In this thorough and pathbreaking study based on fifteen years of research in Paris and Belgium, Sarah Long argues that from 1300 to 1550 selected trade and devotional confraternities in Paris and Tournai could and did construct their own liturgy independently from that of their diocese; that musicians belonging to or working for them composed or contrafacted plainchant for them, especially for saints believed to protect against the plague, sudden death, or associated with healing; and that confraternity members disseminated such chant to other confraternities and churches. She is the first to analyse the chant and polyphony of liturgical books prepared for confraternities, here fourteen, and to study the role of the Parisian book community in printing and disseminating chant for use by confraternities or private individuals. Especially important are her reassessments of the mass of Tournai; mass ordinaries in mensural notation including the Sanctus and Agnus ‘Vineux’ by Du Fay; saints’ offices and masses, some votive, for St Barbara, the Transfiguration, the Finding of the Relics of St Catherine, the Translation of St Nicholas and St Sebastian; and the role of Parisian printers in disseminating votive masses, some used by confraternities, in the notated Misse solenniores, Misse familiares and Communes prose printed in Paris in 1519, 1523 and c.1538.
The five chapters are centred on the music of the confraternity of notaries in Tournai, the confraternities meeting in the chapel of St Nicholas at the hospital of St Catherine in Paris, the manuscript Paris, Arsenal 204 of the Confraternity of Bourgeois Archers of Paris with chant for saintly protectors against plague, mass ordinaries in manuscripts from Tournai, and three early sixteenth-century liturgical books printed in Paris. Throughout the chapters are analyses of the offices and masses for saints, which include discussions of the hagiography of the saint and of the texts (given with translations), text-setting and melodies of the chant, with many transcriptions (listed pp. x–xi). Then Appendix 1 lists all manuscripts and printed books with the book type and date (page numbers are in the indexes); Appendix 2 provides inventories of ten manuscripts from Tournai; and Appendix 3 is an analysis of scribal hands and gatherings of the manuscripts of the confraternity of notaries in the Tournai manuscripts B-Tc A 12, 13 and 27, the latter with the Mass of Tournai. Three further appendices are available online: Appendix 4 with codicological descriptions including decoration and bindings with inventories of liturgical books used by Parisian confraternities (F-Pa 168 and 204; F-Pm 461 and 464; F-Pn lat. 10506; and NL-DHk 76 E 18); Appendix 5 with seventeen comparative tables of confraternity mass ordinary melodies, the office and mass of St Barbara, the masses of Sts Nicholas and Catherine, votive masses for St Sebastian, Pange dulcis francia and Previst le createur; and Appendix 6 with an edition of the rubrics of the Kyriale of the Misse familiares. Unfortunately, the URL printed in the book for these online appendices is wrong, and they are best found by searching ‘Boydell and Brewer’ and ‘Sarah Long’, and clicking on ‘related content’. They are freely downloadable PDFs, but because they lack descriptive headings (given only on p. xxv in the book) and are double-spaced without breaks, they cannot easily be searched. At the end of the book are copious endnotes (an unfortunate continuing practice of the press), the bibliography, and indexes of chant and polyphony, early printed liturgical books, manuscripts cited and a general index.
After introducing us to the plague saint Sebastian and the three protectors against untimely death, Sts Barbara, Nicholas and Catherine of Alexandria, in Chapter 1 Long demonstrates how the confraternity of notaries in Tournai used a contrafacted office in B-Tc A 12 for Barbara, their patron saint along with the Virgin Mary. Comparison of this office with fourteen sources from Cambrai, Liège and Trier demonstrates that liégeois antiphons were adopted, with new melodies composed in Tournai (in the unusual tonal order 111 222 331), combined with a unique series of responsories from Tournai, of which three are transcribed. This office was probably prepared for the confraternity and is older than the composer, Wackerzeele, of the late fourteenth century to whom a Barbara office is attributed. Given that some notaries had musical training, Long suggests that a member of the confraternity could have composed it. The notaries had multiple liturgical books (p. 24), and Long's observation that B-Tc A 12, A 13 and A 27 include copying by the same scribe and similar layers dating from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century constitutes evidence supporting her assertion that the Mass of Tournai in A 27 was intended for the confraternity of notaries rather than the cathedral. The notaries had access to the bishop, which could explain why the confraternity had the liberty it did to determine its liturgy, but Long's point is that the Barbara office of the notaries later moves into the cathedral and diocesan books, although the mass propers for Barbara of the confraternity and cathedral differ.
