When Josef Andreas Jungmann first published his Missarum Sollemnia: Eine genetische Erklärung der römischen Messe, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1948), he did not perhaps foresee that the book would become something like a manifesto in the hands of the liturgical reformers at the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), which he himself was to serve as an expert member and co-author of its constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium (1964). Not everyone was happy, however, with this historical demonstration of the changing interpretations of the liturgy: was it not a challenge to its authority? Not coincidentally, perhaps, the first English edition of Jungmann's study was titled, more cautiously, The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development (New York, 1951–5) – omitting the controversial concept of a ‘genetic explanation’.

Another great liturgical historian, Louis Bouyer, drew the following conclusions from Jungmann's book:

The famous media historian Marshall McLuhan commented on this page in Bouyer's book:

Bouyer himself observed later:

That Jungmann's uncovering of historical misinterpretations of the Mass liturgy could be used as a potential challenge to its authority and a call for its reform in the modern era is one side of the matter. The other side is related to the question how unified an image we can actually paint of the cultural – including the musical – appearances of the medieval Mass ritual. Was music, too, employed for mimetic reproduction, and was the creation of polyphonic Mass cycles an expression of sentimental misunderstandings and cinematic overemphases?

Andrew Kirkman does not mention either Bouyer or McLuhan, although his factual findings are compatible with theirs, at least as far as he draws them from Jungmann. In a sub-chapter towards the end of his book, ‘The embrace of the Passion’, Kirkman explains how the allegorical understanding of the Mass as a representation of the life of Christ, and especially his Passion, increasingly influenced its practice, accentuating ritual action and the visible. ‘For ordinary worshippers, the incomprehensibility of Latin already threw exegetical weight strongly onto the visible’ (p. 201). Importantly, Kirkman extends these observations to the audible: to an aetiology of the cyclic polyphonic Mass:

He also stresses that ‘Unity … is indeed the very lifeblood of the cyclic Mass in its expression of the eschatological needs of those who paid for its production and enactment in sound’ (p. 208).

Such an exegesis of the medieval Mass liturgy may be related to a post-conciliar empathy with what Bouyer and others had condemned as ‘disastrous’ misunderstandings of the liturgy in medieval society. A competent discussion of the musical aspirations of the New Liturgical Movement would have to involve theologians and church historians. But even to the music historian it is plain that the main proposal of Kirkman's book – the unity of the polyphonic Mass cycle is a doctrinal matter – stems from a view of the late-medieval Mass ritual itself as a unified, culturally appealing and theologically relevant form of celebration. This revisionist interpretation then informs a similarly assertive judgement of the polyphonic Mass as an aural phenomenon.

For example, while Kirkman's evaluation of the Mass ritual obviously contradicts Bouyer's doctrinal criticism, he also disagrees with McLuhan's diagnosis of ‘visual segmentation’ when he interprets the ‘spread of the imagery of the redeemer’ in the Mass service as encouraging consistency and indeed, unity. Does his study bear out such a claim?

It is advisable to read The Cultural Life of the Early Polyphonic Mass beginning with its last pages, as this may help prevent a misunderstanding of its first chapter, entitled ‘Enlightenment and beyond’. The author starts, in fact, by questioning Manfred Bukofzer's well-circulated description of the cyclic Mass as a sign of artistic autonomy and an early manifestation of Renaissance aesthetics. Readers may now expect a critique of the concept of the organically unified masterwork in music, but having read the end of the book they will know that Andrew Kirkman's alternative is not a functional aesthetics or reception history of the polyphonic Mass. He certainly does not compare diverse modern views of the genre as a whole, nor does he – as the book's title seems to imply – discuss the practical revival of early Mass cycles. He only criticises a particular historiographical narrative that describes those artistic conceptions as emancipatory, as a liberation of the musical art from the bonds of the liturgical tradition. As the sources of this narrative he identifies the music historians Franz Brendel, August Wilhelm Ambros and Peter Wagner. Behind them stands the historical philosophy of Hegel and of the Enlightenment tradition, where progress in art is part of a self-realisation of the spirit, which emancipates itself from the bonds of natural and sensuous representations. For this interpretation of Hegel, the book relies on Ernst H. Gombrich, who reconstructs the Hegelianism of Jacob Burckhardt.Footnote ⁴ Kirkman's own contribution is to recognise corresponding ideas in the music historiographies of Brendel and Ambros – although the links are tenuous, since Hegel and Burckhardt do not mention music in this context, and Brendel does not mention the cyclic Mass.

