Henry Parkes's recent book focusing on four codices from tenth- and early eleventh-century Mainz makes significant contributions to the study of both medieval liturgy and musicology. As to the first, his examinations of Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf 7.2 Aug. 4^o and Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 701 (hereinafter Guelf 7.2 Aug. 4^o and ÖNB 701, respectively) topple a key support for an influential historical narrative on the origins in Mainz of the so-called Pontifical Romano-Germanique (PRG), a vast collection of prayers, blessings, rubrics and chants for services over which bishops normally presided, accompanied by sermons for special occasions, treatises on liturgy and canonical documents.Footnote ¹ More on this below. The Making of Liturgy also examines two collections well known to specialists in post-Gregorian chant: London, British Library Additional MS 19768 (hereinafter BL 19768) and Vienna, ÖNB 1888, enquiring how each may have fitted into the intellectual and cultural environment of Ottonian Germany and Mainz in particular.

Parkes makes clear from the outset that he will regard these and the other manuscripts under consideration not so much as repositories of chant and liturgical texts of whatever genre, provenance and date, but as historical objects which in their particularities reflect the concerns, needs and agendas of the individuals who made and used them. Herein lies a challenge. To accomplish what is arguably a central objective, namely eliminating Mainz as the place where the tradition of the PRG originated, he must begin building a case on evidence drawn from two books which themselves figure in a different historical narrative, one concerning late chant transmission and repertoire development. With the shift in scholarly perspective Parkes's manuscript-centred observations could be read as challenges to a philologically orientated musicology occupied with transmission and taxonomy.Footnote ² These issues are important, no doubt, but that significant differences in approach and findings are brought to light in this closely argued book is in itself a contribution. Indeed much remains to be learned about Ottonian manuscript production and the provision and use of liturgical and chant books at even the most important East Frankish churches and monasteries in the tenth and early eleventh centuries.Footnote ³

Parkes's focus on Mainz is of course deliberate and the manuscripts to which he devotes two chapters each all figure in some way in the PRG narrative, according to which a unique (and lost) archetype was created shortly after 950 at the abbey of St Alban's that overlooked the walled city and metropolitan church from a high hill.Footnote ⁴ Michel Andrieu, who coined the term Pontifical Romano-Germanique and made the initial forays into its history,Footnote ⁵ observed that embedded in many surviving witnesses, most of which date from the eleventh century or later, are clues linking them to this German primatial see.Footnote ⁶ These include an oath of obedience bishops swore to the province of Mainz during their ordinations.Footnote ⁷ A defining feature of most PRG sources is a lengthy description of liturgical functions for the entire church year, Ordo Romanus L (= PRG XCIX) which Andrieu edited.Footnote ⁸ Having determined from source documents that OR L had been composed around 950, he sought to ascertain the place and narrow the time frame of composition, which in turn would also serve for the PRG.Footnote ⁹ Clear patterns of concordance proved elusive but in about a third of the collated sources Andrieu noted that the Rogationtide versus, Humili prece et sincera devotione, attributed to Hartmann of St Gall (d. 925), included an additional stanza honouring, among others, missionary archbishop St Boniface, Mainz's patron, and St Disibodius, in whose memory a monastery some sixty kilometres southwest of the city was named. The substitution of two other saints’ names with strong Mainz connections in later stanzas, including Alban (for Otmar, first abbot of St Gall), plus the appearance of the same version of the versus in ÖNB 1888, a mid-tenth-century liturgical collection of known St Alban's provenance, and in BL 19768, narrowed things down to the abbey. Andrieu supports his hypothesis with further evidence of a similarly detailed kind, some of it based on particular chants.Footnote ¹⁰ Moreover a source of the PRG with these chants, namely ÖNB 701, had been copied at St Alban's, albeit in the early decades of the eleventh century.Footnote ¹¹ As Parkes observes, Andrieu's theory brought with it a new view of Ottonian Mainz and its hilltop abbey, which had previously been little known but would appear to have been a major centre for the cultivation of the episcopal liturgy and a locus of royal patronage.Footnote ¹² Yet there is more to the PRG narrative than even this.

