In 1397, Carmelites travelling from Prague came to Kraków at the invitation of Queen Jadwiga and her husband to establish a new convent, which has survived to this day. Its library includes twenty-six choirbooks dating from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, as well as dozens of printed books, all examined for the first time by James Boyce in this book, the last study he completed before his untimely passing in 2010. In an introduction, five chapters and an appendix, Fr Boyce draws upon his extensive knowledge of the history of Carmelite chant and liturgy (see the bibliography of his publications appended to this review) to explain how the service books of Kraków encapsulate the history of that convent, of the Carmelite order, and, most importantly to him, the spirituality of the Kraków community that was uniquely Carmelite. Indeed, the main purpose of Boyce's introduction is not only to prepare the reader with a préçis of what will follow, but also to emphasise that the Carmelite liturgy as a whole was shaped by and shaped the way in which Carmelites understood themselves. As he explains, everyone participated in the daily Divine Office and Mass, with lay brothers reciting the Lord's Prayer in the vernacular, while the community chanted the Office in Latin. Whatever else the Carmelites undertook, they joined each other to worship for at least four hours a day.

The first chapter opens with a meticulously researched description, the first in English, of what is known about the foundation of the Kraków Carmelites. Then, working from critical editions of early Carmelite rules, constitutions and documents, Boyce reviews the earliest history of the Carmelite order, emphasising the evidence for Carmelite liturgy at Mount Carmel and then the process whereby the order gained official recognition and mendicant status. By 1281, ten Carmelite provinces had been established. Although the Carmelites left Mount Carmel in 1291, the Holy Land continued to be listed first among their provinces to remind members of the origin of their order. Boyce repeatedly emphasises as indicative of Carmelite nostalgia for their past the primary place in the Carmelite liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre, the prophet Elijah, and the Virgin Mary, claimed as the patroness of their oratory in the Holy Land.

Boyce next reviews the thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century papal and Carmelite legislation concerning the order's mendicant status, privileges, administrative structure, and construction of an official Carmelite history, providing thorough documentation. The rubrica prima of 1281 is particularly important in this last respect, in that it embellished previous Carmelite claims to antiquity and strengthened the place of Elijah and Mary in Carmelite devotion. At this time, the Carmelites distinguished themselves from the more popular Dominicans and Franciscans by replacing their striped cloaks with white cloaks, and by the redaction of the so-called ‘Elijan legend’, which went so far as to interpret psalmody as a prophetic activity, by exploiting the meaning of ‘prophetare’ as an equivalent to singing (pp. 28–30). At the end of this section, Boyce identifies bulls of 1252 and 1253 as highly important, in that they accorded the Carmelites permission to construct cells, churches and cemeteries, and to have a bell to summon the faithful and to hear confessions, now that some brothers had university training in theology.

Having traced the history of the order thus far, Fr Boyce returns to the foundation of the Carmelite convent in Kraków, setting it in the context of urban mendicants, the Carmelite expansion from Bamberg northwards, Polish royal politics, and cosmopolitan Kraków, which was home to a significant German community. He claims that the new convent strengthened ties between the Polish crown, the See of Prague and the papacy, since it was dedicated to the Visitation, a devotion promulgated by the Pope in 1389 to end the schism which had even divided members of the mendicant orders into opposing factions. Boyce provides the text of the apostolic confirmation of the Kraków convent by Boniface IX in 1401, which makes reference to the praiseworthy celebration of the Divine Office at the convent. Whereas the Visitation was celebrated with a proper Office by Jan of Jenstein, the devotion to ‘Our Lady on the Sands’, a Marian apparition at the location of the convent, manifested itself in iconography but not with a place in the liturgical calendar.Footnote ¹ A scapular-wearing confraternity dedicated to the Virgin Mary was established at the Kraków convent in the seventeenth century, by which time ample evidence exists for music-making at its services.