Chapter 2 opens with an alleluia verse for St Nicholas in the Parisian manuscript F-Pm 464, and in B-Tc A 13 for the Tournai notaries that asks the saint for protection from fevers (the plague) and is evidence of confraternity-to-confraternity transmission. This chapter is centred on the books of two Parisian confraternities holding services in the chapel of St Nicholas of the hospital of St Catherine, the confraternity of spice dealers and apothecaries (F-Pm 464) and the confraternity of doublet makers (NL-DHk 76 E 18), the latter with a Catherine liturgy and a Requiem. F-Pm 464 includes three offices for St Nicholas and one remembering the tenth-century finding of St Catherine's relics on Mount Sinai, the latter described only in this source. Relics of St Nicholas were in Normandy, and relics of St Catherine in Rouen – the reason why these saints became known in France. A register of 1502 of the confraternity of spice dealers and apothecaries, B-Br 17939, lists their church services. The St Catherine office has new antiphons by one composer, but its responsories, alleluia verses and a prosa are all contrafacts of chants for St Nicholas. Long explains how the Nicholas prosa became a Catherine prosa, and, based on evidence that the members of the confraternity sang, suggests that the prosas could have been sung by them. The two offices for the Translation of St Nicholas have chant associated with the diocese, but the second, which Long thinks is the work of one individual, describes the Translation and relics more directly and includes contrafacts to melodies from a Crown of Thorns office, which were altered to fit the new syllable counts of their texts. The hymns and prosas for the St Nicholas contrafact Mittit ad virginem no doubt recognise Mary as patron of Paris and also evoke the incarnated Christ. Four alleluia verses are found only in the confraternity's books – their contrafacting is discussed.
Chapter 3 concerns devotion to St Sebastian, who was martyred with arrows and became a saintly protector of France and its royalty and of the confraternity of bourgeois archers of Paris, a citizens’ guard, as well as the chant for the plague saints Sebastian, Anthony, Roch and Geneviève, patroness of Paris, in the mid-fifteenth-century manuscript F-Pa 204. Votive masses for St Sebastian are compared: each chant calls on him for protection, many include geographical references to strengthen him as local protector, and some chants associate him with Christ. The contrafacted prosas of his mass include Pange dulcis francia, which recalls the history of the Franks and translation of Sebastian's relics to Soissons in the ninth century. Two alleluia verses associate Sebastian with King Louis IX. Long explains that a procession of peace in Paris in 1515 brought a statue of the Virgin Mary and image of St Sebastian into the streets and to the people. For comparison, Long lists votive masses in Parisian missals on pages 118–19.
Chapter 4 concentrates on mass ordinary movements, first those of the confraternity of the Transfiguration consisting of eight priests and chaplains of Tournai cathedral. Their manuscript, B-Tc 58, has the Sanctus and Agnus ‘Vineux’, the latter with a long trope only here, and a sequence and offertory, all written in cantus fractus (here as chant using mensural signs).Footnote 1 These movements from Cambrai date from the years of the papal schism and Council of Constance; they also appear in I-Bc Q15 and in manuscripts from Dijon and Avignon. It is relevant that the bishop of Cambrai, Pierre d'Ailly, suggested the Council end the Schism in 1381, and went to Avignon several times, where he died in 1420, and that Nicolas Grenon began his career at the Burgundian court in Dijon of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, in 1412, returning to Cambrai in 1419. A Credo I in cantus fractus for the confraternity of the notaries also moved from Cambrai to Tournai and is found in Paris and Avignon.