Cyrille Vogel and Reinhard Elze, whose edition of the PRG is based on Andrieu's collations, advances 961/3 as the archetype's terminus post quem non.Footnote ¹³ This claim rests on a distinctive and, in certain respects, unique text of an ordo for the episcopal blessing of a king at his coronation (PRG LXXII), the shortest and presumably oldest version of which survives in four collated sources including the earliest one.Footnote ¹⁴ Despite the fragmentary nature of the supporting evidence, the editors assert that this was the very form used for Otto II's coronation over which presided his brother, Archbishop William of Mainz (954–68), protector of St Alban's and imperial chancellor.Footnote ¹⁵ William's role as patron if not author of this coronation ordo perfectly suited Andrieu's ideas concerning the milieu in which the PRG archetype was created. William's royal lineage and prestige moreover bolster the portrayal of the collection's rapid dissemination to suffragan dioceses and from the heart of the Holy Roman Empire to points further north, east and south.Footnote ¹⁶ Vogel and Elze imagined numerous copies having been made in Mainz within a relatively short time, which would have required a large scriptorium staffed by knowledgeable scribes.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet the editors also found themselves needing to account for significant differences in contents and order between the lost archetype, whose broad outlines they attempt to reconstruct, and the four main recensions preserved in surviving witnesses scattered across a wide geography.Footnote ¹⁸ (Following Andrieu they identify the first recension in two manuscripts from Montecassino and the Beneventan region respectively.)Footnote ¹⁹ Given the variability of tenth-century liturgical rituals, they speculate that several recensions, each as ‘original’ as the next, may well have issued from Mainz. Further changes were made as new manuscripts were created elsewhere.Footnote ²⁰

Despite this unlikely scenario and other problems of evidence and interpretation, scholars largely accepted the narrative that the PRG was the singular product of the St Alban's scriptorium, a major religious monument of the Ottonian renaissance and ‘the point of departure for a later evolution of liturgy’.Footnote ²¹ Eric Palazzo characterises it as ‘the fruit of a prolonged labor of carefully considered compilation’ whose ‘organized structure’ contrasts with the ‘randomness’ of ‘primitive pontificals’, the latter term referring to a new liturgical book that emerged in the ninth century in which were collected ordines for non-Eucharistic services that had previously circulated in libelli.Footnote ²² Furthermore, as an ‘official book . . . brought to completion through the emperor's will’, he connected the PRG with the Ottonians’ attempt at a ‘liturgical reunification of the Empire in imitation of Charlemagne’ and ‘the establishment of the Reichskirchensystem’.Footnote ²³ More generally pontificals came to be described as collections suited to the practical needs of bishops.Footnote ²⁴

Nearly all these ideas have come under scrutiny.Footnote ²⁵ On the matter of practicality, unlike missals, breviaries and other liturgical books, the ordines in early pontificals are not organised according to the church calendar. Even PRG witnesses have no fixed order, notwithstanding the impression of uniformity the edition may leave.Footnote ²⁶ Early pontificals are not especially user-friendly, lacking as they generally do indications of their contents or even running titles.Footnote ²⁷ This would have made it difficult for the uninitiated to find their place, but who were the users and how were the books used? How did they function as repositories of memory? How were the manuscripts assembled and how might their structures have been changed with the passing of time and transfers of ownership? What else might these and other Ottonian liturgical collections tell us about the individuals through whose hands they passed, the institutions they served and the events that unfolded around them? These are the kinds of questions Parkes is deeply interested in and addressing them requires a great deal of detailed codicological analysis. An important point of departure is Hartmut Hoffmann's catalogue examining the palaeography of Ottonian and early Salian Frankish manuscripts, which notes that, as a place of book production in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, the city's metropolitan church took considerable precedence over the abbey of St Alban's. The attention Hoffmann pays to Mainz's monastic scribes owes mainly to the influence of the PRG narrative.Footnote ²⁸

