Christopher Page's vast and lavishly illustrated compendium The Christian West and its Singers: The First Thousand Years (Yale, 2010) was delivered in an early form in 2004–05 as the Royal Holloway-British Library Lectures in Musicology, and has appeared in print six years later. This 700-page book is the kind of study a scholar once took a lifetime to write. Page's extraordinary achievement is possible not only because of the author's erudition and industry, but also because he has had helpers, ones only available very recently: the search engines designed for the increasing numbers of primary sources that have been digitised as well as the tools that function as guides to an enormous secondary literature.

Digitised series that have been referenced extensively in Page's research include the Patrologia Latina, the Patrologia Graeca, the Corpus Christianorum (both the Series Latina and the Continuatio Medievalis), the Acta Sanctorum, and, most importantly for this particular book (which depends greatly on chronicles for its later chapters), the MGH, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (select texts are presently digitised). Brepols instituted in 2009 the Cross Database Search Tool (CDS), which enables the user to search simultaneously the Library of Latin Texts (LLT, Series A and B), the electronic Monumenta Germaniae Historica (eMGH), the Archive of Celtic-Latin Literature (ACLL), and the Aristoteles Latinus Database (ALD). Whereas we can assume Christopher Page had to search the Brepols databases one by one way back in 2008, we can review many of his citations using the CDS. If we type in cantor, we get 390 hits; if we type in musicus, we get 456 hits; if we then turn to the digitised Acta Sanctorum, and type in the same two words, we get 215 hits for cantor and thirty-seven for musicus, a great number of passages to study, some well known, others not at all. Other useful and relevant sources now completely digitised and searchable include the Antiphonale Missarum Sextuplex, found as a downloadable file on David Hiley's Cantus Planus Regensburg, a site that includes many other standard resources, and the fifty-five-volume Analecta Hymnica, now online and fully searchable (to libraries with subscriptions). In addition to these resources, Page surely availed himself of the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML), an evolving database that will eventually contain the entire corpus of Latin music theory written during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Many volumes of the Loeb Classics Library are now online through Google and so fully searchable. The Electronic Archive of Greek and Latin Epigraphy is an ever-growing resource for searching inscriptions. In fact, if we look at the printed primary sources in The Christian West and its Singers, well over half are fully searchable online, including reference works and journals, as well as the several series and other works cited above. Page also makes use of many newly edited works not yet digitised, including Brepols's Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum, a resource of great importance because of the high quality of the editions of these difficult texts.

So many new tools and editions have come into existence in the last decade or so that scholars and scholarship have changed accordingly (and so has the writing of reviews). It was perhaps inevitable that someone would assemble a list of words relating to music and to singers in the earlier Middle Ages and take the time to search them and to consult the many new editions of major texts, and see what might happen. Page is the first person to attempt such work, and we owe him an immense debt, not only for being a pioneer, but also for providing the fruits of his research in such detail. His work has not been perfunctory. Rather he has created a narrative incorporating the results of extensive electronic searching, of probing into the texts, of reading relevant secondary literature, and of examining many sources that music historians too often ignore. And most usefully, he takes us to the best editions and scholarship currently available today.

Page begins by questioning the multiple meanings of what must have been a key word for his searches in its various Latin and Greek forms, singer, and his answers establish the groundwork for the book as a whole (pp. 4–7). Page is apologetic: his singers will not be the layfolk, who clearly sang, or the many women, whose roles in music, though undeniable, are frequently more difficult to discern. This will rather be a history of singing monks and clerics, for that is where most readily available evidence lies, at least for this first grand pass through the vast quantities of newly mineable resources. With that much established, the work becomes somewhat circumscribed, and this is useful for such an enormous topic. As the book contains vast amounts of information, I will probe into three time periods, each of which has been seen as a kind of watershed in the history of singers and singing in the Latin West: 1) the fifth and sixth centuries; 2) the late eighth century; and 3) the late tenth century, leading up to the year 1000 and the decades just after it. In each set of circumstances, Page provokes as his analysis points the way to future studies. My brief forays into three time periods are meant only to encourage more work that will take place on the foundation laid by Page.

Any study of singers and singing in the late patristic period must take Augustine into consideration (d. 430), as well as the contexts of the evidence he supplies for the subject at hand, and for the aftermath of his times in the fifth and sixth centuries. Augustine provides more information about music and singers than any other figure from his era. He is a liturgical preacher who mentions singing frequently in his many surviving sermons; he wrote a treatise on music as well as extensive commentaries on the psalms, and he was, by his own admission, deeply moved by music and by singing. Yet in the generations immediately after him, the sorts of evidence he supplies cease in general to be found in sermons of bishops, and the reason for this has been one of the mysteries of the history of music, musicians and singing in the medieval West. Singing belonged to the people in the early fifth century; by the time chant re-emerges in the eighth century, it belongs to the schola. Why? Page uses the immediate centuries after Augustine to point to this ‘gap’ in evidence about the singing of the psalms.

