A medieval patchwork song: poetry, prayer and music in a thirteenth-century conductus

MARY CHANNEN CALDWELL

doi:10.1017/S0961137116000036

A medieval patchwork song: poetry, prayer and music in a thirteenth-century conductus

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2016

MARY CHANNEN CALDWELL

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MARY CHANNEN CALDWELL*: Affiliation:
maryca@sas.upenn.edu

Article contents

Abstract
Piecing the song together: centonisation, poetry and medieval music
Pater creator omnium: a patchwork song
Borrowed text and music: Pater creator omnium and troping the Deus in adiutorium
Deus in adiutorium: the never-ending prayer
The Conferences of Cassian and Deus in adiutorium as unceasing prayer
Prayer in the round
Footnotes

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Abstract

Eight times a day, the prayer Deus in adiutorium meum intende sounded from the lips of the faithful as the standard introduction to the Office Hours. Infiltrating daily life through the liturgy and popular interjections, the psalm verse Deus in adiutorium served a devotional function marked by versatility and popularity. Yet, despite its omnipresence, as well as its inherently vocalic identity, the verse was only rarely troped musically or poetically. A collection of thirteenth-century monophonic and polyphonic tropes of the verse circulating in France in motet collections and festive offices represents one of the few moments of heightened musical interest in the prayer. This article draws attention, for the first time, to the musical and textual connection between these tropes and Pater creator omnium, a thirteenth-century refrain song. This monophonic song from France also belongs firmly to the medieval cento genre, with both its musical and textual construction based on the piecing together of borrowed text and music – including Deus in adiutorium. This article argues that Pater creator omnium stands at the intersection of two important yet understudied histories: the musical and textual troping of Deus in adiutorium and the medieval cento. Analysis of this song ultimately illustrates the creative processes behind the making of a pre-modern song.

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Type: Research Article
Information: Plainsong & Medieval Music , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , October 2016, pp. 139 - 165
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0961137116000036 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2016

In a French Book of Hours from the early 1300s, a woman appears devoutly kneeling in prayer at the beginning of each hour. With her gaze heavenward, the figure – most likely the manuscript's intended noble patron – resists temptation behind her: a two-faced devil. Throughout the Divine Hours she is shown time and again deep in prayer and seemingly unaware of the devilish dangers looming at her back (Fig. 1).Footnote ¹ These depictions of the petition's power against evil summarise visually the function of the liturgical verse that these historiated initials introduce (‘Make haste, O God, to deliver me’) and highlight its significance in the Middle Ages as a popular, salvific interjection. The placement of the prayer within a Book of Hours reflects, too, its broader liturgical function; at least eight times a day in monastic and clerical institutions across medieval Europe, the two-part text ‘Make haste, O God, to deliver me; make haste to help me, O Lord’ (‘Deus in adiutorium meum intende; Domine ad adiuvandum me festina’) was heard and sung.Footnote ² This opening verse of Psalm 69 (70 in the Hebrew Psalter) was more than an introduction to each of the Office Hours; it was an all-purpose, utilitarian petition that served countless functions in the everyday life of the faithful, refrain-like in its constant reiteration. Recited silently, the Deus in adiutorium verse provided strength before laborious tasks; repeated continually, it served as the backdrop for evening meditations; in the liturgy, as well as in emergencies, it accompanied the sign of the cross; and, in the face of temptation, as with the noblewoman of the Book of Hours, it safeguarded against sin.

Fig. 1

Cambrai, Bibliothèque municipale MS 87, fol. 43v, Hours of the Virgin, detail (‘D-’ of ‘Deus in adiutorium’). By kind permission of the Médiathèque d'Agglomération de Cambrai.

Considering its importance throughout the Middle Ages, this intoned, sung, chanted and silently recited prayer has rarely captured scholarly attention. An exception in the realm of musicology resides in discussions of a monophonic and polyphonic trope of the Deus in adiutorium versicle preserved in a group of well-known motet manuscripts from thirteenth-century France, among them the Montpellier (Mo) and Bamberg (Ba) codices, and in an assortment of manuscripts transmitting festive liturgies for Christmastide.Footnote ³ Yet, this broadly circulating northern French trope is a relative anomaly; the verse usually involved only simple, formulaic recitation, not elaborate tropes or polyphony.Footnote ⁴ However, another reworking of Deus in adiutorium also circulated in thirteenth-century France, alongside the better-known versions in Mo and elsewhere: Pater creator omnium, a monophonic Latin refrain song, or conductus, preserved solely in the final fascicle of the famed Parisian manuscript Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Pluteus 29.1 (hereafter F). This song is more than an unicum; unlike the majority of thirteenth-century Latin songs, or conductus, the poetry of Pater creator omnium is built from ‘snippets’ of hymns, prayers, chants and sacred songs. Its text is a patchwork, or ‘cento’, completely fabricated from pre-existing devotional poetry. What connects Pater creator omnium to the Deus in adiutorium trope circulating in thirteenth-century France is the former's refrain: an explicit borrowing of the frequently heard prayer Deus in adiutorium.

In this article, I explore the construction of Pater creator omnium both as a centonate Latin poem and as a musico-poetic expansion of the popular Deus in adiutorium prayer. In so doing, I contextualise this Latin song within the history of poetic and musical centonisation, connecting its piecemeal construction from familiar poetry with similar citational impulses in contemporary repertories. Following a close analysis of Pater creator omnium, including the identification of heretofore unrecognised textual borrowings, I hone in on the refrain's borrowed text to reveal its likely musical source within the family of thirteenth-century Deus in adiutorium tropes transmitted in Mo, Ba and elsewhere. Finally, by focusing on the Deus in adiutorium refrain, I pinpoint the significance of the prayer as a repeated expression of popular piety, bringing the formal structure of Pater creator omnium into dialogue with the rich cultural and devotional history of the verse. Specifically, I suggest that the poetic and theological importance of Deus in adiutorium as a repeated utterance is reflected, and even exemplified, in the refrain of Pater creator omnium, which repeats this psalm text incessantly against its centonate backdrop.

Piecing the song together: centonisation, poetry and medieval music

In the creation of medieval prose, poetry and music, the use of the old to make the new is an overarching compositional tactic. Rather than originality, medieval writers and composers revelled in the reworking of a shared fund of both musical and textual knowledge. Although not strictly the purview of medieval creativity, pedagogical and compositional practices of pre-modern Europe were marked by a high degree of repetition and borrowing.Footnote ⁵ Text or music with a great deal of borrowing should not be seen as unoriginal and lacking the sophistication associated with ‘newly composed’ works; instead, such creations ought to be considered products of a cultural environment that valued reuse. Constant return to, and citation of, meaningful texts in the construction of new works – whether the sources were liturgical, biblical or even vernacular – was a technique practised by ‘good students’ and clerics, composers and poets whose environment encouraged and valued emulation and reuse.Footnote ⁶

Within this culture of creative recycling, the poetic technique of centonisation is central, based entirely on the use of pre-existing works to make something utterly new, replete with new meanings. In its early Classical meaning, a cento refers to something pieced together (technically, a garment) from various pieces; in other words, a patchwork.Footnote ⁷ In its specific poetic usage, cento refers to a poem wholly constructed from lines or half-lines taken from Classical authors or, increasingly, from the Bible or popular medieval writers.Footnote ⁸ Although the genre appeared to lose ground in the later Middle Ages before a resurgence of interest in the Renaissance, numerous examples of centos are extant, including such early Christian centos as Faltonia Proba's Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi, and the less pious Cento Nuptialis of her fourth-century contemporary, Decimus Magnus Ausonius. In his preface, Ausonius provides one of the few existing descriptions of the genre and its construction, praising the cento for its complexity while cautioning against its easy descent into ribaldry:Footnote ⁹

Centonem vocant qui primi hac concinnatione luserunt. solae memoriae negotium sparsa colligere et integrare lacerata, quod ridere magis quam laudare possis cento quid sit absolvam. variis de locis sensibusque diversis quaedam carminis structura solidatur, in unum versum ut coeant aut caesi duo aut unus <et unus> sequenti cum medio.