On the historical importance of the PRG, Sarah Hamilton's book on tenth- and eleventh-century penitential practices reaches the conclusion that its scope and influence were more limited than previously thought. Although popular in the German archdioceses of Mainz and Salzburg, she considers it ‘merely one of several collections circulating in eleventh-century Europe, and despite its impact on late medieval Roman liturgy, should not be assigned a retrospective significance’.Footnote ²⁹ Placing the PRG in this company allows one to appreciate the similarities and differences between its tradition and those of other early collections of pontifical ordines, didactic texts and liturgical exposition. As to the PRG's official status, Hamilton notes in a different publication that the Ottonian experience of liturgical reform had been no more intentional, uniform or successful than that of the earlier Carolingians. And to historians inclined to view the PRG as a component of a conscious strategy on the part of German rulers to promote the episcopal liturgy and with it the imperial church system under their command, she argues that the appointment of bishops in the tenth and eleventh centuries and the Ottonian episcopate itself was owed to local power structures as well as royal authority.Footnote ³⁰

This last observation helps account for the presence of local elements in many early pontificals. Prior to and indeed after the emergence of the so-called PRG, such codices typically combined imported materials with indigenous traditions. (Andrieu's manuscript inventories do not always identify texts other than those he edited.)Footnote ³¹ Besides having different groupings of texts and ordines, moreover, PRG witnesses also differ in size and scope, and range from extensive to incomplete and deluxe to modest. They may have been primarily the work of a single scribe or multiple hands. Niels Rasmussen notes the same differences amongst the earliest pontificals, the smaller and less extensive of which were likely to have been used by itinerant bishops, the larger ones serving as authoritative models containing liturgical ordines along with texts for teaching, administration and reflection.Footnote ³² Parkes argues that these differences and their implications have been overlooked in PRG sources due to the discourse surrounding the pontifical's alleged singular concept, theories of the existence of an archetype and the centrality of the PRG in the history of a book type that only in the thirteenth century came to be known as the pontifical.Footnote ³³ From this perspective the identity of the PRG appears fluid indeed, but how should this and other Ottonian liturgical collections be reconsidered from a historical perspective, particularly one which is not philologically inferred?Footnote ³⁴

In the book's Introduction, Parkes argues that changes in the intellectual environment of the Ottonian era inclined scribes with an expertise in liturgy to move beyond received templates of genre-based liturgical books, such as the sacramentary, lectionary, martyrology and antiphoner, and towards making decisions about performance by recording previously unrecorded details. Writing itself may thus be understood as having intervened in the conduct of liturgy. Ritual forms grew increasingly prescriptive whilst differences amongst the sources multiplied. New kinds of liturgical compendia, such as pontificals, rituals, missals and breviaries, were created and these may organise diverse contents in novel ways. Texts both old and newly composed were forced into new conceptual categories. For example, saints’ legends were excerpted to create hagiographical office lessons; improbably large numbers of trope verses and processional chants were gathered together.Footnote ³⁵ Parkes thus connects changes in tenth-century ritual practice and written convention, arguing that the best way to develop a new historical view of the liturgical manuscripts is to examine previously neglected aspects from the standpoint of scribal agency.

