East Syriac Poetry Embedded in the Manuscript Decoration: 17th—18th Centuries

East Syriac poetry embedded in the manuscript decoration has not been studied despite its large popularity in this tradition. Such verse pieces, mostly quatrains, are known at least since the 16th century. The poems being discussed in the present paper represent a further development of this particular text group. It seems to have first appeared in the Gospel lectionaries. Later on, the other types of liturgical manuscripts also obtained different kinds of “decorative” scribal poetry. This process went on alongside the growth of the poetry's popularity in the East Syriac tradition during several centuries of the Ottoman period.

Isaac's Sacrifice: Operation of Word and Image in Ashkenazi Religious Ceremonies

In the Ashkenazi public prayer domain, narratives and figures were limited to the illumination of large prayer books used by the cantor and smaller copies for private use, ordered by those members of the community who could afford them. Operation of word and image in this context enabled worshipers to interact with the human ancestors of the Jewish people and related fundamental biblical events perceived in the liturgy as ancestral merits. However, while the basic texts used in such collaborations were recited or sung by the cantor or believers and formed a consistent obligatory part of the liturgy, the images were always a flexible nonobligatory addition, open to variation. Often, there may be a clear gap between the two in regard to contents, a result of the way the Jewish visual language crystallized in Christian Europe. This article exemplifies the complexities involved in the process of such an operation as expressed in two Ashkenazi liturgical manuscripts of around 1300.

Cantus figuratusand monastic re-figuration in the late medieval Veneto

In 1409 Ludovico Barbo arrived at the monastery of Santa Giustina in Padua, intent on its reformation. Since the late fourteenth century, the scriptorium at Santa Giustina had produced some of the most significant collections of polyphonic music to survive from the period, specialising in copying the avant-garde repertories of the Ars nova. Yet the reforms Barbo sought to introduce – reforms based on ideals he and a cohort of Venetians had been living out on the island of S. Giorgio in Alga – eschewed outward ostentation, and centred on prayerful engagement with the scene of Christ's Passion. Barbo's initiatives would seem at odds with the tradition of secular polyphony cultivated at the monastery in the years before his arrival. Official documents from the reform prohibit the practice of cantus figuratus and paint a picture of a uniformly spare music aesthetic.Manuscript and material evidence from Santa Giustina and dependent houses tells a different story, and suggests that communities found use for the monastery's musical past within the reformed practice of prayer and meditation. Vestiges of this past appear in the most unlikely of places: the Good Friday rituals that Barbo himself worked to strip of polyphonic accoutrement. The efforts of individual monks, musicians and scribes – here Rolando da Casale, whose musical expertise Barbo enlisted in the copying of new liturgical manuscripts, and Johannes Preottonus – emerge as telling examples of the ways in which institutional histories come under the pressure of their individual actors.

Preservation and Creation Plainchant Notation of the Pauline Order in 14th–18th-century Hungary

This study surveys the musical notation appearing in the liturgical manuscripts of the Order of St. Paul the First Hermit from the fourteenth until the eighteenth century. As a Hungarian foundation, the Pauline Order adopted one of the most elaborate and proportionate Gregorian chant notations of the medieval Catholic Church, the mature calligraphic Hungarian/Esztergom style, and used it faithfully, but in a special eremitical way in its liturgical manuscripts over an exceptionally long period, far beyond the Middle Ages. The research sought to study all the Pauline liturgical codices and codex fragments in which this Esztergom-Pauline notation emerges, then record the single neume shapes and supplementary signs of each source in a database. Systematic comparison has produced many results. On the one hand, it revealed the chronological developments of the Pauline notation over about four centuries. On the other hand, it has been possible to differentiate notation variants, to separate a rounded-flexible and a later more angular, standardized Pauline writing form based on the sources, thereby grasping the transition to Gothic penmanship at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A further result of the study is the discovery of some retrospective Pauline notation types connected to the Early Modern and Baroque period, after the Tridentine Council. The characteristics of the notations of the choir books in the Croatian and the Hungarian Pauline provinces have been well defined and some individual subtypes distinguished – e.g. a writing variant of the centre of the Croatian Pauline province, Lepoglava.

The Liturgy of St James

The Liturgy of St James, named after Jerusalem’s first bishop, was the original eucharistic liturgy of Jerusalem before it completely disappeared by the thirteenth century, being replaced by eucharistic liturgies from Constantinople. Thus, one of the litmus tests of liturgical Byzantinization in Jerusalem is the presence or absence of the Liturgy of St James in liturgical manuscripts. The chapter begins by analysing the content of all its known manuscripts, the majority of them being from the tenth through to the thirteenth centuries, in order to understand its structure. Hymns and scriptural readings in these manuscripts reveal the close connection between the structure of the eucharistic liturgy and Jerusalem’s calendar and lectionary. The chapter then presents hymns from the Liturgy of St James. With the decline of catecheses and mystagogies in Jerusalem after the Arab conquest, liturgical mystagogy was expressed through hymnography, revealing a theological tradition distinct from that of Constantinople.

Introduction

The Introduction prepares the reader for an investigation of Jerusalem’s liturgy and its Byzantinization by explaining the geographical, chronological, and linguistic boundaries of the study, namely the fate of the liturgy within the territory of the Jerusalem patriarchate between the Arab conquest of Jerusalem in 638 and the end of the First Crusade in 1187, as witnessed by liturgical manuscripts from Jerusalem and Sinai. Over a century ago, liturgical scholars began to study Jerusalem’s liturgy. Russian liturgists first noted changes in Jerusalem’s liturgy in manuscripts examined during expeditions to Jerusalem and Sinai. Although the theories they proposed still guide liturgical studies, they remained unverifiable for lack of access to the sources that are available today to liturgists and Byzantinists in the West, as well as to philologists from Georgia and Melkite liturgists, who continued the work of the Russian scholars. The chapter concludes with an outline of the remainder of the book.