A sub-chapter, ‘Ambros and the nineteenth-century invention of the cyclic Mass’, refers back to an essay which Kirkman had published in 2001.Footnote ⁵ Its contents are fully absorbed in the first two chapters of the book. The provocative-sounding title ‘Invention of the cyclic Mass’ targets the secularism of nineteenth-century historians, for whom the cyclic Mass was an aesthetic rather than a ritual entity.

The second chapter, ‘Contemporary witnesses’, attempts to demonstrate a divergence between nineteenth- and fifteenth-century views of the cyclic Mass. The author concludes from contemporary scribal references to polyphonic Mass compositions that the term ‘Missa’ denoting a single musical work is not established before the mid-fifteenth century: specific examples of this terminology are dated 1447, 1455, 1457 and 1462.Footnote ⁶ Before that time, some scribes seem to equate individual Mass sections with ‘motetti’ (probably for the simple reason that they were polyphonic). Kirkman also considers the late testimonies of Johannes Tinctoris, Paolo Cortese and Johannes Ott for views of the Mass cycle. It turns out, unsurprisingly for specialists, that Tinctoris and Ott (the latter in 1539) identify varietas, not unitas, as the foremost quality of a Mass Ordinary cycle. Although Kirkman does not conclude from this evidence that there was no unity, he denies an ‘internally driven’ stylistic motivation for unity, preferring to seek the ‘loftiness’ of such musical creations in ‘concerns that were personal, cultural and, ultimately, eschatological’ (pp. 35–6).

I admit to being slightly confused. References to polyphonic cycles as single ‘Missae’ should not have occurred in the fifteenth century at all, if it was to be demonstrated that the polyphonic Mass cycle was a ‘nineteenth-century invention’. If the terminology was established by c. 1450, this was early enough to allow for Bukofzer's view of it as a contemporary aesthetic conception. Kirkman admits that his references are a small selection:

But the evidence given here positively suggests a change in mid-century. In any case, the argument against the ‘Missa’ as a single work only functions ex silentio fontium, since the identified references to it are treated, without proof, as if they had been a small minority at their own time. It would rather seem fair to state that the copying and naming of polyphonic Mass cycles as self-contained artefacts was common in the second half of the century, and so were the commissioning and consuming, the buying and selling, the sending and receiving, the imitating and emulating of such works. These practices were part of the ‘cultural life’ of the art form. As regards the emphasis on variety in Tinctoris and Ott, these authors presuppose the establishment of the compositional unity of the polyphonic Mass cycle. If at their times they had still recommended that ‘Masses should be unified’, they would have made fools of themselves. A proposal to use variety in art – especially from humanists – almost always rides on the back of an accepted unity, and vice versa. And Tinctoris and Ott point out ‘internally driven’ (i.e., aesthetic) motivations for the variety achieved in such compositions.

Speaking of early ‘composite’ Masses, Kirkman bypasses the obvious question why scribes coordinated even compositionally distinct sections in order to have cycles available. His derogatory tone when calling the Tournai Mass a ‘cycle’, in quotes (p. 33), negates his own argument: in such cases we do have cycles whose unity was indeed ‘personal, cultural, and, ultimately, eschatological’. The Tournai Mass could have served as a splendid example of a confraternity Mass, unified performatively, with strong cultural implications.Footnote ⁷ There is much further evidence of ritual and practical functions for early Mass cycles that might have enriched Kirkman's argument, for example the cycles by Arnold de Lantins and the one in the Turin manuscript.Footnote ⁸

The phrase ‘the nineteenth-century invention of the cyclic Mass’ does an injustice to Guillaume de Machaut and the unitary musical and devotional character of his Messe de Nostre-Dame.Footnote ⁹ Kirkman never addresses the question which Machaut's work poses, although it seems fundamental to his own argument: to what extent is it a ‘personal, cultural, and, ultimately, eschatological’ statement, and to what extent an ‘internally driven’, stylistically motivated composition? If we were to engage in such critical questions, we would probably find it inescapable to accept the ‘internally driven’ strain as a major part of the cultural life of the polyphonic Mass. Admittedly, music historians (including Peter Wagner) have overemphasised this artistic component to the virtual exclusion of the religious one, and admittedly this has something to do with the influence of Hegelian Protestantism.