In his study of the fifth and sixth centuries, Page supports the current understanding of what happened in this crucial time period: lay participation is no longer mentioned in liturgical sermons because it declined. And it declined because slowly an elite core of singers gained control, silencing the voice of worshipping (and responding) Christian populations. To add to this traditional narrative, Page develops the theme of an increasing desire for linguistic purity, and contrasts the Augustine he conceives of as easy-going with a more stringent Cassiodorus (Chapter 9). Accordingly, this control by singers was desired by bishops in major sees who wished to standardise liturgical texts, and it would only intensify as the centuries wore on, ending up with the schola of well-trained singers in Rome, a group that would eventually serve as the model for liturgical singers throughout Europe. His work at filling in the framework of the standard understanding is useful, to be sure. But there is a counter-narrative that will require further work – one he does not mention, and one that challenges the arguments that he and others have made.

According to this other way of interpreting the evidence, there was a radical shift in psalm singing not because a musical elite captured the vox populi but rather because the educational system of the late antique world retreated into the monasteries. In a monastic context, psalms were no longer primarily liturgical texts to be read and responded to as in a cathedral where the laity was present. Instead, they became texts to be prayed within the community. To understand the ‘gap’ in evidence between the sermons of Augustine and the seventh century, scholars must look at rich (and comparatively unstudied) materials from monastic culture in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, culminating with the writings of Gregory the Great, who was both monk and bishop. A preliminary study by Peter Jeffery (cited in Page's fulsome bibliography) points to the way a singer in Augustine's time would have approached his work, and contrasts this with monastic singing.

Jeffery says: ‘“The reader goes up” to read from a high place. He carefully picks his way through the written letters, grouping them into syllables to be sure he pronounces them accurately. The congregation chimes in, enthusiastically and repeatedly.’ When Augustine, as bishop, has used his rhetorical genius to expound the entire production, the people ‘find themselves on the threshold of eternity’.Footnote ¹ This is a different kind of psalm singing from the monastic ideal of the time and later centuries, one that was rather inward-looking, and one in which every monk would see the psalm as a mirror of his own soul, and find within it a call to penance. And this is the kind of psalmody that took over in the generations after Augustine, when the Roman world and its modes of education were played out in the context of monastic life. Page studies the work of a small group of cathedral singers in the fifth and sixth centuries, but there is a whole other world that must be studied too to provide a fuller picture of the singer and song in the period, and of what happened during this period of development.

Page's study of the late eighth century, which relies on the best new editions, usually is very well informed, and serves to help sustain a framework of understanding long in the making. The evidence that we are given is presented sometimes with, and sometimes without, cognisance of the concomitant problems attending each piece of it. Crucial to understanding the history of the decades during the reigns of Pippin III (‘the short’, r. 752–68) and his son Charlemagne (742–814, r. 769–814) are several sets of documents, some of which have been edited more than once. The Codex Epistolaris Carolinus, for example, is a collection of letters from the popes to Charles Martel, Pippin, Carloman and Charlemagne, and to Charlemagne alone. According to the preface, these letters were collected and preserved at the request of Charlemagne himself in 791. However, the collection survives in a single copy which once belonged to archbishop Willibert of Cologne (d. 889). This copy, which may have been made as early as the mid-ninth century, is at least two generations away from the supposed time of compilation; there are no surviving copies of papal registers from the same period to help with content and authenticity. The degree to which the hands of Carolingian reformers have passed over, revised, selected out and shaped this historic collection is still a matter of some dispute, and Page provides us with a short appendix that discusses one of the letters and the probable authenticity of its contents.

To appreciate the many difficulties with this and other collections of evidence, one should read The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages,Footnote ² but then turn as well to reviews of this book. For an introduction to the slippery nature of much of the evidence, especially to the handling of forged documents, Johannes Fried's study of the Donation of Constantine is recommended.Footnote ³ There is much scholarly work to be done, and the lack of it is not Page's fault. But from time to time he could help his narrative by expressing the great extent to which it is a story invented about the eighth century from evidence compiled in the ninth.

His use of sources surrounding Metz and its musical establishment present similar problems, as it was the political situations of the late eighth and early ninth centuries that begat the history of mid-eighth-century Metz, its bishops and their music. Angilram of Metz (c.791), the successor to Bishop Chrodegang of Metz (d. 766), and chaplain to Charlemagne, commissioned a history of the bishops of Metz from Paul the Deacon (d. c.799). In this work, the Liber de episcopis Mettensibus, written in c.784, Page finds some of his prime evidence about the mid-eighth century and the early establishment of singing and singers. However, Walter Goffart (in a work cited by Page) cogently demonstrated the political nature of the Liber. Damien Kempf (in a work not cited by Page) has suggested that the Liber had a particular intention: to celebrate the bishopric of Metz within the ‘framework of its association with the Frankish king’.Footnote ⁴ What Angilram says (through Paul the Deacon) about Metz and Chrodegang in the mid-eighth century may well be related to his own hopes and circumstances some decades later. The story must be qualified.

