Embodying Women's Song in the Middle Ages
Chair(s): Rebecca Maloy (University of Notre Dame)
Medieval Europe knew no shortage of musical women, whether as creators, participants, authorities or patrons, whether living agents or figures of historical memory and imagination. Recent work by Margot Fassler, Lori Kruckenberg, C.J. Jones, Luisa Nardini, Anne Yardley, and others has helped to expose the musical dimensions of women’s religious life – also the focus of this session – in which songs and song-making shaped community and identity, and were the vehicles for both pious conformance and radical self-expression. All recognise, however, that further research is needed, not only in identifying new historical traces within an uncompromising archive, but also in pioneering new approaches to the material that survives. This session offers new insights in both respects. Inspired by various disciplinary turns towards the body, in musicology and beyond, it considers hitherto-overlooked intersections between women’s music, religiosity, and physical practices of movement, choreography, embodiment and representation.
The three papers are offered in cumulative dialogue, united by a common concern with Anglo-Norman geographies and with the intimately connected histories of English saints, religious houses and their memories between the tenth to fourteenth centuries. The first considers a rare notated witness to medieval women’s dance practices, as refracted through the eyes and ears of religious men; this mediation presents stark interpretative challenges, even as it offers genuine insights into the historical representation and reception of female musicality. The second takes us to Wilton, a community that certainly knew of religious dance, whose now-dismembered processional preserves the traces both of the nuns’ musical repertories and of the physical movements that accompanied them. The music was part of an embodied practice, but it also gave expression to an embodied history. Song, movement and memory come together again in the final paper, in which the figure of Mary Magdalene is shown to have animated the musical lives of the nuns at the prominent abbey of Barking, in Essex. By curating songs, movements and actions in the saint’s image, the nuns celebrated the Magdalene’s exemplarity through their own bodies and, thereby, authorized their apostolic and priestly roles within the community.
Presentations of the Symposium
In the Footsteps of St. Dunstan’s Virgins: Vestiges of Female Song and Dance in Metz MS 1168
Henry Parkes
University of Nottingham
Some two centuries before Hildegard, the medieval English abbot and archbishop Dunstan experienced a series of musical visions that he then taught to his fellow monks. So far as the historical record reveals, most involved some kind of liturgical chanting. But one was very different: a vision of celestial virgins in a Canterbury church, in the dead of night, singing and dancing in the round. According to the earliest account, from a contemporary known only as B, the virgins’ call-and-response repetitions reminded him of “mortal girls.” Whilst no humans besides Dunstan were involved, a strong case has been made for associating the anecdote with the secular carole (Page 2010), and the details resonate with many further stories of nocturnal ritual dancing from England and the continent (Bayless 2016).
What is missing from this history is a tangible musical record. In this paper I introduce a possible candidate: a Flemish hagiographical manuscript of the late twelfth century, now Metz MS 1168, which purports to preserve two of the tunes that Dunstan heard. One is the virgin’s song, whose musical identity – melodically angular and formally anomalous – raises pressing questions about its historical status. There are good historical reasons to connect it to tenth-century Canterbury, as I shall show, but also tantalizing resemblances to the northern French dance songs mentioned obliquely in the work of Grocheio ca. 1300. All the while, dramatic rubrics give reason to believe that the vision song had a liturgical place, a hypothesis supported by its apparent reappearance in the ordinal of the nuns of Barking Abbey ca. 1400.
Metz MS 1168 thus pivots suggestively between several lost histories of medieval female musicianship. As well as preserving possible traces of secular musicking, whether of Anglo-Saxon England or twelfth-century Flanders, the song is itself a reception of that tradition in religious circles, including female religious, at a time when dancing was the subject of frequent ecclesiastical prohibition. My paper teases out these historical subtleties, whilst also posing larger questions about cultures of visionary music beyond the famous example of Hildegard.
The Procession of Memory at Wilton Abbey
Alison Altstatt
University of Northern Iowa
A manuscript processional from the royal foundation of Wilton Abbey, England, written ca. 1250–1320, transmits a rich repertoire of processional music and sacred drama. Following Benoît-Castelli’s thorough assessment of its repertoire and liturgical calendar (1961), subsequent studies focused on Visit to the Sepulcher (Yardley 1975, 2006; Rankin 1981) and the processional liturgies of Rogationtide (Altstatt 2016). This paper will consider the music of claustral processions that preceded the festal masses of Wilton’s patron saints, in which the community processed through the cloister and into the abbey’s choir via the altars of the saints. Cynthia Turner Camp (2019) compared texts of unique chants for the Wilton saints with their vitae and the house’s fourteenth-century vernacular verse history for evidence of how the Wilton women conceived of their Anglo-Saxon predecessors. This study will examine some of these same chants and other unica in their musical and liturgical settings, with particular attention to the reuse of Matins responsories in pre-mass processions.
Scholars of processional chants have tended to dismiss the use of responsories in processional liturgies, in place of the older repertoire of processional antiphons, as a late phenomenon of little intrinsic importance. On the contrary, I will argue that the very aspects of the formal and motivic structure of the responsory which support their narrative function within the Night Office take on important roles in the embodied practice of commemoration that is liturgical procession. Performed in response to readings during Matins in choir and in the dead of night, the narrative responsory takes on new meanings when sung in the daylight and embodied in physical movement through the architectural space of the cloister and abbey church.
Singing chants in this manner served as a communal practice of memory that was simultaneously sonic, visual, and kinesthetic. This mode of embodied commemoration was particularly meaningful when practiced on feasts of the translations of saints, which were themselves celebrations of bodily movement accompanied by song. The motivic and formal structure of the Wilton responsories, with their emphasis on return and refrain, underscored the act of commemoration, bridging musically between the past and the liturgical present.
Embodying the Magdalene at Late Medieval Barking Abbey
Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis
University of Notre Dame
By the late fourteenth century, the Benedictine nuns at Barking Abbey in Essex, England, honored only three women saints with principal feasts: the Virgin Mary, St. Æthelburh (d. 686), the abbey’s co-founder and first abbess, and St. Mary Magdalene. The prominent position accorded these saints in Barking’s observance is, in many ways, to be expected. The abbey church was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and St. Æthelburh, and the veneration of St. Mary Magdalene was nearly ubiquitous in England at this time. What is remarkable is that, of these three saints, it was the Magdalene alone whom the nuns were recurrently encouraged to embody in their corporate worship. Scenes in the gospels of the saint’s life deemed essential to the nuns’ imitation of the saint were her conversion from sin, her ministrations to Jesus’s body, her repose at his feet, and her witness to his resurrection.
In this paper I show that these scenes offered scripts for the chants sung and the actions performed by the nuns during their care of the poor on Holy Thursday, their services to each other at the mandatum of the community, and their proclamation of Jesus’s resurrection on Easter and throughout the ensuing season. These chants and rubrics survive in one source: the ordinal Abbess Sibyl Felton (r. 1393–1419) commissioned for Barking in 1404. Sibyl was specially devoted to St. Mary Magdalene. Her ordinal directed the community to bury her before the altar dedicated to the saint in the abbey church. She was also one of the earliest owners of The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ by Nicholas Love (d. ca. 1424). In his meditations, Love urged his readers not only to “take hede & beholde” the Magdalene’s virtuous conduct but to make themselves “present in bodily conuersacion” to events in her life “by ymaginacion,” too. I shall argue that, in the veneration of St. Mary Magdalene at Barking during Sibyl’s abbacy, Love’s Mirror may have guided the community’s embodiment of the saint in song and deed, for it was this text that rendered the Magdalene’s exemplarity more vivid and imitable.
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