Along these lines let us begin with ÖNB 1888, a liturgical miscellany of 218 folios in twenty-nine gatherings. According to Parkes's analysis it comprises six sections of contrasting length, five of which date from the tenth century. Despite having been written in different-sized scripts and employing a variety of page formats and styles of initials, the sections are nonetheless connected thematically: the substantial third section (fols. 13–116), which shows extensive signs of use, contains pastoral rites as well as processional chants and other items for Purification and Holy Week; the short fourth section (fols. 117–24) includes the Ordo missae; the fifth (fols. 125–221) begins with seventy-five sets of Mass prayers followed by liturgical offices, the Quem quaeritis chants, various blessings and the Office and (incomplete) Mass for the dead.Footnote ³⁶ The book may at first have been intended for pastoral use, but as it gained additional material over time it came to serve a broader range of liturgical functions. Still the book remained just small enough for a priest to have carried it outside his church. Invocations of St Alban and references to male monastics throughout indicate the compilation was made at the abbey; its many notated chants, which must have been copied for good reason, further suggest that its maker was a cantor in priestly orders. These conclusions, interesting in their own right, also serve as a reminder that assumptions about medieval liturgical books as sources should be open to challenge: that they had a single purpose; that their ownership was limited to a particular individual or institution rather than having been passed down, which ÖNB 1888 eventually was to a community of nuns at St Margaret's convent, Waldkirch, in the Black Forest.

Andrieu, who assumed a rather early date for ÖNB 1888, believed it to have been intended for the female monastery but it instead probably reached St Margaret's sometime after its re-founding in 994 under the supervision of Mainz's famous Archbishop Willigis (975–1011) during the reign of Otto III (r. 983–1002). Otto rex is indeed mentioned twice in its litanies, which among other indications inclined Hoffmann to date it to no more than fifteen years on either side of BL 19768, that is, 960–90.Footnote ³⁷ So how did ÖNB 1888 fit into the PRG story? As previously mentioned, Andrieu claimed that Hartmann's Humili prece in its ‘Mainz’ version and other chants he considered distinctive to the metropolitan see agreed with those found in a small but significant group of OR L / PRG sources, among which numbered those thought to represent its earliest recension. It stood to reason that if ÖNB 1888 and BL 19768 had been made in mid-tenth-century Mainz, then so too had the PRG archetype; the chants could all conceivably have been copied from locally available exemplars.

In rebuttal Parkes notes that the complete complement of chants critical to Andrieu's theory are actually found in fewer PRG sources than implied, although these include those reputed to be the earliest recension. Parkes then examines connections between the pontificals and ÖNB 1888, finding that some chants Andrieu placed into evidence are not, in fact, in it. Although they are found in another tenth-century Mainz codex that figures in the PRG narrative, BL 19768, Parkes observes that they are also present in other more or less contemporary books copied outside Mainz. The focus narrows to Montecassino, Archivio della Badia, MS 451, which together with Rome, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, Cod. D. 5 Andrieu considered the closest reflection of the putative PRG archetype. These and other pontificals indeed preserve the ‘Mainz’ version of Humili prece but, as Parkes demonstrates, it comprises twenty-one stanzas; the versus in ÖNB 1888 and BL 19768 has twenty. The twenty-one stanza version in OR L does in fact survive in a Mainz source, ÖNB 701, an early eleventh-century PRG representative of a later recension whose significance Andrieu appears to have overestimated. As Parkes's penultimate chapter argues, this manuscript was loaded down with additional antiphons and other text besides those typically found in other PRG witnesses, leading to questions about the nature of this particular collection and how it may have been used in the actual conduct of episcopal liturgy at Mainz.

Parkes further notes that Andrieu dismissed the Assumption versus ‘Sancta Maria quid est?’ in OR L (and the PRG) despite its being found in MC 451, Vallic. D. 5 and other early PRG sources.Footnote ³⁸ The text alludes to Otto III's journey to Rome at the turn of the millennium, which considered in light of other evidence effectively re-dates the Montecassino manuscript and strongly suggest that neither it nor Vallic. D. 5 represent the earliest recoverable state of the PRG. Thus although MC 451 shares chants with ÖNB 1888 and BL 19768, these do not figure in what may now arguably be construed as earlier recension of OR L. ÖNB 1888 yields no corroborating evidence that either OR L or the PRG tradition originated in tenth-century Mainz.

