The medieval cantor was a Jack (or Jill) of many trades, having responsibility not only for directing the musical activities of a monastery or chapter of canons, but also for managing the library and the scriptorium that produced books for study or liturgical use. No job was too small or too large. In this respect medieval cantors were not unlike modern directors of music in parish churches and cathedrals, who are expected to be accomplished organists, service players, choir conductors, administrators, accountants, as adroit with interpersonal relations as with computer programs.

The major problem faced by the contributors to the Medieval Cantors and their Craft is the difficulty of identifying cantors in the sources at their disposal. Given that cantors wore so many ‘hats’, the sources might not have considered musical leadership as their primary charge compared to their activities as scribes or historians. These roles were not necessarily connected. Henry Parkes observes in his contribution that the abbreviations ‘ca’ or ‘can’ could be resolved either as ‘cantor’ or (in the case of secular clergy) ‘canon’.

The nineteen essays of Medieval Cantors and their Craft, which covers the period from 800 to 1500, are grouped into four sections: (1) the Carolingian period, (2) the eleventh century, (3) England in the twelfth century and (4) the continent (‘five case studies’). The eleventh and twelfth centuries are well represented (sections 2 and 3 with three chapters in section 4), and there is a decided slant towards England (eight chapters), as acknowledged by the editors in their introduction.

David Ganz leads off with a review of the term ‘historia’, a matter of relevance, because several of the supposed cantors mentioned in this volume were also, perhaps primarily, historians. Ganz cannot, of course, offer more than ‘reflections’ on so complex a subject. He notes that ‘history’ can be construed as a record of eyewitness accounts (‘oclata ut dicunt fide’, as Einhard maintained of his own work), whilst annals accumulate information from multiple sources. Both were part of an endeavour to preserve (in the words of an anonymous eighth-century author) ‘the account of events worthy of memory’ (pp. 15–16). Ganz touches briefly on Augustine's consideration of time and eternity in chapter 11 of the Confessions, specifically the imperfection of human understanding of the past and (necessarily) of the future.Footnote ¹ An additional meaning of ‘historia’, a rhymed office whose responsories and antiphons recapitulate the narrative of a saint's vita, might have received brief mention in this thought-provoking essay.

With her accustomed mastery of sources, Rosamond McKitterick takes on a broad survey of ‘Liturgy and History in the Early Middle Ages’. She notes that liturgy forms the framework of the anonymous eighth-century chronicle, Liber historiae francorum, which was inspired by the Liber pontificalis, the celebrated ‘book of the popes’ containing biographical sketches of the bishops of Rome from St Peter to Stephen V (885–91) with later additions. McKitterick proposes to demonstrate that the Liber pontificalis ‘exploits the liturgy and music as a narrative strategy to highlight both actual and symbolic meaning in relation to papal representation’ (p. 27). She acknowledges, of course, that liturgical innovations attributed to pontificates before the end of the fifth century must be dismissed or seriously questioned – a point the reader needs to keep in mind while following McKitterick's brilliant traversal of passages in the Liber pontificalis which ‘document’ papal interest in the liturgy. There are a few statements in the listing (both p. 31) that could have been more accurate: the phrases ‘sanctum sacrificium’ and ‘diesque nostras in tua pace disponas’ added to the canon are not prayers per se but insertions in extant prayers; and Pope Simplicius (468–83) did not assign the titular priests of regions ‘four through seven’ to officiate at St Peter's but priests from regions six or (and?) seven (regio VI vel septima ad sanctum Petrum).

