Chant among the Franciscans: Songs, Singing, Sequences
Chair(s): Catherine Saucier (Arizona State University)
These three papers ask new questions and confront a variety of problems raised by repertories associated with three different groups of Franciscans in the later Middle Ages. Although Franciscans and their music is our topic, the geographic range of our work is broad and the kinds of music and musical performance engaged vary greatly, demonstrating the vitality of the subject. The first paper examines the work of friars who preached and led communities following their conceptions of St. Francis the jongleur. Why is it that a great variety of dance songs were championed by and composed by Franciscans friars? How did understanding the musical charism of the saint across geographic boundaries manifest itself in so many genres of later medieval song? And last, what was the relationship between the preaching inside the church and the dancing and singing outside. Two of our papers are quite different from the first and engage communities of Franciscan women in the fifteenth century. Both show, in slightly different times and in very different places, how women reacted to the religious reforms that were sweeping through their communities in the fifteenth century. One paper is about the extreme angst that reform brought to a famous religious leader, Colette of Corbie (b. 1381- d. 1447). How did she respond to an early directive that seemed to ban singing as the leader of a community used to the practice and beauty of its song? What “work-around” suggested itself to her? Was it implemented? The third paper reflects on the exuberance that reform inspired within a community of Franciscan women in Villingen, reformed in the late fifteenth century by Ursula Haider (abbess from 1480 to 1489). Her work begot a vigorous campaign of book production and art work. Among the codices copied by a Franciscan woman in the early sixteenth century is the richest and most extensive collection of sequences ever made for a Franciscan community, some of which are dramatic dialogues. What pieces did the women chose and why? How does St. Clare’s portrait in song relate to contemporary art?
Presentations of the Symposium
Dance, Dance Revolution
Peter Loewen
Rice University
Why were the early Franciscans so obsessed with dance songs? We know that the friars had a hand in shaping the early repertories of laude, carols, cantigas, and lyric lais, but many of these are actually symptoms of Franciscan preaching that may be traced back to root causes in the life of St Francis. In this paper I will first argue that the hagiographers who composed the Vita secunda and the Compilatio Assisiensis in the 1240s constructed Francis of Assisi as a jongleur for the purposes of emulation. Using evidence in Franciscan novice manuals, such as Bartholomew Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum and Juan Gil de Zamora’s Ars musice (c. 1256), I will show that the jongleur persona was promulgated among young friars who were training for a career in the priesthood. Franciscan priests and other popular preachers then carried the jongleur persona into the field, as Salimbene’s Cronica and John Pecham’s Lambeth Constitutions (1282) demonstrate. Finally, I will present for the first time a representative selection of Franciscan dance songs culled from the chansonnier, cancioneros, laudarie, and preaching sources in which they were preserved in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.
Songs that appear in preaching sources from Italy (I-Ma, ms. Q 32 sup.) and England (GB-Lbl, Add. 46919 and Arundel 248) demonstrate that friars would sometimes transform Latin hymns and sequences into vernacular refrain-form songs and French and English lyric lais. The repertory of Franciscan dance songs also extends the Cantigas de Santa Maria. Copied between 1271 and 1280, the Codice rico (E-E, Codex T.I.1) includes several miragres attributed to Juan Gil de Zamora; and some of its historiated panels attest to the jongleur persona when they depict a Franciscan friar, usually in the final frame, proclaiming the legend to his attentive audience (eg. CSM 85 and 171). Gathering together these sources of hagiography, theology, preaching, song, and art, I hope to recover the jongleur persona of the medieval Franciscan priests who engaged audiences outside the church through sacred dance songs, much as they engaged with them inside the church through the Roman liturgy.
A Reformer’s Dilemma: Colette of Corbie and St. Clare’s Rule of Life
Martha Culshaw
University of Toronto
As the leader of the reform of the Order of Saint Clare in Burgundy, Colette of Corbie (b. 1381- d. 1447) sought the adoption of the forma vitae ascribed to the alleged foundress of the Poor Clares, Clare of Assisi (b.1181/82 – d. 1253), by the houses of religious women under her charge (later known as the Colettines). Colette believed that the document, which had fallen into disuse since its papal confirmation in 1253, contained the authentic charism affiliated with the ‘pristine’ origins of the Poor Clares, but was purportedly baffled by its strange and curious prescription regarding chant and liturgy. At a time when sung performance of the office was a given, the forma vitae mandated that the sisters render the office ‘sine cantu,’ while providing no rationale. The directive confronted Colette with a conflict between her ideal of fidelity to the Franciscan vision as dictated by the forma vitae and her expectations for the liturgy and its music.
How this confrontation of Colette’s ideals materialized in the liturgy of her sisters, however, is unclear, and scholarship, which has only lightly broached the topic, is not unanimous: some claim that the Colettines chanted the hours in an ‘angelic’ voice, as a sort of compromise between spoken recitation and singing; while others assume that the Colettines sang the office as per usual practice. This paper thus takes up the question of how Colette’s reception of Clare’s directive ‘sine cantu’ materialized in the liturgy of the fifteenth-century Colettines, examining the evidence as found in the Constitutions and the unofficial documents she composed to supplement her sisters’ observance of the forma vitae and their formation and instruction. This paper investigates this reception against the backdrop of the forma vitae’s original context of Clare’s community of San Damiano and the reasons why they may have recited the office ‘sine cantu,’ and asks what Colette’s writings on the divine office reveal about her conception of music and sound in the liturgy within the context of her particular brand of women’s Franciscanism.
By Women and For Women: Music and Art for the Franciscans of Villingen
Margot Fassler
University of Notre Dame
The Clarissen Convent in Villingen (the Bickenkloster) on the edge of the Black Forest
underwent a reform carried out by abbessa Ursula Haider (1480-1489), this marking, among
other things, the beginnings of a campaign to copy books. Scholars recently at work on the
collection have established that a significant number of the manuscripts found in the library of
the Benedictine monastery of St. George, now residing in the Baden State Library of Karlsruhe,
were copied in or for the Bickenkloster. Among these manuscripts sixteen belonged to the
Bickenkloster, and twenty more from this house of Franciscan women have been found
elsewhere, bringing the number to thirty-six. Within this collection of liturgical books,
prayerbooks, and mystical treatises for contemplation, is found a sequentiary, St. George, MS
no. 3, with an addition made by a female scribe responsible for several other books in the collection.
My presentation is the first study of the texts and music in this collection of seventy-six
sequences, which has been catalogued by Calvin Bower in his Clavis sequentiarum. Franciscans
generally did not sing large numbers of sequences; the collection is highly unusual, and offers a
unique window into the liturgical life of Franciscan sisters. Contained in the collection are
several rare works, some of which may have been composed by the sisters themselves. Special
attention will be given to dialogue sequences, miniature dramas, found in the repertory, and to
sequences for St. Clare. These will be situated more broadly by study of related books that have
been prepared for liturgical use in the Bickenkloster, including the office of St. Clare, and the
Regula sancte Clare virginis in Villingen (London, British Library, Add. Ms. 15686) that dates
from around 1480, and has eight miniatures by Sibylla von Bondorf of Freiburg. The paper brings the character of Claire to life, both as understood in song, and as manifested in manuscript painting and demonstrates ways in which genre and discipline shaped the persona of the saint for a particular community of women.
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