By the later Middle Ages, the Carmelite priests of Kraków not only celebrated the liturgy, preached and heard confessions, but also trained students in the convent, either those in the novitiate or those pursuing higher studies in liberal arts or theology. In 1472, the Kraków convent was designated a studium generale of the order, at which Boethius's treatises on music and arithmetic were taught, along with grammar, logic, philosophy and pastoral theology. The convent's library now contains 368 incunabula (not inventoried here, but 250 of them are so far listed on the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, istc.bl.uk). They were available for communal use rather than privately owned, and mainly used for teaching. In addition to the liturgical sources that are the subject of this book, scores of some 545 works dating from 1665 to 1684 make up the musical holdings of the convent.Footnote ²

With this historical basis established, Fr Boyce can explore ‘the liturgy and self-understanding of the Kraków Carmelites’ in the second chapter, which is written for the non-specialist and non-Carmelite. Here, Boyce distinguishes the Carmelites from other mendicants, the Franciscans and Dominicans, reviews the structure of the Office and features of chant and of Offices for saints, explores early Carmelite borrowings from the rite of the Holy Sepulchre, and gives particular attention to the thirteenth-century general chapters of the order that preceded the promulgation of the ordinal of Sibert de Beka in 1312. Boyce rightly emphasises the ‘paramount importance’ of Sibert's ordinal, given that the order had no convent with authority over the other houses. After 1312, the ordinal was not modified, but was used along with a book of chapter constitutions – the Liber ordinis – comprising the decisions of later general chapters pertaining to worship. Boyce discusses and quotes from these decisions to show how the universal liturgy of the order was promoted and successfully enforced, to the extent that local saints were excluded from the Carmelite calendar. The end of the chapter prepares for the next with observations on the role of Carmelite choirbooks and how they differ from those of Franciscans and Dominicans. There follows a short history of Carmelite scholarship on Carmelite manuscripts and recommended sources for the study of liturgical manuscripts.

In the third chapter, the choirbooks are presented as a group before six of them are examined in detail. The three earliest codices, all antiphoners, are vitally important, because they were brought from Prague and include Bohemian material otherwise lost: no manuscripts survive from the founding convent in Prague, which was destroyed during the Hussite wars. Boyce compares the contents of the Kraków manuscripts with the medieval manuscripts from Pisa, Florence and Mainz, and the Tridentine manuscripts from the Roman convents of San Martino ai Monti and Santa Maria in Traspontina, from Caudete and Onda in Spain, and from other European convents. Only the Kraków convent has a collection including both medieval and post-Tridentine codices, providing a continuous liturgical record that allows Boyce to recognise the consequences of the Council of Trent for the Kraków community in the later manuscripts.

The Kraków manuscripts include complete rubrics, chant texts and music for all the incipits listed in Sibert's ordinal. Having established this fundamental correspondence, Boyce next analyses the temporal cycle. His comparison of the Carmelite series of chants for selected occasions with Franciscan, Holy Sepulchre and Kraków diocesan usage, as well as Dominican and Roman practices, shows that the Carmelite liturgy differed from all and did not correspond in any significant way to the medieval or post-Tridentine Roman uses. The Carmelites numbered their Sundays after Trinity rather than after Pentecost, celebrated the feast of the Commemoration of the Resurrection on the last Sunday of the year, and sang distinctive chant for the Dedication of a church. Boyce further establishes the uniqueness of the Carmelite commune sanctorum and then of the Carmelite calendar, which he compares with Franciscan, Dominican and Holy Sepulchre sources (pp. 128–47).

The distinctly Carmelite sanctorale is then examined more closely. Boyce presents all incipits of feasts or formularies unique to the Carmelites, and comments on the Carmelite reception, celebration and even theology of the feast in question. We learn that the Kraków Carmelites adopted the feasts of St Francis and St Dominic, but no others of those orders, despite the size and prestige of their houses within the walls of Kraków. They celebrated the feasts of the Bohemian saints Ludmila and Wenceslas, the latter even after the Council of Trent, but none for Kraków diocesan saints before the eighteenth century. Since the saints of their own order were most important in the Carmelite liturgy, Boyce treats each Carmelite saint separately. Only one feast received a Carmelite rhymed Office, that for Albert of Sicily, who was never canonised but whose cult received papal approval in 1457 and again in 1476 (p. 368). Its Office texts are attributed to the Carmelite Johannis de Poluciis, and its hymn texts to the Carmelite Baptist of Mantua, but the probably Carmelite composer is not known.

Many Carmelite feasts celebrated individuals and events in the Holy Land, reminding the Carmelites of their origins. The Carmelite Transfiguration liturgy was taken from Matthew, not Peter the Venerable. The Marian feasts take well-known chant and re-order it, although the Conception, which was approved by the order in 1328, and the late-medieval feasts (Our Lady of Snows, the Visitation, and the Presentation) use newly composed Offices. The feast of Mary Magdalene uses a unique liturgy closely related to one found in Laon. Boyce emphasises that the Carmelite manuscripts are of musical interest mainly because they transmit the chant for so many Offices, which include those for Nicolas, Thomas of Canterbury, Augustine, Catherine, Corpus Christi and Elizabeth of Hungary. The Kraków Office for St Anne came from Prague and includes an adaptation of Fulbert's ‘Stirps Jesse, stirps Aaron’, which is a rhymed poem set to the Chartrain chant that was necessarily adapted. The feast of the Three Marys is found only in one Kraków codex from 1468.

The main discussion of Carmelite music comes at this point. Boyce analyses a series of chants, mostly for the Office, that were unique or important in the Kraków Carmelite liturgy. One wishes that the chants had been laid out to follow their poetic structure and spaced to represent the neumes here. These chants lack any trace of the German chant dialect and rarely use the Gallican cadence that is so common in Offices used further west, but they follow modal conventions and show none of the eccentricity of some medieval chant. An unusual adaptation is the borrowing of ‘Felix locus, felix ecclesia’ from the Office of St Thomas of Canterbury for the Office of St Anne, because the former chant was not sung in Kraków, meaning that the borrowing must have occurred before the St Anne Office appeared in Kraków, probably in Prague. ‘Benedictus sit Dominus’, which Boyce claims is separate from the two main Offices for St Elizabeth of Hungary, in fact appears in the ‘Letare Germania’ Office found in the Zwiefalten Antiphoner, where it is an addition that was made to adapt the secular Office to the Benedictine cursus.

In short, the six medieval manuscripts from Kraków give evidence that the Carmelites of this city followed the tradition of the order established in 1312, and that their liturgy remained impervious to local and diocesan practices. The evidence of these antiphoners suggests that graduals and other mass books, had they survived, would lead to the same conclusion.

In the fourth chapter, on Carmelite liturgy after the Council of Trent, Boyce examines the arrival of reform in Kraków through the codices dating from the early modern period, a time of considerable change. The Carmelite order began to reform its liturgy in 1580, publishing a reformed breviary in 1585 and a new ceremonial in 1616, which replaced the ordinal of Sibert of Beka. In Kraków, however, the medieval books continued to be used until 1743, and reforms were implemented slowly. In this period, there was much composition of new Offices, which follow old Vitae, but lack rhyme. Dedicated Carmelite artists also expressed post-Tridentine Carmelite values in their illuminations. Boyce describes those in a gradual of 1644 in a substantial excursus, before continuing his review of the codices and printed liturgical books.

Before discussing selected feasts individually, Fr Boyce usefully compares the post-Tridentine liturgy of the Kraków codices with the Roman liturgy, demonstrating that the Carmelite practice remained distinctive. In the sanctorale, we find some medieval saints, even Wenceslas. The Council of Trent required the Carmelites to abandon some Latin Kingdom feasts, such as the Commemoration of the Resurrection and the feast of the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, also the feast of the Three Marys, but it allowed them to celebrate Carmelite saints who were important to their spiritual heritage, notably those from the rite of the Holy Sepulchre, and to keep the Marian feasts of their medieval liturgy, to which further Marian feasts were added. Also kept were the proper feasts for Elijah, Elisha, Albert and Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which had been added during the course of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Since new post-Tridentine music replaced the old, and no Renaissance choirbooks survive from Kraków, the medieval chant for these feasts does not survive. Fr Boyce presumes that the earliest chants for Our Lady of Mount Carmel probably were not rhymed, in keeping with the style of the Carmelite Offices for the Virgin Mary. Seven Swedish saints' liturgies were added to the medieval Kraków MS 1, and four Polish saints absent from the medieval codices appear in several post-Tridentine Kraków manuscripts. The medieval feasts of Mary Magdalene, St Anne and the Transfiguration kept their significance to the order.

Twelve new Carmelite feasts are represented in the manuscripts. Boyce argues that the progressive addition of such specifically Carmelite saints to the liturgy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries further increased the independence of the order's liturgy. For example, the feast of St Angelus, the first Carmelite martyr, provided a Carmelite parallel for the Dominican feast of St Peter Martyr. Despite the paucity of evidence of the life of St Simon Stock, the Carmelites celebrated his feast with a complete proper Office.

In the last section of Chapter 4, Fr Boyce compares medieval and early modern chant settings of a selection of antiphon texts. Rhythmic notation and melismas moved to accented syllables are notable and expected, but Boyce presents some examples in which care was taken to keep as much of the medieval melody intact as possible. The chants for the newer feasts observe modal conventions, but lack the longer melismas of some of the earlier chant.

Finally, in Chapter 5, Fr Boyce reconsiders the purpose and significance of the Kraków choirbooks. Of particular interest are codices 1 and 2 at the Kraków convent, and Wrocław, Biblioteka Narodowa ‘Ossolineum’ MS 12025/IV, originally brought from Prague for the foundation of the Kraków convent, because they provide rare witness to the Bohemian liturgy in the years of the rise of Hussitism. Boyce makes the interesting suggestion that the later, larger codices, with their abundant historiated initials, may have been intended as devotional objects, as well as service books. They were large enough to be read by onlookers, and they could have catechised the faithful as they passed by the book in the church. For example, MS 1 depicts a Carmelite in the distinctive white habit adopted in 1287, and other illuminations included well-known Carmelite symbols. The codices were certainly used: Boyce notes that MSS 1–5 appear to have been used for 500 years, and the large choirbooks also show signs of use.

The Appendix provides manuscript number, book type, date, leaf measurement and a table of contents for each of the choirbooks, devotional books and selected printed books in the Kraków Carmelite collection. (Full indexes of six manuscripts from Kraków and Wrocław listed below can be consulted at the CANTUS website.) Noteworthy are MS 6, a gradual of 1644 containing more than twenty votive masses, several manuscripts with some polyphonic settings or mensural chant (MSS 8, 9, 14, 18, 20, 22–4, 36, and Book B1), three with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Tractati de accentis (MSS 26–8), and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century copies of what appears to be the same sixty-nine-page compilation of treatises (MSS 30, 32) with the titles De cantu chorali et ejus origine, De clavibus et eorum transpositione, De vocibus et earum mutatione, De notarum figuris, De pausis mensuris et tactu, and De modis seu intervallis in cantu. The treatises in these manuscripts are followed by rules and formulas to assist singers, undated but probably contemporary rudiments of music, and liturgies of the dead. After the bibliography and index, a reference chart on the services of the Divine Office with a table of abbreviations is provided.

Fr Boyce's fine study provides a fundamental assessment of Carmelite liturgy through the example of the Kraków convent, an example of the early reach of the Carmelite order into northern central Europe. Extensive manuscript collections from a single convent are rare in any case; in this study, the manuscripts are shown to be a useful link between past and present. Carmelite theology, spirituality, liturgy and history are presented and explained in meticulous detail. Boyce's extensive comparisons of liturgy and music effectively present the uniqueness of the Carmelite liturgy and the place of the Kraków Carmelite use within that. He identifies chant that is uniquely Carmelite, as well as compositions of interest. One could learn more about the transmission of chant in the momentous thirteenth century by examining the melodies of the many Offices that were adopted by the Kraków Carmelites more closely, particularly those that appear elsewhere in Central Europe, such as St Thomas of Canterbury or St Nicolas. One also wishes that the modern history of the convent and of its library had been briefly summarised. The absence of discussion of the notation of the codices can be explained by the Carmelite adoption of square notation in the thirteenth century, which was retained throughout the history of the convent.

This book is the result of a remarkable collaboration between the Kraków Carmelites and Fr Boyce, who had the learning to recognise the interest and rare musical value of their codices and the patience to study the manuscripts with meticulous care. The collaboration is an admirable example of the community spirit that has bound Carmelites to one another for centuries, and that Fr Boyce has presented so expressively here.