The chapter on ‘Notker Bibliothecarius’ was contributed by Susan Rankin, a connoisseur of the St Gall scribe and composer of sequences.Footnote ² She offers a succinct introduction to Notker's life before focusing on his activities as ‘scribe and maker of books’. Her familiarity with Notker's hand (in at least thirty-one codices) enables her to identify the small and large tasks he undertook on behalf of his monastery, holding the position of librarian from at least 890. Notker contributed substantial portions of some texts (the Martyrology of Hrabanus), corrected others’ work, and supervised the activities of the scriptorium. Rankin also describes the kinds of texts on which Notker toiled, and she documents his collaboration with Regibert, librarian at Reichenau. Notker was notably occupied with the production of homiliaries, linked to his interest in saints’ lives. The chapter stresses the eagerness of St Gall's bibliothecarius to provide his confrères with material to serve for instruction, for meditation, for reading during the night office and for edification at mealtimes.

The monastery of St Gall also receives attention in Lori Kruckenberg's treatment of Ekkehard IV (d. c.1060), who was not only a ‘poet, glossator, reader and teacher’ but also a composer, music scribe and cantor. He is to be regarded, nevertheless, only ‘as an ecclesiastical singer, rather than as a holder of a particular clerical or monastic office’ (p. 66). She calls Ekkehard's Casus sancti Galli, which narrates the history of the abbey from c.890 to 972, an example of ‘singing history’ for its approximately sixty references to ecclesiastical chant. Numbered among these is the episode of Petrus and Romanus, the legendary Roman cantors who allegedly transmitted Roman chant to St Gall and Metz in the eighth century. Kruckenberg points up the prominence that Ekkehard gave to strict observance of the Rule of Benedict at St Gall, and she deftly illustrates how even his bizarre anecdote about the confrontation between the simple-minded monk Heribald and invading Hungarians underscored this very point. The essay closes with an analysis of the antiphon Sanctifica nos (cited in the Heribald anecdote) within the context of the St Gall office for the Finding (Invention) of the Holy Cross.

James Grier introduces the eleventh-century segment of Medieval Cantors with a chapter on ‘Adémar of Chabannes (989–1034) as Musicologist’. Grier is the acknowledged expert on the life and works of this multifaceted figure, having published a monograph on The Musical World of a Medieval Monk: Adémar de Chabannes in Eleventh-Century Aquitaine (Cambridge, 2006). Here, after briefly summarising research on Adémar's life, his role as a critical historian, and his notorious promotion of the ‘apostolicity’ of St Martial, Grier focuses on the talents Adémar offered to the monastic community at St Martial, where his uncle, Roger of Chabannes, became cantor. (Adémar entered the monastery of Saint-Cybar at Angoulême as a child but conditions there were not invariably auspicious.) Grier demonstrates that his talents as a scribe were appreciated at St Martial. By comparing passages from BNF lat. 1120 with the same passages notated with a more accurate diastemy in Adémar's hand in BNF lat. 1121 and 909, he presents evidence of his editorial acumen and ‘musicological’ skills.

Henry Parkes takes up the challenge of identifying scribal hands in around fifty surviving books from the cathedral chapter at Coutances (1070). In many cases glosses are the prime evidentiary material. Parkes identified one Wolferad, active in the 1080s, by his ‘small sharp-edged letterforms’. Wolferad was not only a glossator but also a competent music scribe, who notated sixteen chants plus a separate offertory verse, mainly from the Temporale. Parkes stakes out his view that a scribe hitherto known as ‘Anonymous A’ is none other that the itinerant Alsatian, Manegold von Lautenbach (1030/40–after 1103). Another new identification offered in this chapter is a monk named Heremann, an associate of Wolferad, who notated many chants (upside down!) in the margins of texts; he was ‘simply a musician in search of blank parchment’ (pp. 116–17).

Margot Fassler's chapter on St Dunstan (‘Many Lives and a Musical Office’) is both richly detailed and clearly presented. Two tables (7.1 and 7.2) illustrate successive layers of Dunstan's ‘lives’ and stages in the life of the historic Dunstan (c.910–88). The earliest vita, composed shortly after the subject's death, contained little about the early career of this future bishop of London and Worcester, and (for a short time concurrently) archbishop of Canterbury. A century later, Osbern of Canterbury (depicted on the cover of Medieval Cantors) supplied this information from various sources. The layers of Dunstan's biography, one of which is a series of twelve readings by Adelard of Mont St Blandin (c.1006–11), are lucidly presented. The chapter concludes with a consideration of ‘the role of music in the lives of Dunstan’, whose musical interests were highlighted by Osbern,Footnote ³ and an examination of his office in the Worcester Antiphoner (Worcester Cathedral MS F160).