They who first trifled with this form of compilation call it a ‘cento.’ ’Tis a task for the memory only, which has to gather up scattered tags and fit these mangled scraps together into a whole, and so is more likely to provoke your laughter than your praise I will expound what a cento is. It is a poem compactly built out of a variety of passages and different meanings, in such a way that either two half-lines are joined together to form one, or one line and one accompanied by the following half-line.

As Ausonius implied, intimate familiarity with the borrowed texts is assumed, making the choice of texts in a centonised work meaningful and revealing of the author's context. While the earliest centos relied strictly on classical authors, later medieval poets moved away from Classical writers, instead citing sacred and vernacular texts ranging from the Bible to Alexander of Villedieu's Doctrinale.Footnote ¹⁰

Centonisation entered musicological discourse with the work of Paolo Ferretti in 1934; he introduced the term, previously used by liturgical scholars, as a way to analyse formulaic chant repertories.Footnote ¹¹ The role of centonisation in chant has since undergone various stages of criticism, fuelled especially by a seminal article of Leo Treitler.Footnote ¹² Yet, the use of ‘cento’ to describe the technique and appearance of certain genres of music and poetry has persisted, often used inaccurately as a quasi-synonym for the intimately related processes of citation and quotation.Footnote ¹³ Among the textual and musical works identified as centos in the later Middle Ages, the ‘refrain cento’, a motet in which refrains comprise the entirety of the work, is the most significant. Although the number of motets identified as such has been reduced in order to remain truer to the conventions of the cento genre, these polyphonic works bear certain markers of centonate construction, namely the wholesale use of pre-existing refrains as the musical and textual material of new motets.Footnote ¹⁴ In the end, a true ‘refrain cento’, in the sense of reflecting the principles of centonate construction, is a relatively rare occurrence in the motet repertory, and represents a citational technique as opposed to a subgenre.Footnote ¹⁵

While the level of borrowing may not be great in chant and motets, it is in the vast conductus repertory of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that a level of borrowing comparable to that of the classical and later medieval cento genre emerges.Footnote ¹⁶ Conducti were, like most medieval centos, fabricated from an array of familiar medieval sources, including hymns, chants, sequences, biblical, patristic, didactic and narrative texts, as well as other conducti. In contrast to contemporary repertories, the Latin conductus sets to music a number of poems that, akin to the Classical and medieval cento, are composed of lines and sentences drawn from other contexts and strung together to create new meanings. In other words, certain conducti could be added to the list of extant poetic centos from the Middle Ages.Footnote ¹⁷

With the sheer quantity of citations in mind – both biblical and otherwise, and often echoed from one conductus to another – it becomes clear that the poets behind this repertory were working from a common devotional vocabulary.Footnote ¹⁸ Contrary to the broader reception of the medieval cento as a parodic form, in the conductus repertory, the centonate poems are more devotional. In most cases, each new conductus includes a relatively moderate amount of pre-existing material, ranging from one or two lines or incipits of chants and conducti to entire sections or strophes of hymns, sequences and other sacred and secular poems.Footnote ¹⁹ A significant number of conducti rework well-known hymns, such as Ave maris stella, while others incorporate substantial segments of sequences, such as Mors vite propitia, modelled on Sexta passus feria.Footnote ²⁰ One conductus takes as its textual authority the introductory line of Cato's Distichs, a medieval textbook, manipulating it into a refrain that grammatically declines over seven strophes.Footnote ²¹ In such conducti the label ‘cento’ seems somewhat misleading, since the borrowed material comprises only a portion of the total work. Although conducti frequently utilise pre-existing textual and musical material – which argues against the textbook-propagated conception of the conductus as ‘newly composed’Footnote ²² – only a small portion are genuine centos, in the sense that the entirety of the ‘new’ piece comprises ‘old’ bits.Footnote ²³

The role of music as a potentially borrowed element in such textually centonate works should also be considered. When centonisation is used to describe the composition of chant repertories, it is typically in reference to melodic construction. In the context of the refrain-cento in the motet repertory, both music and poetry arguably contribute to a centonate construction. With many conducti, centonisation occurs almost solely on the poetic, not the musical, level, and the textual authority of the work often resides in the conductus repertory of which it is a part, rather than in external authorities.Footnote ²⁴ Pater creator omnium, therefore, is one of the few examples of a ‘true’ Latin song-cento, since each line of a song exists as a unit of musico-textual meaning that has been borrowed, reworked and re-contextualised in a new work.Footnote ²⁵ Authorities in Pater creator omnium range from the biblical to the contemporary, namely the conductus repertory. It is to Pater creator omnium that I now turn, examining in detail the systematic musical and poetic construction of this elegantly quilted medieval song.

Pater creator omnium: a patchwork song

The final fascicle of F transmits five dozen Latin refrain songs; the majority of these formally resemble the vernacular rondeau with a partial repetition of the refrain in the midst of strophes and a full repetition at the end.Footnote ²⁶ Pater creator omnium, which will be more closely examined here, was written in the same rhymed, rhythmical Latin as the other works, with regular eight-syllable proparoxytonic lines organised into five strophes, all set to the same music. Presented in a conventional layout, the first strophe with refrain is fully notated, while all remaining text appears unnotated alongside the musical setting (see Fig. 2).Footnote ²⁷ Unlike the usual two melodic phrases of a rondeau, the musical setting of Pater creator omnium consists of three phrases, each melody presented first with a line of the strophe, and then echoed by a line of the refrain. The resulting six-line form divides into three closely related lines: aAb¹b²B¹B² (see Ex. 1).

Fig. 2

F, fol. 467r, Pater creator omnium. By kind permission of the Ministero dei beni culturali e del Turismo. Any further reproduction, by any means, is forbidden.

Ex. 1

Pater creator omnium, F, fol. 467r.

The melodic contour stays within a fairly limited range of a fifth (G–d), and emphasises stepwise and triadic motion (only the first phrase has a larger leap). The text setting is predominantly syllabic, with a maximum of three notes to a syllable (again, in the initial phrase). All phrases revolve around G, outlined by triadic motion up to d and the beginning and closing pitches of each phrase (G and b). The song's notation and formal structure are by no means unusual in relation to other Latin refrain songs in F’s final fascicle; textually, however, this is an exceptional work, both within F and the larger repertory of medieval Latin song.

Notably, Pater creator omnium is the only song in the final fascicle of F centonised completely from hymns, chants and conducti. Its centonate character is immediately obvious to anyone familiar with the medieval hymnal, since its incipit is drawn from a hymn for the Holy Trinity (‘Pater creator omnium’). If that clue was not clear, the entrance of the refrain mid-way through the first system in the manuscript immediately signals the song's liturgical orientation: ‘Deus in adiutorium’.

Gordon Anderson's conductus edition identified a number of textual citations in Pater creator omnium; Table 1 lists the remaining identifications, together with further sources for lines already partially identified by Anderson (his misleading identifications are corrected in the right-most column). Each distinct line has its own number from 1 to 12, while line repetitions, including the refrain, are unnumbered. Unless indicated otherwise, the centonised text is an incipit. The previously missing identifications are likely due to the fact that some borrowed lines are either not easily searchable incipits or paraphrases. In the case of line 9, the text is actually found in the same conductus cited in the second strophe, Dum medium silentium. Line 11, also unidentified in Anderson's catalogue, derives from a hymn for one martyr, Martyr dei qui unicum. Textual snippets found in multiple contexts are clearly preferred by the poet; almost every line of the centonised poem would have been familiar to singers from the liturgy. Only two conducti are drawn on, but even these present formulaic ideas with ultimately scriptural origins. In terms of its identification as a cento, the wholesale construction of the conductus Pater creator omnium from pre-existing poetry argues strongly for such a label.

