when the scribe wrote the melody on the page.”4 Determining if any particular chant was actually performed by a community and determining the extent to which those performances resembled the written record are separate considerations, which usually fall outside of the boundaries of possible historical inquiry. (Some manuscripts in this study do show specific signs of use, and these are noted in the following chapters.) This study examines each liturgical source asa reflection of possible practices at the deathbed, but the performance being analyzed—by necessity—is the performance depicted in the manuscript.
Even with these inherent limitations, an analysis of the music notation in the deathbed rituals yields clear findings. Far from being an incidental or neutral component, music shaped the performance of each text—and consequently, each ritual—in substantial ways. Occasionally, a musical setting prioritizes the comprehensibility of a text by rendering it more speech-like (with relatively high and low pitches emphasizing the syllables accented in spoken performance, and with cadential gestures and melismas articulating the endings of a text’s syntactic units). But most often, the melodies are strikingly oriented toward the sung words’ semantic contents. The melodies of the deathbed rituals promote specific interpretations of their sung texts. They emphasize individual words and draw connections between words with melodic repetition. Melodic movement sometimes mimics the movement depicted in a textual image, as when an ascending musical gesture conveys a portrayal of the soul ascending to God. The music of the deathbed rituals intrigues, not only because of the circumstances in which the chants were sung, and not only because the repertory is unknown to chant scholars, but also because the melodies form an active, interpretive element of the chants, articulating and emphasizing specific images and theological understandings.
In their nuanced conveyances of texts, the melodies promote reassurance. Merciful images of God and serene depictions of the soul’s afterlife are musically underscored. As I will argue in the following chapters, the melodies of the deathbed rituals seem to have served the functions of comforting the dying and promoting encouraging theological understandings of the afterlife. Paxton has already noted that the deathbed rituals show a care for the dying as much as a concern with the afterlife of the soul. Beginning with the late eighth-century rituals, Paxton observes a “change of emphasis from the exclusive concern with the fate of the soul to the needs of the dying person.” Eschatological affairs are interwoven with expressions of comfort. The following study shows that the rituals’ chants served as vehicles for offering consolation. The chants’ texts convey reassuring, peaceful images of the afterlife; the chants’ music underscores the peaceful images. In studying the music of the rituals, we study beauty offered to console the dying and the bereaved.
We also glimpse how communities of that time “enacted, asserted, confronted, lived, and gave meaning to” the awful and awe-filled moment when a body fails, a life ends, a loved one dies.”° We “encounter people who struggle as we struggle” with one fact that we cannot change: my life, and the life of each person I love, will end.”” We are finally impotent when faced with death. I value the study of the medieval deathbed rituals not only as part of an academic discourse with its own inherent value, but also because these rituals show us how others chose to fight the losing fight. They show us how others engaged with death—the opponent that eventually, inevitably, wins. Singing a deathbed liturgy was an action undertaken by communities whom we might consider (mistakenly?) to have been powerless, since they lacked meaningful medical capabilities. Yet in these liturgies, the medieval sources reveal people who gathered, rather than staying away; people who acknowledged the end of life, rather than denying it; people who found the breath to sing at the very moment of loss. Even as we wield the astonishing resources of contemporary medical technology, the image of those people, gathering and singing at the deathbed, humbles and fascinates.
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