England remains the focal point for the contribution of Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis on female monastics in England during the central Middle Ages. Alas, evidence of women who exercised this office, though there must have been someone of this description in every convent, is slim. Monastic cantatrices seem to have taken on the same range of duties in their communities as their male counterparts did in their own (and shared a similar anonymity). Whatever the nun Eadburgh did by preparing ‘spirituales cibos’ for the Lord, she cannot have fulfilled the role implied by the anachronistic term ‘eucharistic minister’, since touching the host was forbidden to the laity.Footnote ⁴

The section of Medieval Cantors centred on England in the twelfth century begins with Teresa Webber's examination of an aspect of ‘the provisioning of books in Anglo-Saxon England’, which offers a useful general summary, adumbrated in previous chapters, of the many duties that fell to the monastic cantor/armarius/scribe/sacristan. The reader might well be advised to peruse this chapter first as a background to other communications. It concludes with a summary of the wide responsibilities of the cantor found in the Consuetudines Cluniacenses.

Charles C. Rozier reviews the life and works of Symeon of Durham, ‘one of Durham's intellectual elite’ (p. 205), who assumed many duties as a member of the cathedral priory. He is best known to posterity as a historian, but a letter of 1126 identifies him as precentor of the church of Durham. Beyond this, Rozier is also faced with the other contributors’ problem in determining ‘exactly what the cantor's role entailed within a specific religious community in the early and high Middle Ages’ (pp. 193–4). He does, however, succeed in clarifying two phases in Symeon's historical endeavours, the first dedicated to placing his community within the sweep of a broader insular and continental historical narrative, the second focused on the compilation of shorter chronicles and annals.

One of the most curious essays in the collection is Lauren L. Whitnah's account of how the abbess Æbbe of Coldingham, superior of a joint monastery of men and women that Bede claimed to have been destroyed by fire ‘because of the wickedness of those who dwelt there and especially of those who were supposed to be its leaders’, eventually became a saint. An ascetic told the abbess that a vision revealed to him that her monastery would be ‘burnt to ashes’ after her death, and so it happened (in 683). Four centuries later, Æbbe, despite the debauchery of her charges, had been raised to ‘the honours of the altar’. Whitnah's narrative of how history was ‘reshaped’ to create an office for the (improbable) St Æbbe makes for fascinating reading.

William of Malmesbury figures in the next two contributions, which I would suggest reading in reverse order (chapter 13 before 12). Sigbjørn Olsen Sønnesyn offers an elegantly written, sympathetic portrait of a personage identified in his lifetime as ‘monachus et cantor’. Sønnesyn argues that for William the writing of history had a moral function, informed by his role as cantor. William admired Cistercian austerity and the Cistercians’ devotion to the Divine Office. In this spirit he regarded his efforts to enlarge the library at Malmesbury as a cornerstone in revitalising monastic observance at his own abbey. It is easy to see in William's abbreviatio of Amalar's Liber officialis an extension of his duties as musical leader of his community's worship. In his contribution Paul Anthony Hayward adds further detail to this picture of William as ‘cantor-historian’. With respect to William's dual responsibilities, Hayward takes the view that the historical works do not reveal anything about the cantor.

William of Newburgh (1135/6–c.1200), whose ‘minor works’ are studied by Andrew Kraebel, possesses a rather slim claim to the title of cantor. Apart from his major works, the Historia Anglorum and a commentary on the Song of Songs, he left behind three homilies that incorporate a few musical references. Kraebel, who has edited William's homilies, examines closely the homily on the British protomartyr St Alban (d. c.305?), which draws not only on Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica but also on William's own Historia and commentary on the Song of Songs.