If there are difficulties with the major bodies of evidence from the period, the same is true for works that are important but usually less used by music historians (at least until now). Sometimes Page seems aware of the problems and sometimes not, and in general he might have been better served by presenting the history he offers as a view of the past through a particular lens or set of lenses. The degree to which Page is dealing with history or with historiography needs to be owned perhaps more completely than it is. For example, he begins Chapter 14 with a view of Aidulfus of Auxerre and his case of paralysis, and uses his circumstances to take us to the time of Pippin in the mid-eighth century. This is enjoyable reading, but what we need to know is that the story of Aidulfus and his miracle are found in the Deeds of the Bishops of Auxerre, a work now thought to have been composed all at once, between 872 and 875, under the episcopate of Wala, a time when a copious miracle literature from the place was also compiled and created. An understanding of Aidulfus needs to be put in the context of these writings, which lie between history, historiography and hagiography. The same is true of the cantor Aldricus (d. 856), who eventually became bishop of Le Mans, and whose life and circumstances Page describes, but without telling the reader that the material comes from the pen of the Le Mans forger, who contrived his fanciful accounts and a series of forged charters in the late 860s and early 870s. The work that Page has done in presenting us with names, circumstances and documents remains invaluable, however, and of course, in a book of this scope he cannot be expected to contextualise every source.

The blurring between history and hagiography is prevalent in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, just as in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. Here too one wishes not for a major transformation in Page's excellent work, but rather for a slight shifting of authorial tone and perspective. We are working with cantors, singers who were also in charge of inventing history and of raising cults of local saints as they did so. As a result, each text can be analysed for the particular agendas of the people who did the writing, and repositioned within the politics of their times. Most interestingly many of the writers were often in charge not only of composing new music for the saints, but also in the development of suitable shrines to house their relics. As a result, certain figures were given musical credentials in the Capetian realm, who may or may not have earned them, beginning with King Robert himself (972–1031). Page mentions the king as the supposed composer of a sequence (actually a work by Notker the Stammerer). But the king came to be styled as a composer of other works as well, and as someone who knew how to notate music. The king's character evolved slowly from a biography by the cantor Helgaud of Fleury, through to a description by abbot Trithemius of Sponheim (1462–1516), which portrays him as a skilled musician.Footnote ⁵ The situation with Robert the Pious sends off a loud alarm about the evidence for music and musicians as found in hagiography and chronicles; many times these materials are created by cantors, and they privilege music and musicians, and use music to heighten the characters depicted in historical writings and in hagiography. Of course, medieval cantors wrote to give lustre to their own offices and to establish pieces they or others were composing, especially as emanating from their own monastic or episcopal spheres.

We can take the case of Sigo, cantor of Chartres cathedral, as an example, and look at the documents that surround his efforts; for him several of these are not available online, and they point to other kinds of materials that must be explored to reconstruct the history of the cantor around the year 1000, most particularly obituaries, necrologies and collections of charters. In every case, singer by singer, scholars will need to discern if these kinds of materials exist as well. Page's discussion of cantors as men who wrote music for the saints in this period is cogent: this was the time of the ‘great white mantle of churches’, a period of building, of raising local cults, and the composition of offices for the saints. The eleventh-century necrology of Chartres cathedral, Chartres, B.Mun. Na 4 (perhaps initially copied by the cantor Sigo from earlier records) continued with additions throughout the eleventh and into the early twelfth century. Sigo was a great advocate for the fame and sanctity of his teacher Fulbert, bishop of Chartres (d. 1028), and seems to have taken charge of the bishop's papers and of organising his letters. In addition to establishing the bishop's tomb and writing his epitaph, Sigo also commissioned a series of three paintings in his honour (one of which survives in the manuscript cited above). The ways in which musical composition became associated with Bishop Fulbert needs to be placed in the context of Sigo's activities, as cantor and as historian. The necrology shows that there were three men named Sigo at Chartres in the eleventh century, and Sigo the cantor, who died on 11 July, was surely dead by the time the cantor Arnulf took his place in 1040. The identity of Page's Sigo I and his role in musical composition – based on the History of the Abbey of St Florent – is difficult to determine, and one would have to study the history of this place and put this work in its context. Page's Sigo I is not Sigo the cantor of Chartres (Page's Sigo II), but the passage describing him may be based on a myth growing from that cantor's prowess, and attached to a figure named Sigo who came from Chartres via Marmoutier and was Abbot of St Florent (1055–70).Footnote ⁶ Many of the people on the list Page provides in an appendix to Chapter 19 raise similar problems to those surrounding Sigo I and Sigo II. In case after case, the references are found in documents that need further study. Page has provided an invaluable service by listing them all, and providing references, a feast for the future.

This book provides a copiously annotated study of Who Was Who among musicians of the early and central Middle Ages. Scholars will be relying upon it and exploring the information it offers for decades to come. Christopher Page has challenged the entire field to follow where he has led, and to undertake the painstaking work of exploring with care the citations he has unearthed, thereby drawing as closely as we can to the singers of the Christian West.