Table 1

Pater, creator omnium, F, fol. 467r, translation and textual sources.Footnote ²⁸

Pater creator omnium is set apart from other sacred medieval centos, however, by its contextualisation in a deceptively simple, and even popular, devotional song form (thanks to its structural parallel with the rondeau). The guileless melodic form works, in fact, to obscure the significance of the cento genre for the music, as well as the poetry. Given the patchwork character of Pater creator omnium, it should be unsurprising that the music, too, may have been borrowed. Despite the simplicity of its melody, its music nevertheless serves to link it to the larger complex of thirteenth-century tropes that likewise rework its most pervasive text, the refrain ‘Deus in adiutorium / Nostrum venit intendere’.

Borrowed text and music: Pater creator omnium and troping the Deus in adiutorium

In addition to textual citations, contrafacture and melodic borrowing are by no means unusual within F’s conducti, especially the refrain songs of the final fascicle.Footnote ³² Sources for Latin and vernacular as well as sacred and secular medieval song all demonstrate the cultural trend towards reusing music for a range of texts.Footnote ³³ Yet, despite the role of musical borrowing in song repertories writ large, no concordance has been posited for Pater creator omnium, although the centonised fabric of hymns, chants and conducti offers many possibilities. By placing Deus in adiutorium in a prominent position in Pater creator omnium as its refrain, the song's creator may have actually been gesturing towards the prior existence of the melody as a whole.

Liturgically, however, settings of the invitatory psalm Deus in adiutorium are typically nondescript. Unlike the numerous melodies circulating for the concluding Benedicamus Domino versicle, Deus in adiutorium did not seem to garner the same level of compositional interest.Footnote ³⁴ Likewise, tropes of the Benedicamus Domino proliferated from the twelfth century onward (a substantial number of which demonstrate ties to the conductus repertory), while only a few medieval Deus in adiutorium tropes of any kind are extant. Considering the lack of melodies for the Deus in adiutorium versicle, the popular versified trope (Deus in adiutorium / Intende laborantium) that circulated in thirteenth-century liturgical and motet manuscripts holds considerable interest. An elaboration of the opening versicle in the form of a rhyming, strophic Latin song, this expansion of Deus in adiutorium is preserved monophonically in at least nine sources, and in the majority of those sources is specifically positioned within festive Christmastide Offices.Footnote ³⁵ Additionally, it is transmitted as the lowermost voice of a conductus-motet in five manuscripts, almost all of which preserve motet collections (Table 2). In festive Offices, the monophonic Deus in adiutorium trope is assigned to the Feasts of Circumcision, the Holy Innocents and Epiphany. Figure 3 presents the version preserved in one of the festive manuscripts transmitting the Office of the Circumcision, Sens 46; here, the rubric preceding the trope provides evidence as to the versicle's liturgical performance within an Office, reading: ‘Let the priest begin at the lectern’ (‘Lecta tabula incipiat sacerdos’).Footnote ³⁶ Constructed as a strophic poem, this expansion of the Deus in adiutorium versicle closely resembles contemporary conductus poetry, with rhythmical, rhymed and eight-syllable proparoxytonic lines:

Footnote ³⁷

Table 2

Sources for Deus in adiutorium trope.

Fig. 3

Sens 46, p. 2, Deus in adiutorium trope. By kind permission of the Bibliothèque municipale, Sens.

Like the refrain of Pater creator omnium, only the beginning and end of the versicle is retained (‘Deus in adiutorium intende’ and ‘festina’), troping the biblical text with further petitions to God to have mercy on his believers (and, importantly, the choir). Complementing the Christological bent in the second two strophes, the doxological message in the second strophe (‘in secula / seculorum in Gloria’) concludes the Trinitarian focus and also refers to the doxology following the versicle in the Offices.

The version of the monophonic trope in Sens 46 provided above is not the only extant textual form of the trope; it expands to four strophes in two different polyphonic settings that circulated, sometimes side by side, in motet sources as a quasi-liturgical introduction.Footnote ³⁸ Only one of the two polyphonic settings is of interest here, since it is this work that shares its lowermost melodic line with the nine monophonic settings. In Figure 4, the polyphonic setting of the trope with four strophes appears as transmitted in Ba, a central source for thirteenth-century French polyphony. Poetically, this version of the trope, which introduces two of the motet collections (Ba and Mo), includes an additional strophe and inverts the order of the middle strophes. This is also the ordering followed in some monophonic sources and one that makes logical sense considering the doxology of the third strophe. Rather than being fully worked-out, the added fourth and final strophe plays on two liturgical refrain words (‘amen’ and ‘alleluia’), emphasising through repetition their traditional function as cadential formulae and their assonant relationship:

Footnote ³⁹

Fig. 4

Ba, fol. 62v, Deus in adiutorium, polyphonic setting. By kind permission of the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg.

The origin of this trope in either its three or four strophe form, the latter familiar to many musicologists due to its polyphonic existence, is less well known. It is transmitted first not in thirteenth-century motet manuscripts, but in the twelfth-century Aquitanian troper St-M A, and in a hymn from the eleventh-century Irish Liber Hymnorum, attributed to sixth-century Irish abbot and missionary St Columba.Footnote ⁴⁰ In other words, despite its novel polyphonic appearance, the textual Deus in adiutorium trope was not new to the thirteenth century, but instead represented a reworking of a pre-existing trope.

The more than a dozen settings of this Deus in adiutorium trope are unquestionably linked poetically and musically, with all five polyphonic and nine monophonic sources sharing a virtually identical melodic line (the lowermost ‘tenor’ in multi-voice settings). The shared musical features with the melody of Pater creator omnium, however, have so far escaped notice. Example 2 compares the melody of Pater creator omnium (seen with the refrain text only) with the melodies of the monophonic Deus in adiutorium tropes from festive manuscripts and the lowermost lines of polyphonic settings, the latter two with the first poetic strophe underlaid.Footnote ⁴¹ Only melodic relationships among the tropes in Example 2 have been noted, but not the musical link to Pater creator omnium in F. The most significant similarity occurs at the opening of ‘Deus in adiutorium’ and the triadic beginning of the second phrase (‘intende laborantium’ in the tropes), with shared pitches indicated by larger note heads. Shared melodic material becomes less apparent in the final two musical phrases, with only general contours and the closing pitch on G in common between Pater creator omnium and the Deus in adiutorium tropes. Overall, the melody of Pater creator omnium displays strong, almost unmistakable parallels to contemporaneous Deus in adiutorium tropes.

Ex. 2

Pater creator omnium compared with monophonic and lowest voice of polyphonic Deus in adiutorium tropes.

Just as the text of Pater creator omnium was constructed from familiar snippets of sacred texts and the all-too-familiar opening versicle Deus in adiutorium, so too does it appear the melody is shared with, or perhaps inspired by, a familiar elaboration of the versicle circulating in the same cultural and geographical areas. With multiple sources for one Deus in adiutorium textual and melodic trope preserved in an array of sources, it seems clear that at least one musical expansion of the versicle was popular and widespread. Due to such melodic and textual connections, Pater creator omnium is a likely candidate to be added to this corpus of elaborations for Deus in adiutorium.

Another striking point of comparison emerges between the texts of Pater creator omnium and these tropes, namely the treatment of the shared text. From the first half of the original psalm verse, the creator of Pater creator omnium fashioned the nearly identical two-line refrain to the contemporary trope: ‘Deus in adiutorium / Nostrum venit intendere ^.’. Among the alterations made to the verse, the pluralising of the verse is perhaps the most significant, from ‘Deus in adiutorium meum intende’ (singular) to ‘Deus in adiutorium nostrum venit intendere’ (plural).Footnote ⁴² Although the grammatical shift in the versicle is occasionally found in liturgical uses, such as that of Sarum,Footnote ⁴³ the singular is far more typical, even in the choral response of the second half of the versicle where a plural subject might be expected: ‘Oh Lord, make haste to help me.’ The grammatical shift from singular to plural characterises the refrain song Pater creator omnium entirely, since the adapted versicle text forms the refrain and thus occurs five times throughout the five strophes. This pluralising is significant since it appears in both the monophonic and the polyphonic Deus in adiutorium trope, emphasising a community of believers over the singular faithful. Here, the Lord is petitioned to alleviate the suffering of the people; Christ is asked to have mercy on all his believers; and blessings are asked for ‘our choir’ (‘chorus noster’), presumably the singers of the trope themselves. Whether joining in at the refrain, as in the plural refrain of Pater creator omnium, or joining together in polyphony, both the trope and the song reworking of Deus in adiutorium shift the emphasis away from the individual and towards the larger community by foregrounding the plural, rather than the singular (albeit still collective) voice.

Above and beyond this intriguing musical and poetic connection to a broader repertory of musical and textual tropes of the verse, Pater creator omnium also serves as a significant intertext within the theological history of Deus in adiutorium as an all-purpose Christian prayer. With its continual returns, the borrowed refrain of Pater creator omnium links thirteenth-century song to the centuries-long history of the Deus in adiutorium versicle in exegesis, poetry and devotion.

Deus in adiutorium: the never-ending prayer

Why was Deus in adiutorium chosen as a refrain? What factors led to the reworking of this specific prayer as a refrain, and not (as it appears elsewhere) as a single citation? If the centonate form ‘is a successful literary endeavour because it takes the canon of a given community and assumes it for itself, takes it, and divides it until its reorientation fits the centonist's purposes’,Footnote ⁴⁴ then the reasons for a continued emphasis on the psalm verse deserves investigation. Few detailed discussions of the theological and liturgical function of Deus in adiutorium are extant from the Middle Ages, apart from its daily performance in the Office Hours.Footnote ⁴⁵ Liturgically, the psalm verse is prescribed for use in daily rites by the Benedictine Rule and most subsequent rites, in which its recitation and response occur at the beginning of each hour.Footnote ⁴⁶ That the practice of introducing the Office Hours with this verse quickly became commonplace is confirmed in the ninth-century Concordia regularum of Benedict of AnianeFootnote ⁴⁷ and the De ecclesiasticis officiis of liturgical commentator Amalarius of Metz.Footnote ⁴⁸ Into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Jean Beleth's Summa Footnote ⁴⁹ and Guillaume Durand's Rationale divinorum officiorum Footnote ⁵⁰ also attest to the continued use of the verse ritually and practically. In notated and unnotated manuscripts containing the Offices Hours, the Deus in adiutorium is so standard that it becomes increasingly difficult to gather much information at all about its performance.Footnote ⁵¹ The omnipresence of the text in the liturgy and its matter-of-fact acceptance by liturgical commentators leaves no doubt as to its complete integration into daily devotional life.

Above and beyond its liturgical function, the text also inspired a less liturgical but still faith-driven tradition that affects how its repeated appearance in Pater creator omnium might be understood. Psalm 69 from which the verse and refrain derives provides the necessary entry point to a strand of devotional interpretations of the verse:

The psalm itself is constructed as a prayer, with the initial plea echoed in the final verse; it is, as Augustine observes, a prayer for sufferers, martyrs and the persecuted. With a unified voice the brief psalm pleads for protection against sin and evil:Footnote ⁵²

[Diabolus t]entare ergo non cessat; insidiari non cessat. Infrenatus est atque illigatus in cordibus impiorum, ne saeuiat in ecclesiam, et tantum faciat quantum uult Clamemus ergo una uoce omnes uerba haec: ‘deus, in adiutorium meum intende.’ Opus enim habemus sempiterno adiutorio in isto saeculo. Quando autem non. Modo tamen in tribulatione positi maxime dicamus:‘deus, in adiutorium meum intende.

[The devil] never ceases to tempt us, never ceases to lie in wait. In the hearts of the godless he is unleashed and unrestrained, but let him not wreak havoc on the Church, and do what he likes here Let us, then, shout these words with one voice: O God, give heed and help me; for as long as we are in this world we need his constant help. Whenever shall we not? Yet now most of all, when we are in distress, let us say it: O God, give heed and help me.

Augustine's reading resonates with later writings, including those of Durand who essentially transmits a paraphrase of Augustine.Footnote ⁵³ Essentially, Augustine, Durand and others see this verse as a Christian talisman to ward off danger in its various demonic guises.

The usefulness of the Deus in adiutorium extends beyond the evils described by Augustine to more banal tasks. While the prayer served as a distress cry, it simultaneously served as a general interjection of mindfulness, accompanied the signum cruces and was a reminder of God's power when performed before weekly duties. Silent reflection on the prayer is also frequently advised, as in the sixth-century Regula coenobialis by Columbanus:Footnote ⁵⁴

In commune omnes fratres omnibus diebus ac noctibus tempore orationum in fine omnium psalmorum genua in oratione, si non infirmitas corporis offecerit, flectere aequo animo debent, sub silentio dicentes, Deus in adiutorium meum intende, domine ad adiuvandum me festina.

All the brethren together, every day and night at the time of prayers, on the ending of all psalms, should uniformly bend their knees in prayer, if bodily weakness does not prevent it, saying in silence, O God make speed to save me, Lord make haste to help me.

Other spiritual figures likewise found mundane and domestic uses for the prayer. Catherine of Siena not only incorporated the verse into a longer prayer of her own design (Prayer 12), she also frequently repeated it aloud.Footnote ⁵⁵ Centuries later, Catholic writer Lady Georgiana Fullerton (1812–85) recorded her use of the prayer before ‘going up or downstairs’, ‘beginning to read’ and ‘closing the book’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In essence, Deus in adiutorium functioned as an ejaculatory prayer, or aspiration, which could be freely repeated throughout the day just as other short prayers were repeated (e.g., the ‘Jesus Prayer’), all following a Pauline model for unceasing prayer, based on 1 Thessalonians 1:2 and 5:17. It is precisely the prominence of the verse in the practice of unceasing prayer that connects thirteenth-century Deus in adiutorium tropes, and especially Pater creator omnium, to the writings of John Cassian. His Conferences with the Fathers not only reveal the poetic and theological motivations behind the later saturation of the Deus in adiutorium text in devotional life, they also lay the groundwork for the refrain-like function of the psalm excerpt in the Office Hours and in Pater creator omnium.

The Conferences of Cassian and Deus in adiutorium as unceasing prayer

Prayer occupies two conversations of Cassian with desert father Isaac.Footnote ⁵⁷ Within this extended discussion of monastic prayer, the verse Deus in adiutorium is especially singled out by Abba Isaac, and consequently by his reporter, Cassian, for a special kind of treatment that affords insight into its later devotional usage as a talisman and all-purpose prayer. Conference 10, chapter 10, transmits Abba Isaac's perspective on ‘continual prayer’, foregrounding the importance of the verse ‘Deus in adiutorium’ for ‘perpetual awareness of God’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The concept of continual prayer has clear implications for the Offices Hours, a form of continual daily prayer of which the verse Deus in adiutorium is a significant element. Indeed, Cassian's Conferences predicts, or even prescribes, the practice of singing Deus in adiutorium at the beginning of the Hours, a practice adopted by Benedict in his Rule and many other rules.Footnote ⁵⁹

Chapter 10 continues with Abba Isaac noting the amazing malleability of Deus in adiutorium: ‘Not without reason has this verse been selected from out of the whole body of scripture. For it takes up all the emotions that can be applied to human nature and with great correctness and accuracy it adjusts itself to every condition and every attack.’Footnote ⁶⁰ Indeed, the flexibility of the versicle is evidenced by its repetition a total of fifteen more times within the brief chapter, outlining the occasions on which its recitation would be appropriate.Footnote ⁶¹ Figure 5 provides one of the folios from a manuscript in the Vatican Library transmitting the Conferences, although chapter 10 was added later in this source. On the manuscript page, Cassian's rhetorical anxiety to include all possible occasions is immediately clear from the overwhelming repetition of the verse (highlighted here).Footnote ⁶²

Fig. 5

Abba Isaac further reflects on the perpetual meditation of Deus in adiutorium, stressing its saturation even in daily life. The following passage, the most striking in the Chapter, depicts the physicality of the reiterated prayer:Footnote ⁶³

Hunc uersiculum meditanti tibi somnus inrepat, donec incessabili eius exercitatione formatus etiam per soporem eum decantare consuescas. Hic tibi expergefacto primus occurrat, iste euigilantis cogitationes anticipet uniuersas, iste te de tuo surgentem cubili curuationi genuum tradat atque illinc deinceps ad omne opus actus que deducat, hic te omni tempore prosequatur [] hunc scribes in limine et ianuis oris tui, hunc in parietibus domus tuae ac penetralibus tui pectoris conlocabis, ita ut haec ad orationem procumbenti sit tibi adclinis decantatio et exinde consurgenti atque ad omnes usus uitae necessarios incedenti fiat erecta et iugis oratio.

