Susan Rankin, 'Historiae' for St Katherine: Competitive Liturgical Composition in 11th-Century Normandy?

The Journal of Medieval Latin, with CMS, welcomes Susan Rankin, Emeritus Professor of Medieval Music at the University of Cambridge to present a lecture entitled 'Historiae' for St Katherine: Competitive Liturgical Composition in 11th-Century Normandy? at this year's Annual O'Donnell Lecture, hosted by Greti Dinkova-Bruun.

A short reception will follow the lecture.

REGISTRATION REQUIRED

Abstract

The 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 the 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 following centuries, making her one of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages”.  Among new texts of her passion, in Latin rather than Greek, the most prominent are one composed by Peter of Naples in the tenth century (BHL 1659), and another of unknown origin but circulating in northern France by the third quarter of the eleventh century (BHL 1659).  This literary activity in northern France may have been the direct result of the arrival of a relic of Katherine at Rouen in the second quarter of the eleventh century.  Another feature of this developing cult, besides the Passion texts, was the composition of liturgical material for celebrating the saint: a full historia — a set of chants for the divine office — was probably composed 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 in Rouen, or by someone who was extremely familiar with the cult of St Katherine, 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 office are textually distinguished by their expression in hexameters (responsories) or prose (antiphons), a technique which serves to emphasize the discrete narrative of each cycle.  The structure of the Norman office is not quite so stream-lined, yet it does appear that the Night office responsories and antiphons were also mainly distinguished in the same way: here it is the antiphons of the Night office which are in hexameters, while the responsories are in accentual verse, hexameters  and prose.  Moreover, despite their dissimilarities, these two offices share the full texts and melodies for three chants, all demonstrably Proper to the feast of St Katherine.  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. 

Biography

Susan Rankin is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Music at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. Her research interests lie in two directions: on the one hand, the manuscript transmission and forms of writing of music in the early Middle Ages, and, on the other hand, ritual expressed in music throughout the Middle Ages. Her most recent publication is a monograph on the music scripts and notations invented by the Carolingians (Writing Sound in Carolingian Europe, CUP 2018), and she has recently finished a second ‘Carolingian’ book (Sounding the Word of God: Carolingian Books for Singers) based on the Conway lectures delivered at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana in 2017. She was a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University during 2019-202, working with Margot Fassler towards a book in which dramatic modes of action in and alongside the medieval liturgy – from dramatic liturgy of the ninth century to sequences 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 Europaea, Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and Corresponding Member of the American Musicological Society.

Annual O'Donnell Lecture

The 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 the University of Toronto and the École des Chartes, who passed away in 1988. From the 1930s to his retirement in 1971, he taught Medieval Latin, palaeography, and the edition of texts at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and in the Classics Department at U of T, with rigorous teaching standards that were carried over into his scholarship. His book Nine Mediaeval Thinkers, and his articles on Calcidius, Alcuin, Bernard Silvestris, and Coluccio Salutati, are cited as authoritative contributions to this day. This lecture series is intended to commemorate O’Donnell’s wide interests that embraced philology, the classical tradition, and medieval philosophy and theolog, and to give prominence to the general field of Medieval Latin Studies.