In the paired chapter Parkes seeks to learn about the impact the proximity of St Alban's abbey and Mainz's metropolitan church of St Martin had on chant, but this is hampered by a lack of evidence and the attributions of BL 19768 to the former institution rather than the latter, for which he had had previously made a compelling case. Products of the same local mixed oral/written transmission, the two collections were compiled for different purposes. Parkes here reprises observations that ÖNB 1888 may have been intended as a supplement to other liturgical books and that its compiler, who was musically competent, appears to have had a penchant for curiosities. The collection is largely coherent and problem-free. On the other hand, the contents of BL 19768 ‘reveal that the scribe was capable of copying extended liturgical texts naively and without any realistic expectation of their local performance’.Footnote ³⁹ In his view it does not accurately reflect the liturgical practices of late tenth-century Mainz and includes a number of corrupt and archaic chants on the way to becoming obsolete, copied from exemplars that may have been damaged.Footnote ⁴⁰

Parkes's fifth and sixth chapters investigate Guelf 7.2 Aug. 4^o, an early pontifical with a sizeable complement of episcopal ordines which, unlike the apocryphal PRG archetype and perhaps even ÖNB 701, reflect something of the liturgy of Ottonian Mainz. The manuscript did not, however, originate there but in the diocese of Regensburg. Parkes further demonstrates that it reached Mainz in the last quarter of the tenth century (based on Hoffmann's analysis of scribal hands, which number ten at least).Footnote ⁴¹ The circumstances of the book's transfer are unknown, but codicological analysis makes clear that it was overhauled after arriving in Mainz and perhaps within the immediate circle of Archbishop Willigis. Gatherings were rearranged and new ones added. Other signs of remodelling including erasures, rewritings and extensive additions including chant notation, all owing to the book's new institutional context. Although the scribe responsible for much of this work appears to have had the book in his possession for quite some time, texts continued to be added well into the eleventh century. Further confirming its long-term use are similarities between its ordines and those found in two later codices, probably copied in Mainz. These include litanies invoking the city's patron saints among other local features. In this respect, however, they differ from their putative model: local clerics had no need to emend the south German litanies in the old corpus since they either knew the names and their order by heart or could consult other liturgical sources if memory failed.

These findings are obviously incompatible with the narrative that the PRG originated in mid-tenth-century Mainz. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, the earliest layers of Guelf 7.2 Aug. 4^o are here and there reminiscent of the PRG and a few ordines modified after the book reached Mainz brought them more in line with the PRG tradition. Yet even where ritual elements of Guelf 7.2 Aug. 4^o and the PRG resemble one another closely, as in the consecration of holy chrism and reconciliation of penitents on Holy Thursday, differences in intellectual conception are evident. The scribe of the former breaks up the components; the PRG handles them as a single, integral unit. The PRG moreover includes rubrics for preparing the oil and balsam as well as prayers for the Chrism Mass, readings and chants. These are lacking in Guelf 7.2 Aug. 4^o as is the lengthy OR L and other texts characteristic of the PRG. Parkes incidentally uncovers new evidence in the pontifical confirming Thomas Kozachek's identification of a little-known ritual for the dedication of a church that apparently emerged independent of the Ordines Romani and the PRG.Footnote ⁴² This ordo was, however, revised early on. In sum, whatever connections existed between the traditions are indirect and tangled.

Taking nothing away from its many other insights and observations The Making of Liturgy may challenge those not as deeply engaged in codicology as its author. All a reviewer can do is assure readers that the details involved are indeed necessary and that Parkes does his best to set them out thoroughly, drawing from them many insightful conclusions. Musicologists in particular may find themselves needing to consult further bibliography, manuscript inventories and images, augmenting Parkes's manuscript-centred considerations with those of traditional philology. Particularly as the Internet affords increasingly easy access to digitised sources, few scholars seem to have the resources to examine manuscripts in situ and fewer still have professional training in codicology and palaeography. The Making of Liturgy in the Ottonian Church reminds us that manuscripts are indeed unique cultural artefacts, each with a history of its own. Ignoring this fact makes it far too easy to overlook a wealth of material evidence vital to fully understanding that history.