Let sleep overtake you as you meditate upon this verse until you are formed by having used it ceaselessly and are in the habit of repeating it even while asleep. Let this be the first thing that comes to you when you awake, let it anticipate every other thought as you get up, let it send you down to your knees as your arise from your bed, let it bring you from there to every work and activity, and let it accompany you at all times You should write this on the threshold and doors of your mouth, you should place it on the walls of your house and in the recesses of your heart, so that when you prostrate yourself in prayer this may be your chant as you bow down, and when you rise from there and go about all the necessary affairs of life it may be your upraised and constant prayer.

The relationship between these early writings and later poetic and musical reworkings is conjectural but important: Deus in adiutorium was a prayer that could not only be adapted to fit any situation, but also in fact required constant rumination. The versicle's positioning in Pater creator omnium as a repeated refrain, therefore, at least conceptually and poetically reflects this devotional function. The continued significance of Deus in adiutorium as an everyday prayer from Cassian onward increases the likelihood that the creator of Pater creator omnium was aware that, by using the text as a refrain in a poetic cento, he was making reference to a broader tradition of its use in the ritual of unceasing prayer. In this way, Pater creator omnium provides a centuries-later musical counterpart to Cassian's commentary, adapting the versicle to each new strophe, and continually returning to it until the singer is ‘moulded’ by its ‘constant use’.

Prayer in the round

Infiltrating daily life through the liturgy and popular interjections, the verse Deus in adiutorium has served a devotional function marked by versatility. Yet, despite its omnipresence across cultural contexts throughout the Middle Ages and beyond and its inherently vocalic petition, Deus in adiutorium has only rarely found a place in musical repertories outside or alongside the liturgy. The collection of thirteenth-century monophonic and polyphonic tropes of the verse circulating in France within both liturgical and extraliturgical sources represent, consequently, one of the few moments of heightened musical interest in the verse. What has not been noticed previously is the musical and textual connection between these tropes and a song also from thirteenth-century France, Pater creator omnium. A welcome addition to the meagre number of medieval Deus in adiutorium reworkings, Pater creator omnium also belongs firmly to the cento genre, with its construction based on the piecing together of the old to make the new.Footnote ⁶⁴ In other words, it stands as a pivotal work at the intersection of two important, yet still understudied histories: the musical and textual troping of Deus in adiutorium and the medieval cento.

The significance of Pater creator omnium extends beyond its centonate and tropic features, offering insight into the broader cultural use of Deus in adiutorium. Deus in adiutorium serves not only as a multipurpose prayer, but also as one of the most powerful petitions against sin and for divine intervention. In Pater creator omnium, the salvific properties of the verse are exploited, with the song functioning as an extended supplication to the Lord. More than simply a cry for help, though, Pater creator omnium reflects on a structural level through the continual return in its refrain to Deus in adiutorium the principle of perpetual prayer. Advocated for by Cassian, the continual recitation of Deus in adiutorium is the most important aspect of the verse's devotional history, enacted liturgically through its placement in the Offices and daily in the lives of the devout. Uniquely in pre-modern music and poetry, Pater creator omnium serves as a musical exploration of such meditation on Deus in adiutorium, praying for salvation in and through a song, itself already infused with the meanings of its borrowed verses.

Footnotes

1 This discussion of the Book of Hours is indebted to Bennett, Adelaide, ‘A Woman's Power of Prayer versus the Devil in a Book of Hours of ca. 1300’, in Image and Belief: Studies in Celebration of the Eightieth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art, ed. Hourihane, Colum (Princeton, NJ, 1999), 89–102 .

2 Among the exceptions is Matins in secular uses, which generally began with the versicle Domine labia mea and its response Et os meum, followed by Deus in adiutorium. On secular Matins, see Harper, John, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century: A Historical Introduction and Guide for Students and Musicians (Oxford, 1991), 86–97 . Depending on the use, the Deus in adiutorium was omitted during the Triduum and Office of the Dead, and replaced during Easter week at Vespers with a repeated Kyrie. See Hiley, David, Western Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford, 1993), 25 .

3 See Günther, Ursula, ‘Les versions polyphoniques du “Deus in adiutorium”’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 31 (1988), 111–22. For a complete list of manuscript sigla, see Table 1, note 28. I use the term ‘trope’ here and throughout to refer in the broadest sense to the poetic and musical expansion of a liturgical item, such as the versicle Deus in adiutorium, when it retains part or all of the original text and/or music, and – in some cases – its ritual function.

4 Surprisingly few conducti incorporate this versicle, especially in comparison with Benedicamus Domino, the concluding versicle of the Divine Office. Apart from the trope discussed here, an unnotated song in Evreux, Bibliothèque municipale latin 17, fol. 2r–v, from the twelfth century (likely of Anglo-Norman origin) takes its initial line and a half from the prayer (‘Deus in adiutorium/Meum intende, vitium’) (Analecta Hynmica 20:180). On the manuscript source for the song, see Helen Deeming, ‘Music in English Miscellanies of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’ Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University (2005), 75–80, and ‘The Song and the Page: Experiments with Form and Layout in Manuscripts of Medieval Latin Song’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 15 (2006), 16–7. One other context is the conductus Qui seminant in loculis, in which the prayer is described as precipitous against the sins of the curia, including usury and hypocrisy. Transmitted in F, fols. 424v–425r and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Add. A. 44, fol. 128v.

5 For an overview of repetition in Latin song specifically, see Caldwell, ‘Singing, Dancing, and Rejoicing in the Round’, 274–405.

6 The processes of repetition and reuse are exemplified in genres such as florilegia, sententiae, exemplae, excerptiones, excerpta, distinctiones and anthologia, which collect together fragments from other writings for the purpose of study, meditation and composition. For the process behind the use of such collections, see Parkes, Malcolm B., ‘The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book’, in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, ed. Alexander, Jonathan J. G. and Gibson, Margaret T. (Oxford, 1976), 115–41.

7 A list of early medieval references to ‘cento’ is included in Liu, Jinyu, Collegia Centonariorum: The Guilds of Textile Dealers in the Roman West (Leiden, 2009), 395–8. The references pertinent to poetry are in the writings of Tertullian, Ausonius and Isidore of Seville. Du Cange's Glossarium includes the verb ‘centonizare’, which cites its textual usage and includes Tertullian, among others. Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, ed. Charles du Fresne du Cange (Niort, 1883), 2: col. 265a.

8 For the history and etymology of the term, see Belardi, Walter, ‘Nomi del centone nelle lingue indoeuropee’, Richerche linguistiche, 4 (1958), 29–57 . The oft-cited cento written by fourth-century female poet Faltonia Betitia Proba, Cento vergilianus de laudibus Christi, is a central example of the Christianisation of the genre, while still using the secular writings of Virgil. Edited and translated in Clark, Elizabeth A. and Hatch, Diane F., eds., The Golden Bough, the Oaken Cross: The Virgilian Cento of Faltonia Betitia Proba (Chico, CA, 1981).