In chapter 3 the author collects evidence for devotional purposes of Mass performances, mentioning their significance for endowments and exploring various allegorical connections with extraneous poetry and music. This large topic is well illustrated with compositions whose often secular borrowings seem to suggest devotional purposes. Kirkman expands on contributions by Christopher Reynolds, Michael Long, Jennifer Bloxam and others on the eucharistic, penitential or funeral allusions in Josquin's Masses Di dadi, Faisant regretz and Pange lingua, also adding new cases (the anonymous Masses Le serviteur and Adieu m'amour/O2).Footnote ¹⁰ He draws textual cues from secular songs and endows small musical motifs with allegorical significance. In reporting on the anonymous Missa La mort de Saint Gothard on the basis of Murray Steib's edition, he misses a splendid example. Wolfgang Nitschke's careful description of the cantus firmus treatment, only partially quoted by Steib, goes on persuasively to explain the work's intention and title: the cantus firmus is a recitation tone for the canticle ‘Benedictus es dominus Israel’, with its antiphon ‘Ascendo ad Patrem meum’: chants which were performed, according to the vita of St Godehard of Hildesheim (d. 1038), at the Saint's deathbed. Thus the Mass would not be a mere reference to, but an enactment or historia of, St Godehard's death.Footnote ¹¹

In Du Fay's Missa Ave regina celorum, the composer himself recalls the personal invocation ‘miserere tui labentis Du Fay’ in the parent motet (Kirkman aptly calls this a ‘dialogue between model and Mass’). The passage shares a standard humility motif (mi–fa in different hexachords) with Du Fay's Missa S. Antonii and with his earliest Mass cycle, whose title Kirkman obviously misremembers: it is not La belle se siet but Resveillés vous.Footnote ¹² The act of inscribing oneself into a composition – whether as author, lover or supplicant – was quite important in motet and secular song. Personalisation in Mass cycles, however, was seldom so explicit. Even Du Fay's Missa Ave regina celorum does not quote his name as does the motet, it only repeats the sounds of his prayer. The case of Ave regina celorum could have been discussed earlier in this chapter, under the subheading ‘The polyphonic endowments of Guillaume Du Fay’, because the Mass is in fact one of them.Footnote ¹³ In its personal function it also parallels Machaut's Messe de Nostre-Dame. Kirkman's argument that the general forms and uses of the Mass liturgy acquire individual religious meanings through a process of ‘personalization’ and ‘particularization’ in the polyphony (see pp. 209–10, for example) would have deserved more illustration with similar endowments.

Polyphonic Mass cycles can of course not easily be pinned down to ‘prayer intentions’. The chapters ‘Christological imagery and the Caput Masses’ (ch. 4) and ‘The sacred meaning of L’homme armé' (ch. 5) add new interpretations to an already exuberant scholarly discourse. That the literature is so extended and yet so inconclusive may be because allegories are statements that are not usually falsifiable – we cannot eliminate but only accumulate them. Kirkman's proposals are strong. His evidence for the Caput cantus firmus to be an allegory of the head of Christ rests mainly on cultural discourses, for example the established comparison of the Church, or other communities, with the human body. By contrast, Anne Walters Robertson's contention that the rubric ‘Caput drachonis’ in the Lucca Choirbook (I-La 238) reveals the true signification of the cantus firmus may be one of the rare allegories we can eliminate. Given the amount of evidence assembled by Robertson for the popularity of the ‘Dragon's head’ as a symbol for sin, which must be defeated, we can well understand why the scribe erroneously labelled the cantus firmus ‘Caput drachonis’ instead of just ‘Caput’. Kirkman's much more convincing interpretation still comes at the price of admitting that cycles could be more or less ‘emancipated’ from the narrow liturgical context of their cantus firmi, in this case from the Mandatum ceremony (Bukofzer himself had indicated this option, see p. 79). If the only intention of cantus-firmus selection was to pronounce a universal symbol, then the plainchant repertory offered many choices indeed. The ‘Caput’ melisma has an astounding musical theatricality (which the analogously employed melisma ‘Spiritus almus’ has not): it would be strange to think that a composer had selected the ‘Caput’ melody only because it referred to Christ. The view that musical criteria for such choices must have been applied at least within a framework of institutional and liturgical propriety had been expressed by Roger Bowers in an essay of 1981, not considered here.Footnote ¹⁴

L'homme armé is explained by Kirkman as the cantus firmus of Masses pertaining to the Church Militant (‘war Masses’). Theological allegories, for example in Durandus's Rationale divinorum officiorum, interpret the vestments of the priest as those of a warrior. Kirkman's well-researched explanation also has the advantage of being compatible with other recent proposals (for example by Flynn Warmington and Michael Long), on condition that we regard the meaning of the ‘Armed Man’ as somewhat fluctuating in different circumstances. This fluctuation concurs, however, with the variety of settings and occasions for which the cantus firmus has been used: the Masses would be general votive services for knights, specific Missae contra Turcum, or celebrations of secular powers. The accompanying texts and music of the six ‘Neapolitan’ Masses from the court of Charles the Bold (analysed on pp. 123–34) bear out McLuhan's formula of ‘cinematic reconstruction by visual segmentation’.Footnote ¹⁵ It should also be remembered that the monophonic song L'homme armé is very special even without its secondary sacred meanings: it is not simply ‘about war’, but about a particular battle cry. Its background is the mimetic secular songs of the late Ars Nova (with street cries, birdsong and trumpet signals), and in analogy to several other specimens it incorporates the cry in its own melody. Not only do the L'homme armé Mass settings refer to the ‘sounds of battle’ (p. 108), the underlying song already resounds of them.