The discussion next moves to B-Tc A 27 with the mass of Tournai. The manuscript includes Kyrie and Sanctus melodies in cantus fractus that Michael Cuthbert identified as polyphonic canons. Some movements of the mass of Tournai have separate histories, evidence for the compilation of ordinary movements that continues into the fifteenth century: the Credo is found in the Las Huelgas codex with variants, and a motet for the Ite missa est with texts in Picard dialect was associated with the French court by Karl Kuegle. Since Long identifies B-Tc A 27 as a manuscript of the notaries, she separates the mass from the 1349 foundation of a Marian mass in the cathedral that was previously considered. This chapter ends with a discussion of composers in Paris and musicians in northwest Europe in the time of the Council of Constance who could have played a role in disseminating this music. Long points out that her confraternity manuscripts mostly integrate ordinary chants with mass propers. She found some unica among the ordinary melodies, but those in BnF lat. 10506 for the confraternity of barrel makers in Paris are those of the diocese of Paris. Yet when confraternities did adopt a diocesan Kyriale, its ordinaries were usually given new festal destinations or rubrics.
In Chapter 5, Long identifies alleluia verses for Sts Catherine and Nicholas used in Parisian confraternities that appear in the votive masses of three graduals printed for wider use. She identifies a music teacher who worked with a collaborator to print Misse sollemniores for high feasts, which were so successful that Misse familiares and Communes prosa followed, all related. These books include ‘new and corrected’ masses for the Temporale, St John the Baptist, the Assumption and All Saints, as well as votive masses (Table 5.3 at pp. 204–6 lists more than forty votive masses in missals printed in Paris for Tournai, Cambrai, Amiens and Soissons), mass ordinaries in a Kyriale with two new cycles added to those of Paris, here rearranged, and sequences for the main feasts of the year (listed on p. 187). This was the work of the Parisian book community, of which Long provides an important description. On the Left Bank, the scribes and booksellers swore oaths to the university, and printers belonged to the confraternity of St John the Evangelist. They hired clergy in or outside of Paris, or university teachers, to advise on the content of books; print runs of liturgical books were between 200 and 600 copies. Nearby communities included the nationes of university students and confraternities: two discussed here held services at the Trinitarian house of the Mathurins, which was where the theology faculty held its meetings and where processions held four times yearly began (there is a list of participants at p. 191). Long argues that bishops were not involved in determining the content of the printed books and that printers could issue books without supervision of high clergy, and she observes that there was no standardisation of musical notation.
Long concludes that music was often copied and transmitted in libelli and that it moved with people and through the agency of popular devotional networks. Choices of music were determined by proximity to relics, translations of them, civic cults and pilgrimages. Confraternities maintained independent liturgies that sometimes moved to other locations. The book demonstrates the effort it took and the care that went into preparing liturgies, as well as the hope that drove it. It would be useful to know if language in the confraternity documents describes motivations.
This is a remarkable study that demonstrates how communities confronted with the plague in the fourteenth century produced and disseminated music. The coherence of that argument belies the difficulty of the research. Although confraternity studies have an established place that rests on surviving archives, books with music that are undeniably associated with confraternities are hard to find. Those with notated music are especially rare, so it is not surprising that the chant studied here is exclusively for major feasts, patron saints, or the dead and for the use of prominent and wealthy confraternities. To evaluate this chant in context means locating a variety of chant books and, ideally, archives, but the archives from Tournai were destroyed in the Second World War. It was a diocesan see; they were probably as copious as those of Cambrai Cathedral. Long has also searched the considerable sources for the early history of printing in Paris. Future studies of music in confraternities from locations with archives, as Long indicates, should seek to establish if they had budgets independent of the church, or if the church managed their foundations and transferred funds to pay celebrants and singers for their masses, and who hired such clergy and musicians. Given the lost documentation, Long does not discuss who sang or copied the music, although she analyses the scribal hands.
This book was carefully produced, with one typing error appearing twice on p. 178 (the papal schism was from 1378 to 1417, not 1477), and a confusing use of the word ‘fabric’ without an explanation (pp. 21–4, 66). Here, Long is referring to manuscripts with inventories of objects in the church drawn up by the church Fabric, the main ‘bank’ of the church that paid for and kept track of all material objects ranging from any construction or repair of the church edifice to candles for worship. The many subheadings within the chapters provide very helpful navigation.