9 Edited and translated in McGill, Scott, Virgil Recomposed: The Mythological and Secular Centos in Antiquity (New York, 2005), 1–3 . This passage occurs in an explanatory letter to Axius Paulus that precedes Ausonius's Cento Nuptialis. Ausonius's prescriptive outline of the cento genre is governed, however, by the definition of the cento as constructed from Classical sources, meaning certain poetic rules do not necessarily apply to later medieval centos. Bayless, Martha, Parody in the Middle Ages: The Latin Tradition (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996), 130 .

10 Although some scholars have failed to note the continued popularity of centonate forms in the Middle Ages, the genre was cultivated by a number of poets, including, for example, Gower, John. Yeager, Robert F., ‘Did Gower Write Cento?’, in John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983–1988, ed. Yeager, Robert F. (Kalamazoo, 1989), 113–32, at 123. In addition, Bayless provides an overview of centos, especially humorous ones, in the Latin Middle Ages, in Parody, 129–76.

11 Ferretti, Paolo Maria, Estetica gregoriana ossia Trattato delle forme musicali del canto gregoriano, 1 (Rome, 1934), 114–31.

12 Treitler, Leo, ‘“Centonate Chant”: Übles Flickwerk or E pluribus unus?’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 28 (1975), 1–23 . A brief summary of the issues surrounding centonisation in music is found in Everist, Mark, ‘The Refrain Cento: Myth or Motet?’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 114 (1989), 164–88, at 167–8.

13 The cento is one among many terms drawn on to describe citational practices in musical repertories. Pastiche, quodlibet, parody, bricolage, entée or grafted, sampling, allusion, citation, reworking – these and other terms are used to describe and define musical works that integrate or are built from pre-existing text and music. In the context of this article, ‘cento’ is preferred to describe the construction of Pater creator omnium over any of the other related terms due to the particular nature of its wholesale construction from pre-existing materials, as well as its striking parallels to, and participation in, the Christian cento tradition.

14 Everist, Mark, French Motets in the Thirteenth Century: Music, Poetry and Genre (Cambridge, 1994), 109–25; Evans, Beverly J., ‘The Textual Function of the Refrain Cento in a Thirteenth-Century French Motet’, Music and Letters, 71 (1990), 187–97. This winnowing of the repertory is critiqued briefly in Butterfield, Ardis, ‘“Enté”: A Survey and Reassessment of the Term in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Music and Poetry’, Early Music History, 22 (2003), 67–101 , at 83.

15 Specifically, as Everist notes (‘Refrain Cento’, 188), ‘the links between [the refrain cento] and literary models from late antiquity and the early Middle Ages are unjustifiable’, meaning there is little in common between the conventional poetic use of the term and the technique of refrain citation in motets. In terms of this disjunction, Butterfield notes that ‘centonisation in the motets is not quite part of the wittily maverick and self-enclosed high tradition of the Classical cento, but rather an extension in extremis of an intense thirteenth-century fascination with creating aggregate structures of small independent citations in a wide range of formal realisations’. Butterfield, Ardis, Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge, 2002), 232 .

16 The database Cantum pulcriorem invenire: Thirteenth-Century Music and Poetry (hereafter CPI), by Mark Everist and Gregorio Bevilacqua (http://catalogue.conductus.ac.uk) catalogues extant conductus c.1170–1320.

17 No one source catalogues all surviving medieval centos; for an overview, see Delepierre, Octave, Tableau de la litérature du centon chez les anciens et chez les modernes, 2 vols. (London, 1874–75).

18 Although Anderson's catalogue of conducti is both incomplete and has been superseded by the CPI database, it still offers valuable perspective on borrowing in the Latin poetry. See Anderson, Gordon A., ed., Notre-Dame and Related Conductus: Opera Omnia, 9 vols. (Henryville, PA), 1979–.

19 On the relationship between conducti and clausulae, see Bukofzer, Manfred, ‘Interrelations Between Conductus and Clausula’, Annales musicologiques, 1 (1953), 65–103 .

20 For an examination of hymn and sequence reworkings in the conductus repertory, see Caldwell, ‘Singing, Dancing, and Rejoicing’, 348–403.

21 Transmitted in F, fols. 225v–226r, W1, fols. 117r–v (108r–v), ORawl, fols. 244r–v (15r–v). Text and music edited in Anderson, ed., 2pt Conductus in the Central Sources. Vol. 4: Notre-Dame and Related Conductus: Opera Omnia (Henryville, PA), xiii and 21–3.

22 The existence of centonate conductus, not to mention evidence from music theorists, argue against the genre being primarily ‘newly composed’. Although prevailing narratives of music history emphasise the ‘newly composed’ conductus (in contrast to genres such as organum and the motet, which explicitly reuse and borrow material), many textual, musical and formal links can be found between conductus and contemporaneous genres. Walter of Evesham, for example, defines the conductus as ‘composed out of several beautiful melodies, known or invented’(‘Conducti sunt compositi ex pluribus canticis decoris cognitis vel inventis’). Walter Odington, Summa de speculatione musicae, ed. Frederick F. Hammond, Corpus scriptorum de musica 14 ([Rome], 1970), 142; English translation adapted from Ronald Edwin Voogt, ‘Repetition and Structure in the Three- and Four-Part Conductus of the Notre Dame School’ (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1982), 4. Similar statements can be found in Franco of Cologne's Ars cantus mensurabilis, ed. Gilbert Reaney and André Gilles, Corpus scriptorum de musica 18 ([Rome], 1974), 69, 73–4; Johannes de Grocheo's De musica, ed. and trans. in Christopher Page, ‘Johannes de Grocheio on Secular Music: A Corrected Text and a New Translation’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 2 (1993), 17–41, at 37–9. My thanks to the anonymous reader who pointed out that these comments regarding the ‘newly composed’ conductus refer principally to polyphonic, not monophonic, works.

23 One such work is the two-voice conductus Hac in die rege nato. As Anonymous IV observes, it is a conductus ‘in quo continentur nomina plurium conductorum’. Reckow, Fritz, ed., Der Musiktraktat des Anonymus 4, Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 4 (Wiesbaden, 1967), 82 . Of the twenty-six lines in the conductus, twenty are identifiable as belonging to other polyphonic conductus; the remaining unidentified lines are likely incipits of now lost conducti. See Anderson, 2pt Conductus, xxxv.

24 As Everist notes (‘Refrain Cento’, 168, note 4), the compositional processes behind the conductus share ‘characteristics of the literary cento in that the resultant text makes reasonably coherent sense, but it is different in that it draws on its own repertory, in an intertextual sense, rather than on some sort of classic body of material’.

25 It is identified as such in Anderson, ed., 1pt Conductus–Transmitted in Fascicle X of the Florence Manuscript. Vol. 6: Notre-Dame and Related Conductus: Opera Omnia (Henryville, PA), xxiv, note 1. Rudolf Meyer calls Pater creator omnium a ‘Lateinische Cento’ in his early work on motets containing refrains, ‘Die in unseren Motetten enthaltenen Refrains’, in Die altfranzösischen Motette der Bamberger Handschrift, nebst einem Anhang, enthaltend altfranzösische Motette aus anderen deutschen Handschriften, ed. Albert Stimming (Dresden, 1906), 141–84, at 176.

26 The eleventh fascicle is edited in Anderson, ed., 1pt Conductus–The Latin Rondeau Répertoire. Vol. 8: Notre-Dame and Related Conductus: Opera Omnia (Henryville, PA, 1979); Tischler, Hans, Conductus and Contrafacta, Musicological Studies 75 (Ottawa, 2001), 307–22; Yvonne Rokseth, ‘Danses cléricales du XIIIe siècle’, in Mélanges 1945 des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de Strasbourg (Paris, 1947), 93–126, at 120–6.

27 This is the standard layout for Latin refrain songs, as well as hymns, throughout the Middle Ages. On hymn layout, see Boynton, Susan, ‘Orality, Literacy, and the Early Notation of the Office Hymns’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 56 (2003), 99–168 , at 132–5.