Chapter 6 is an admirable exploration of ‘outside texts and music in the Mass’, initially addressing the difficult assumption made by others that a melody ‘calls to mind the words to which it had first been set’ (p. 135), even if it is used melismatically or with the Mass text. A heavy burden of significations for the listener in a culture of contrafactum and parody! Kirkman goes on to identify outside texts that were actually heard, scrutinising manuscript evidence for texted cantus firmus parts, and opens a large panorama of evidence that secular songs, including frivolous ones, were heard at Mass. Much of that evidence comes from theological condemnations of such ‘abuses’. The vexed question of the uses of motets – sacred and secular – in the Mass service is faced head on, and the confluence of the sacred, the secular and the outright ‘carnivalesque’ in the Mass is judged to be meaningful (pp. 161–2). The rejections of secular music performances in the Mass (at the Council of Basel, for example) would have led to the hiding away of such songs in the cantus firmi (pp. 163–4) – an intriguing new genealogy of the cantus firmus Mass.

This is not the only chapter that contains emphatic references to, but not exactly elaborations of, the issue of particularisation or personalisation of the Mass liturgy through personal endowments. Another reference to this is found at the end of chapter 7, entitled ‘The shape of the Mass’, which is a survey of the development of the liturgical form in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, including the role of the Franciscan Order and the development of the Kyriale. Questions arise about the separate hierarchical position of the ‘Mass Ordinary’, without which the polyphonic cycles would have been impossible, the liturgical status of public and private Masses, and the ‘votive expansion’ of the genre, particularly in Marian services (pp. 175–6). This short chapter in some ways balances the earlier examples of authorially chosen meanings of the cycles: here we recall the wider, interpersonal conventions governing when, where and for what purposes Mass services could actually be employed. Some of these arguments would have become more palpable, had the existence of the Mass Proper and its polyphony been acknowledged as well.

In my own research on fifteenth-century documents concerning Mass music, I have come across many references to space, sight, sound and movement. Kirkman's chapter 8 deals with these parameters and their ritual and theological status in a magisterial fashion. His central idea is the unification around or focus on the Holy Sacrament and thus around the elevation of the host, the canon, the Sanctus: ritual events which were importantly adorned with special music, not least in the ‘elevation motet’ around 1500 (see pp. 198–9):

Kirkman apparently hopes to overcome the danger of a contradiction between Jungmann's (and McLuhan's) interpretation and his own, more unitary, view by adopting the model of hierarchy – a centralised differentiation of values – which was first proposed for the Renaissance motet by Manuel Erviti (see pp. 27 and 30). It is tempting to follow Kirkman on this path, particularly on account of this last chapter, which is suitably headed ‘Counterpoints of images, counterpoints of sounds’. However, the potential of the polyphonic Mass cycle for separation, diversification and emancipation from the ritual hierarchy appears greatly underplayed at this point. Did these works – the L'homme armé Masses, for example – not set their own standards and put their own cultural tendencies in motion, such as imitation, emulation, expansion, reform? Would the unfolding of the ritual alone really have enabled the difference between, say, Du Fay's Missa Resveilliés vous and Josquin's Missa Di dadi? Gombrich wrote:

We could apply this explanation also to someone like Du Fay. Kirkman might respond, then: ‘But this is the Ambros-Wagner-Bukofzer autonomy theory of the polyphonic Mass again.’ Yes, but I believe that this narrative has not been successfully refuted here. Unless we want to classify Kirkman as a (right-wing) Hegelian himself, who would see all Mass music as a manifestation of a Catholic Zeitgeist, we should read his exhilarating interpretations as but one voice within that counterpoint of texts, sounds and images which formed the cultural life of the polyphonic Mass cycle.

Three substantial appendices of contemporary testimonies (pp. 215–52) are a potentially great asset of the book, although for many readers they will be little more than dead weight since only about half of the texts are translated. (There seems to be no obvious criterion why some are and others not.) This calls for emendation and completion in a second edition.