Cara Aspesi makes a case for the decisive role that Frankish cantors in the Holy Land had in shaping a feast instituted to celebrate the reconquest of Jerusalem by the Crusaders (15 July 1099). The names of five cantors are known, but only for one of them, a certain Ansellus, have biographical details been preserved. Table 15.1 summarises Aspesi's outline of how the celebration of the Christian triumph changed from a festival commemorating the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to one that commemorated the liberation of the city, and finally to a feast that combined both observances. The first borrowed chants mainly from Advent (76%); the second favoured Epiphany (35%) over Advent (22%); the third became decisively a dedicatio Office.

The chapter by Alison Beach draws the reader's attention to a ‘Cantor-Historian from Twelfth-Century Petershausen’ and an Office for the founder of the monastery, Bishop Gebhard of Constance (979–59). For his canonisation and the reception of his relics in 1134 an office had to be created. Beach identifies the ‘impresario’ who organised this great event and composed the saint's office as an unknown cantor-historian of Petershausen, who also wrote a vita of the saint and a Casus monasterii Petrishusensis. Whilst she acknowledges that no source names this person as cantor, she hypothesises that he might have served as such ‘in function only’.

The only chapter in the volume that shifts the purview to southern Europe is Peter Jeffery's essay on the Liber politicus of Canon Benedict of St Peter's (Rome), who identifies himself as ‘romanae ecclesiae cantor’. Though often mined for bits of liturgical information, the Liber politicus awaits a thorough examination. This task is admittedly too large for a single chapter, so Jeffery elects to analyse how Benedict recycles information from the Liber pontificalis to credit Gregory the Great with interventions attributed in that source to other popes. Juxtaposing Benedict with his sources, including John the Deacon's vita (873/875) of the pope, Jeffery argues that his goal was to fabricate an image of the Roman liturgy as ‘a seamless whole’ (p. 325). Given the density of material presented in this chapter, there are bound to be a few questions: ‘letanias maiores’ is translated as ‘Major Rogations’ (p. 319) where ‘Major Litany’ might have been expected.Footnote ⁵ The four cantors wearing a mitre who officiated at the altar of St Peter's were not bishops but undoubtedly members of the schola cantorum who had been granted as subdeacons the privilegium of wearing the mitre in the exercise of their office.Footnote ⁶

Another case study of transformation is Anna de Bakker's examination of the Office of Arnulf de Villers (d. 1228), a Cistercian lay brother. The fact that a prose vita was adapted for a liturgical observance is hardly remarkable, but de Bakker illustrates how Goswin, the author of the saint's office (and vita), shaped the ‘dialogue’ between responsories and readings to define his subject as not just a local holy man but an ‘eternal figure’ (p. 338). The responsory Egressus igitur, for example, invokes Abraham as one who, like Arnulf, departed ‘de terra et cognatione sua’. The extreme penances and mortification which the saintly Arnulf imposed upon himself are recorded in grisly detail in a hymn which begins (incongruously?) Gaude mater ecclesia (Table 18.1).

The closing essay by Claire Taylor Jones on the reformer Johannes Meyer (d. 1485) has little relationship to the title of the book. She chronicles Meyer's strenuous endeavours to impose on convents of Dominican nuns a strict Observance of the Rule of Augustine and the customs of the Order. Meyer copied, translated and edited ‘sistersbooks’ (histories of convents composed in German by the sisters themselves) and other materials related to his mission, in which he was assisted by reforming nuns. Meyer laid particular stress on education, so that the choir nuns would understand the Latin of the office they were bound to recite.

Any reader who takes this book from the library shelf will surely be able to find chapters that relate to his or her interests. Not to be found, however, is much information about ‘medieval cantors and their craft’. That might require a different kind of research in archives, ordinals and customaries. York Medieval Press has done an excellent job of producing a readable text in a sturdy binding. The manuscript illustrations are of serviceable quality, though Rankin's ‘Plate X’ (p. 57) seems to have gone astray.