Sigla

Ba: Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Lit.115
Da: Darmstadt, Universitäts– und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt 3471
F: Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Pluteus 29.1
fr. 146: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, français 146
Hu: Burgos, Monasterio de Las Huelgas
Laon 263: Laon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 263
Le Puy A: Grenoble, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 4413
Le Puy B: Le Puy-en-Velay, Bibliothèque du Grand Séminaire, AV7 009
LoA: London, British Library, Egerton 2615
Ma: Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS 20486
Mo: Montpellier, Bibliothèque Inter-Universitaire, Section Médecine, H196
ORawl: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C510
Paris 1351: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, latin 1351
Sens 46: Sens, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 46
St-M A: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, latin 1139
St-M D: London, British Library, Add. 36881
Stuttg: Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek MS HB. I asc. 95
Tu: Turin, Biblioteca Reale Vari 42
W1: Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Helmstedt 628
W2: Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Helmstedt 1099

Abbreviations

AH: Analecta hymnica medii aevi. 55 vols. Ed. Guido Maria Dreves and Clemens Blume. Leipzig, 1886–1922
RH: Chevalier, Ulysse. Repertorium hymnologicum. 6 vols. Brussels, 1920–1
TH: Daniel, Hermann Adalbert. Thesaurus hymnologicus sive Hymnorum, canticorum, sequentiarum circa annum MD usitatarum collectio amplissima. Halis: E. Anton, 1841–56

29 Anderson indicates the following sources for lines 5 and 6, but these seem to be misidentifications: ‘hymn, Daniel 1:292 and Conductus K14’. Neither of these identifies the original biblical or liturgical sources (likely due to a typo in the case of Daniel 1:292). The conductus is actually K15 (Dum medium silentium / Tenerent) in Anderson's catalogue, attributed to Walter of Châtillon, and the hymn is, according to TH1: 292, for St Louis. The two monophonic conductus that begin with Dum medium silentium both have refrains; see Anderson, Gordon A., ‘Notre Dame and Related Conductus: A Catalogue Raisonné’, Miscellanea musicologica vi–vii (1972–3): no.1, 190–1. Edited and translated in Anderson, 1pt Conductus-Fascicle X, xxiv–xxvi.

30 A search in the AH reveals at least twenty-six separate occurrences of ‘vergente mundi vespere’ in texts beginning in the tenth century.

31 As with ‘vergente mundi vespere’, the incipit ‘Iam lucis orto sidere’ is cited dozens of times in medieval song. Most notably, the same fascicle in F transmitting Pater creator omnium also preserves the hymn Iam lucis orto sidere (fol. 470v) interpolated with a two-part poetic and musical refrain (‘Fulget dies’ and ‘Fulget dies ista’). Unlike Pater creator omnium, this somewhat anomalous work is a setting of the hymn itself with an added refrain, as opposed to being a centonate work constructed out of multiple sources. On this hymn, see Caldwell, ‘Singing, Dancing, and Rejoicing’, 608–28.

32 For example, the song Decet vox letitie (F, fol. 463r) is concordant with both a French motetus and an earlier versus with a refrain: Tout leis enmi/DO[MINUS] (W2, fol. 247v–248r) and Ave mater salvatoris (St-M D, fol. 16v). See Gaël Saint-Cricq, ‘Formes types dans le motet du XIIIe siècle: étude d'un processus répétitif’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Southampton, 2 vols., 2009), 1: 155–6.

33 Examples of refrain song repertories explicitly involving contrafacture include the Irish Red Book of Ossory, the St. Victor Miscellany (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, latin 15131), and the Ludus super Anticlaudianum of Adam de la Bassée.

34 The seminal work on the Benedicamus Domino versicle illustrating its melodic sources is Robertson, Anne Walters, ‘Benedicamus Domino: The Unwritten Tradition’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 41 (1988), 1–62 .

35 Among the monophonic sources for the Deus in adiutorium trope, St-M A is actually an example of successively notated polyphony. The version in Stuttg, fol. 46r, concludes somewhat bizarrely by means of another Office verse, Benedicamus Domino; the version in CH-EN 102, fol. 12v concludes similarly. See Arlt, Wulf, ‘Einstimmige Lieder des 12. Jahrhunderts und Mehrstimmiges in französischen Handschriften des 16. Jahrhunderts aus Le Puy’, Schweizer Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft, 3 (1978), 7–47 , at 13. According to the CPI database, at least one other source transmits the trope but is now lost: F-TOm 1299, fol. 24v. I have also been unable to confirm the placement of the trope in the Office of Circumcision in Le Puy B, although Arlt lists it as fols. 47v–48r and 80r–v (for Prime and Compline).

36 Indications for the verse's performance in the liturgy typically name a priest or, for high feasts, bishop. See, for example, the rubrics indicating its performance by the ‘sacerdos’ throughout the thirteenth-century ordinal for the cathedral of Laon, the same source as one of the extant versions of Deus in adiutorium cited in Table 2: Chevalier, Ulysse, Ordinaires de l’église cathédrale de Laon (XIIe et XIIIe siècles): suivis de deux mystères liturgiques (Paris, 1897), 6 , 8, 16 and passim.

37 Edited and translated (with a minor emendation here) in Tischler, ed., The Montpellier Codex. Pt. 4: Recent Researches in the Music of the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance 8 (Madison, WI, 1985), 1 and 103, the latter with different ordering of the strophes.

38 The two polyphonic settings of the Deus in adiutorium trope are similar poetically, not musically. The trope musically unrelated to the monophonic settings discussed here is transmitted in Mo, fol. 350r; Tu, fol. 4v; Cambrai, Bibliothèque municipale, Inc. B 65, fol. 2e plat; Bibliothèque Royal, MS 19606 (‘Brussels rotulus’), recto. The melodic incipit is the same as the conductus, Parce virgo spes reorum, also in Tu, fols. 1r–4r. On the tradition of beginning motet collections with Deus in adiutorium, see Everist, French Motets, 9–10. An unnotated – and seemingly unnoticed – context in which the liturgical verse introduces a motet is the Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, a collection of fourteenth-century vernacular religious dramas produced by a Parisian confraternity. During the tenth miracle, the Virgin appears to a bishop in a dramatised Matins beginning with the bishop intoning Domine labia mea and Deus in adiutorium and their responses. Immediately following Deus in adiutorium, a marginal note reads: ‘Cy chantent un motet’. Transmitted in F-Pn fr. 819, fol. 105r, and edited in Paris, Gaston and Robert, Ulysse, Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, publiés d'après le manuscrit de la bibliothèque nationale (Paris, 1877), 2 : 74–5.

39 See note 33.

40 Two manuscripts preserve the Liber Hymnorum: Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 1441, and Dublin, University College, MS Franciscan A 2. The hymn is edited in Bernard, John Henry and Atkinson, Robert, ed., The Irish Liber Hymnorum (London, 1898), 1: 84–5. In the Liber Hymnorum, the first strophe and refrain prefigure later versions of the trope: ‘Deus, in adiutorium / Intende laborantium, / Ad dolorum remedium / Festina in auxilium.’ The poem's copying in the Liber Hymnorum is roughly contemporaneous with the section of St-M A in which the trope is preserved. In one of the most recent considerations of the polyphonic trope, Emma Dillon misleadingly identifies Mo as the earliest source for the text of this trope: The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (New York, 2012), 308.

41 For full editions of the trope in Mo, Laon 263, LoA and Sens 46, see, respectively, Tischler, Montpellier Codex, pt. 1, no. 1; Robert Charles Lagueux, ‘Glossing Christmas: Liturgy, Music, Exegesis, and Drama in High Medieval Laon’ Ph.D. diss., Yale University (2004), 573; Arlt, Wulf, Ein Festoffizium des Mittelalters aus Beauvais in seiner liturgischen und musikalischen Bedeutung, 2 vols. (Köln, 1970), 2: 139; Villetard, Henri, Office de Pierre de Corbeil (Office de la Circoncision) improprement appelé ‘Office des fous’ (Paris, 1907), 131 . Excluded from Table 2 are the neumed versions in Stuttg, fol. 48r, which combines both the opening and closing versicles of the Divine Hours, and CH-EN 102, fol. 12v. Le Puy B, a copy of the Office of the Circumcision contemporary with Le Puy A, and the earliest source for the poetic trope St-M A are also not included, the former due to its unavailability and the latter since it is the most distant melodically.

