BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Date iCal//NONSGML kigkonsult.se iCalcreator 2.20.2// METHOD:PUBLISH BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Toronto BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20251102T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 RDATE:20261101T020000 TZNAME:EST END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20260308T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT UID:calendar.2764.events_uoft_date.0@www.medieval.utoronto.ca CREATED:20260306T154027Z DESCRIPTION:\nWhen and Where: \nFriday, April 10, 2026 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm \n 3rd Floor \n Lillian Massey Building \n 125 Queen's Park, Toronto, O N, M5S 2C7 \n\nSpeakers \nSusan Rankin \n\nDescription: \nThe Journal of Medieval Latin, with CMS, welcomes Susan Rankin, Emeritus Professor of Medieval Music at the University of Cambridge to present a lecture entitle d 'Historiae' for St Katherine: Competitive Liturgical Composition in 11th -Century Normandy? at this year's A\nual O'Donnell Lecture, hosted by Gre ti Dinkova-Bruun.A short reception will follow the lecture.REGISTRATION RE QUIRED AbstractThe cult of St Katherine had deep roots in Byzantium, but in the west it was only in the ninth and tenth centuries that it spread to southern Italy and from there to northern Europe, reaching Normandy in t he first half of the eleventh century.  In the words of Tina Chronopoulos\ , “she arrived with a bang that was to reverberate across Europe in the fo llowing centuries, making her one of the most popular saints of the Middl e Ages”.  Among new texts of her passion, in Latin rather than Greek, th e most prominent are one composed by Peter of Naples in the tenth century (BHL 1659), and another of unknown origin but circulating in northern Fra nce by the third quarter of the eleventh century (BHL 1659).  This literar y activity in northern France may have been the direct result of the arriv al of a relic of Katherine at Rouen in the second quarter of the eleventh century.  Another feature of this developing cult, besides the Passion te xts, was the composition of liturgical material for celebrating the saint : a full historia — a set of chants for the divine office — was probably c omposed at Rouen in the mid eleventh century, and a second, different, historia first appears in a late eleventh-century English manuscript.     There is a real possibility that this “English” office was also composed i n Rouen, or by someone who was extremely familiar with the cult of St Kat herine, as promoted in Rouen.  It has a different set of chants from the “Norman” office and a contrasted approach to shaping the overall structure .  In the English office the responsories and antiphons of the Night offic e are textually distinguished by their expression in hexameters (responsor ies) or prose (antiphons), a technique which serves to emphasize the disc rete narrative of each cycle.  The structure of the Norman office is not q uite so stream-lined, yet it does appear that the Night office responsori es and antiphons were also mainly distinguished in the same way: here it i s the antiphons of the Night office which are in hexameters, while the re sponsories are in accentual verse, hexameters  and prose.  Moreover, des pite their dissimilarities, these two offices share the full texts and me lodies for three chants, all demonstrably Proper to the feast of St Kathe rine.  The unavoidable implication of this sharing is that the composer of one office already knew the other, or that both composers had experience of a liturgical use in which those chants were already sung.  BiographySu san Rankin is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Music at the University of Ca mbridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. Her research interests lie in tw o directions: on the one hand, the manuscript transmission and forms of w riting of music in the early Middle Ages, and, on the other hand, ritua l expressed in music throughout the Middle Ages. Her most recent publicati on is a monograph on the music scripts and notations invented by the Carol ingians (Writing Sound in Carolingian Europe, CUP 2018), and she has rec ently finished a second ‘Carolingian’ book (Sounding the Word of God: Caro lingian Books for Singers) based on the Conway lectures delivered at the U niversity of Notre Dame, Indiana in 2017. She was a Fellow of the Radclif fe Institute at Harvard University during 2019-202, working with Margot F assler towards a book in which dramatic modes of action in and alongside t he medieval liturgy – from dramatic liturgy of the ninth century to sequen ces composed in the fifteenth – will be examined. She was awarded the Dent Medal in 1995 and is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academia Europ aea, Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and Correspo nding Member of the American Musicological Society. A\nual O'Donnell Lectu reThe O’Donnell Memorial Lecture Series was established in 1992 to honour the memory of Rev. Prof. J.R. O’Donnell, a Basilian priest educated at th e University of Toronto and the École des Chartes, who passed away in 198 8. From the 1930s to his retirement in 1971, he taught Medieval Latin, p alaeography, and the edition of texts at the Pontifical Institute of Medi aeval Studies, and in the Classics Department at U of T, with rigorous t eaching standards that were carried over into his scholarship. His book Ni ne Mediaeval Thinkers, and his articles on Calcidius, Alcuin, Bernard S ilvestris, and Coluccio Salutati, are cited as authoritative contributio ns to this day. This lecture series is intended to commemorate O’Donnell’s wide interests that embraced philology, the classical tradition, and me dieval philosophy and theolog, and to give prominence to the general fiel d of Medieval Latin Studies. \n\nContact Information: \n Centre for Mediev al Studies medieval.communications@utoronto.ca \n\nSponsors \nJournal of M edieval Latin, CMS \n125 Queen's Park, Toronto, ON, M5S 2C7 \n\nCatego ries \n Lectures \n\nAudiences \n Alumni and FriendsCommunityFacultyFirst- Year StudentsGraduate StudentsGraduating StudentsProspective Graduate Stud ents DTSTART;TZID=America/Toronto:20260410T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/Toronto:20260410T180000 LAST-MODIFIED:20260309T141855Z LOCATION:125 Queen's Park, Toronto, ON, M5S 2C7 SUMMARY:Susan Rankin, 'Historiae' for St Katherine: Competitive Liturgical Composition in 11th-Century Normandy? URL;TYPE=URI:https://www.medieval.utoronto.ca/events/susan-rankin-historiae -st-katherine-competitive-liturgical-composition-11th-century-normandy END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR