Conference Agenda

The love story of Peter Abelard and his student Heloise, documented in their letters and Abelard's autobiography, is well-known from popular culture and scholarly literature. Liturgical chant, both texts and music, has a major role to play in understanding this relationship. While Abelard’s authorship of a substantial hymn cycle is well established, his contribution to the sequence repertory has remained a subject of intense debate. His composition of six planctus (laments) on Old Testament themes is widely accepted, but it has long been questioned how many liturgical sequences he may have composed for the Oratory of the Paraclete where Heloise was the abbess.

This paper presents new evidence in the form of two recently transcribed sequences found in an overlooked 12th-century Aquitanian source in which the works are attributed to Magister Peter. The first text plays on the name “Paraclete” and matches an unidentified incipit in the Paraclete Ordinal; the second is a contrafactum of Abelard’s own lament for Saul and Jonathan (Dolorum solatium), featuring a striking reference to female martyrs as “Amazons,” a rare term used in one of his hymn texts. These new discoveries prompt a re-evaluation of the sequence repertory as recorded in sources from the Paraclete.

The new findings provide crucial support for Abelard’s claim in the 1130s to have compiled a booklet of hymnorum vel sequentiarum ("hymns and sequences"). Furthermore, they suggest that other unidentified items in the Paraclete Ordinal may also be his work. However, these pieces also challenge generic norms: neither follows the standard double-versicle structure of the liturgical sequence. Instead, they favour designs characteristic of Abelard’s planctus, the contemporary lai, and virtuosic twelfth-century Latin songs (labelled versus or conductus). Did Abelard also compose the melodies? His reputed skill in poetry and song—famed through his lost love songs for Heloise—implies significant musical ability; but the first discovery employs a limited range of standard melodic formulae, while the second fits a new text to an existing melody. Even so, both sequences display a sophisticated transformation of received materials, revealing a master craftsman at work.

Liturgical books from the mid twelfth and early thirteenth centuries witness to a thriving cult of Mary Magdalene at the royal Abbey of St. George, the oldest Bohemian monastic house for women, an institution where privilege allowed the women to develop their own liturgical practices. Notable features of the St George’s liturgy include a uniquely ordered office for the saint's feast (July 22), with readings found only at the Abbey, and a distinctive Easter Visitatio sepulchri ceremony that includes Mary Magdalene’s meeting with Christ after his resurrection. It is clear that the nuns of St. George had developed innovative strategies whereby the role of the Magdalene in the events commemorated at Easter was foregrounded. Comparison with manuscripts from the Cathedral of St. Vitus (only a few yards away from St George’s) indicates that these aspects of the Easter liturgy and handling of Mary Magdalene within that liturgy were indeed specific to St George’s.

Devotion to the Magdalene was significantly strengthened during the abbacy of Princess Kunigunde (1265–1321, and abbess from 1302). Easter themes within the liturgy for the feast of Mary Magdalene were significantly deepened, while the Visitatio sepulchri ceremony performed on Easter morning was led by the abbess, followed by Mary Magdalene. A brilliantly painted Passional (Prague XIV A 17) was commissioned by Abbess Kunigunde, and its contents suggest that she took a significant part in planning its contents. One of its illustrations shows a Benedictine nun who can be read as Mary Magdalene kneeling in the garden at the feet of the resurrected Christ; in another part of the manuscript there is a lament in the voice of Mary Magdalene. Ways in which the lament references the readings of the liturgical office for the Magdalene’s feast further promote the nuns’ shared conviction that Magdalene was especially beloved by Christ.

Few facets of medieval Western music theory have elicited more sustained modern skepticism than the doctrine of modal ethos. Music theorists of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, following ancient authorities, described modes as possessing distinctive affective properties—an “ethos”—capable of shaping listeners’ dispositions or emotions. Medieval theorists accordingly prescribed modes for setting texts of corresponding affective characters. Modern scholars, however, have tended to be skeptical of these ethos attributions, and modal ethos is now generally regarded as a series of inert theoretical clichés rather than a meaningful reflection of or influence on musical practice, especially with respect to polyphony.

Such skepticism has crystallized most decisively around the Phrygian mode, with its final tone on E. Whereas medieval theorists consistently associated the Phrygian with anger, madness, and warlike violence, modern scholars have observed that the texts of polyphonic songs classifiable as Phrygian overwhelmingly express sadness, grief, and lament. This apparent contradiction has established the Phrygian as the example invoked most often to refute the practical and thus hermeneutic relevance of ethos doctrine. This, in turn, has contributed to broader doubts about the compositional reality of mode itself.

This paper reopens the question of modal ethos through close study of historical writings and of Phrygian polyphony from the fifteenth century. Pioneering Phrygian works by Guillaume Du Fay, Johannes Okeghem, and their contemporaries reveal recurrent evocations not of lament per se but of indignation—anger rooted in perceived mistreatment or unjust injury. In this corpus, martial topics likewise appear as figures of an aggrieved psychic state. When read alongside coeval descriptions of the Phrygian as provoking anger and violence, the affective field registered by these E-final chanson texts evinces not a contradiction but a close correspondence to theoretical accounts of the mode’s ethos and tonality.

Through this analysis, modal ethos emerges as an historically operative dimension of late-medieval musical thought and practice. This paper thereby restores Phrygian ethos doctrine as a viable framework for present-day hermeneutics and opens new pathways for inquiry into the expressive use of the other modes across the premodern West.