42 The other notable alteration is the addition of the word ‘venit’, ‘he is coming’, and the consequential change of ‘intende’ to ‘intendere’. The effect is twofold: first, the syllable count, rhyme scheme and accent become consistent with the remainder of the poem (eight-syllable, proparoxytonic lines); and second, the verb moves from the singular imperative, ‘intende’, to the third person singular perfect active ‘venit’ combined with the infinitive ‘intendere’. In other words, the intensity of the imperative prayer is lessened in the reworking, although the incipit remains identical.

43 Frere, Walter, ed., The Use of Sarum I. The Sarum Customs as Set Forth in the Consuetudinary and Customary (Cambridge, 1898), 153 . The versicle Deus in adiutorium is sung at Compline with ‘nostrum’ on the Octave of Easter.

44 Meconi, David Vincent, ‘The Christian Cento and the Evangelization of Christian Culture’, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, 7 (2004), 109–32, at 123. As Bayless observes, a cento and its sources also provide evidence of an audience that will readily recognise borrowed works (Parody, 129).

45 For brief overviews of the liturgical verse, see Leclercq, Henri, ‘1. Deus in adjutorium’, in Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, ed. Cabrol, Fernand (Paris, 1920), 697–8; Fernand Cabrol, ‘2. Deus in adjutorium’, in Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, ed. Cabrol, 698–9.

46 Cited in chapters 17–18 of The Rule of Saint Benedict, trans. Bruce L. Venarde (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 80–9. In chapter 35, Benedict also includes a mention of the prayer being required of kitchen servers upon beginning their weekly duties. Ibid., 126–9.

47 Concordia regularum, ed. Pierre Bonnerue, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis 168A (Turnhout, 1999), 249 and 368.

48 De ecclesiasticis officiis, Patrologia Latina 105, cols. 1167a and 1171c.

49 Summa de ecclesiasticis officiis, ed. Douteil, Heriberto, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis 41A (Turnhout, 1976), 50 and 187.

50 Rationale, ed. Davril, Anselme and Thibodeau, Timothy M., Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis 140 and 140A (Turnhout, 1995–8), book 5, passim.

51 Hughes, Andrew, Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: A Guide to their Organization and Terminology (Toronto, 1982), 53 : ‘That the versicle Deus in adiutorium and its response were said before each of the hours was apparently so much taken for granted that a statement to that effect is difficult to find.’

52 Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, Patrologia Latina 36, col. 867. English translation in Expositions of the Psalms, 51–72, vol. III/17, trans. Maria Boulding, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY, 2001), 401–2.

53 Durand, Rationale, bk 5, ch. 2: ‘Cum enim persecutio iusti sit a leone, id est a dyabolo, impetu, id est manifeste seuiente; uel a dracone, id est a dyabolo, insidiis, id est occulte persequente: omnes clament: “Deus in adiutorium meum intende.”’

54 Edited and translated in Walker, George S. M., ed., Sancti Columbani Opera (Dublin, 1970; repr. 1970), 158–9. The excerpt was silently recited three times.

55 See Noffke, Suzanne, ed., The Prayers of Catherine of Siena, 2nd edn (San Jose, 2001), 118 . In her life as recorded by Raymond of Capua, Catherine ‘was particularly struck by the psalm-verse with which each Hour of the Office begins. It remained a favourite with her for the rest of her life; ‘Incline unto my aid, O God; O Lord, make haste to help me.’ She translated it into the vernacular, and would repeat it again and again. Raymond of Capua, The Life of Catherine of Siena, trans. Conleth Kearns (Wilmington, DE, 1980), 105.

56 See Fullerton, Lady Georgiana, The Inner Life of Lady Georgiana Fullerton with Notes of Retreat and Diary, trans. Coleridge, H. J. (London, 1899), 274 and 365 .

57 The Latin text is edited in Collationes XXIIII, ed. Petschenig, Michael, supplemented by Kreuz, Gottfried, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum , vol. 13, 2nd edn (Vienna, 2004).

58 Cassian, Collationes, 297: ‘Erit itaque ad perpetuam dei memoriam possidendam haec inseparabiliter proposita uobis formula pietatis’. Translated in John Cassian, The Conferences, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New York, 1997), 379.

59 Cabrol, ‘2. Deus in adjutorium’, 698, with reference to chapter 18 of Benedict's Rule Rule: ‘In primis semper diurnis horis dicatur versus: Deus in adjutorium meeum intende, Domine ad adjuvandum me festina.’ In fact, Benedict recommends in his Rule that monks read Cassian's Conferences, clearly connecting his daily prescriptions for the singing of Psalm 69 with Cassian. When Cassiodorus comments upon Psalm 69 a century or so after Benedict, he likewise refers to Cassian's interpretation of the Deus in adiutorium text: ‘But the most eloquent Cassian attaches such glory to it that whenever his monks undertake a task, they do not begin without declaiming this little verse three times. By repeatedly reiterating it, he shows that memorising it is extremely useful.’ Cassiodorus, Cassiodorus: Explanation of the Psalms, trans. Patrick G. Walsh, 3 vols. (New York, 1991), 2: 162.

60 Cassian, Collationes, 297–8: ‘Hic namque uersiculus non inmerito de toto scripturarum excerptus est instrumento. Recipit enim omnes adfectus quicumque inferri humanae possunt naturae et ad omnem statum atque uniuersos incursus proprie satis et conpetenter aptatur.’ Trans. in Cassian, The Conferences, 379.

61 See Leclercq, ‘1. Deus in adjutorium’, 697: ‘Cassien dit simplement, à l'occasion de ce verset, que les moines zélés entretenaient l'esprit de prière et se préservaient des tentations et du relâchement par des oraisons jaculatoires telles que le Deus in adjutorium qu'ils répétaient fréquemment.’

62 Cassian, Collationes, conference 10, ch. 10, runs from fols. 97r to 109v. Digitised image: http://bibliotheca-laureshamensis-digital.de/bav/bav_pal_lat_560/0220?sid=9d1625c7ac92efb49bda4b8d940580a9 (accessed 20 November 2013).

63 Cassian, Collationes, 302; trans. in Cassian, The Conferences, 382–3. This passage has clear connections to Deuteronomy 6: 5–9: ‘Eruntque verba haec, quae ego praecipio tibi hodie, in corde tuo: et narrabis ea filiis tuis, et meditaberis in eis sedens in domo tua, et ambulans in itinere, dormiens atque consurgens. Et ligabis ea quasi signum in manu tua, eruntque et movebuntur inter oculos tuos, scribesque ea in limine, et ostiis domus tuae.’ My thanks to Louis Epstein for bringing the Shema to my attention, a daily Hebrew prayer derived from this same biblical passage. See also Stewart, Columba, Cassian the Monk (Oxford, 1998), 111–12.

64 Pater creator omnium has no explicit liturgical associations other than those implied through its borrowed texts. Similar arguments could be offered for the performance of Pater creator omnium in the liturgy as have been made for Benedicamus Domino tropes based on the appearance of a liturgical versicle in its text, but no concrete evidence currently exists to provide compelling support.

Fig. 1Cambrai, Bibliothèque municipale MS 87, fol. 43v, Hours of the Virgin, detail (‘D-’ of ‘Deus in adiutorium’). By kind permission of the Médiathèque d'Agglomération de Cambrai.

Fig. 2F, fol. 467r, Pater creator omnium. By kind permission of the Ministero dei beni culturali e del Turismo. Any further reproduction, by any means, is forbidden.