Musical Hagiographies

For cloistered religious during the European Middle Ages, sacralized narrations of the tortures of virgin martyrs facilitated erotic display under the cover of disavowal. David Frankfurter (2009) has considered "prurience into sado-erotic violence" in early Christianity, arguing that violence depicted in saints' vitae permitted "masochistic identification with victims' eroticized brutalization and dissolution." During the late Middle Ages, music was a primary vehicle by which the vitae of virgin martyrs were meditated upon, and its role in heightening the erotic impact of violence must be brought to bear on the history and reception of liturgical cults.
Unique among plainchant liturgies for saints, an office for St. Katherine of Alexandria composed in England around the turn of the twelfth century directly quotes a woman's speech as Katherine declares Christian doctrine; her female embodiment is highlighted through text and expansions in melodic range; her social disruption is mirrored by musical instability. Communities performed Katherine's speech, identifying with her gendered transgressions but simultaneously reveling in her punishment as the precocious woman was tortured for her crimes against both civic and gender normativity--an increasing concern for ecclesiastical writers steeped in the Gregorian Reforms during the twelfth century. The sung delivery of these texts resulted in a communally performed voyeurism, but also a performance of transgression and torture, as singers contended with the musical and physical demands of the melodies.  
The depiction of speech and authority linked with female bodies would become all the more pertinent during "the Anarchy" in England when the Empress Matilda claimed the throne as regnant queen. This paper concludes with a consideration of how the this Office could be read in relation to the gendered political discourse of the mid-twelfth century, examining it in light of anxieties about ruling women.

Although Advent was a time of penitential preparation, its solemn mood was often inflected by joyous anticipation of Christ's nativity, especially in the streets of medieval Paris. No saint exemplified the festive aspects of clerical and lay celebrations more than the ever-popular patron of clerics and schoolchildren, St. Nicholas, whose highly-feted 6 December feast fell toward the beginning of Advent. As a saint also praised for abstinence and moderation, St. Nicholas was an ideal role model for the simultaneously festive and penitential  season. Yet, despite the importance of Advent and its banner saint within liturgical and extraliturgical practices, musical accretions for season and saint are rarely discussed. In this paper, I look to thirteenth-century Parisian sources of polyphony for musical and poetic evidence demonstrating not only a link between saint and season but also the reconciling of Advent's inherent tensions between penance and rejoicing through the figure of St. Nicholas.           
Pulling together narrative strands from St. Nicholas's vita with the Advent liturgy and popular customs in medieval Paris, I connect the devotional framework of one motet for the saint, Psallat Chorus-Eximie-APTATUR, to the dichotomous Advent season. In so doing, I reveal previously unnoticed intertextual relationships between two additional motets on the tenor DOCEBIT ("he will lead") and Psallat chorus-Eximie-APTATUR. My identification of textual and theological themes shared among these motets and the Advent liturgy highlights a thematically and textually integrated collection of polyphony commemorating saint and season in equal parts. Moreover, I argue that the seasonal themes of spiritual leadership and festive celebration narrated in these motets are intimately tied to cultic veneration of St. Nicholas. Through examination of this tightly woven complex of music, text, and liturgy in thirteenth-century Paris, Nicholas emerges as a saintly and musical beacon of Advent and its dual poles of repentance and joy. 

The late medieval church of Sint-Jan in the Netherlandish town of 's-Hertogenbosch cultivated unique local devotions to the widely venerated apostle, St John the Evangelist.  Most notable are the five annual feasts, two of which are unknown elsewhere in Western Christendom-John's Exile on the Island of Patmos (27 September) and Return from Exile (3 December).  While Patmos figured prominently in the Western iconography of John's prophetic vision and writing of the Apocalypse, this event was largely overlooked in the Western Johannine liturgy, with but a cursory reference in two antiphons from the modally-ordered series sung at Matins across medieval Europe.  In dedicating two high-ranking feasts to John's exile, the 's-Hertogenbosch clergy thus faced a problem: How to embellish the standard Western liturgical narrative in sufficient detail?  
 
By quoting excerpts from a fifth-century text of Syrian origin-the Acts of John by Prochorus-in the Matins lections and composing new verse and music for the accompanying responsories, the 's-Hertogenbosch clergy effectively synthesized Eastern and Western narratives of John's evangelical and prophetic activities on Patmos.  My analysis of a previously-ignored liturgical book-the Festorum compositorum ecclesie collegiate sancti Ioannis-sheds new light on local reception of the Prochorus Acts, widely disseminated in Byzantium but little known in the Latin West.  Through careful study of the eight extant Latin copies, I identify the probable source for the Sint-Jan lections and consider what the hagiographic context in which this text circulated might reveal about its local significance.  While the lections contradict the Western prophetic association of Patmos by imagining this island as the locus for John's preaching and writing of the Gospel, the corresponding responsories call on John as both an apostle and a prophet-attributes that merge in the musical form and melodic embellishment of these previously unstudied chants.  I argue that by giving equal voice to John's twin identities, the clergy of Sint-Jan may have sought to position themselves as mediators between the priestly and monastic vocations.  More broadly, this case study explores Eastern influence on the Western liturgy and considers how conflicting hagiographic narratives might be reconciled through liturgical song.