Conference Agenda

Scholars have long recognized that the chant repertoire of both the Gallican and Old Hispanic churches adapted the formula known as the Trisagion (in Greek, Agios o theos, agios ischyros, agios athanatos; in Latin, Sanctus Deus, Sanctus fortis, sanctus immortalis). Originally adopted in the Eastern churches in Constantinople and Syria, where it is still recited in the mass, the Trisagion (not to be confused with the Tersanctus) likewise occupied a similarly central role in the liturgy of Merovingian Gaul, according to the early eighth-century Expositio antiquae liturgiae gallicanae. However, with the adoption of the Roman canon of the mass by the second half of the eighth century, the Frankish church appears to have abandoned this practice. Instead, the Romano-Frankish liturgy restricted the chanting of the Trisagion to the veneration of the cross on Passion Friday, the early evidence of which dates to approximately the middle of the ninth century.

This paper, though, highlights new evidence for the recitation of the Trisagion, both in the liturgy and outside formal liturgical settings, during the ninth and tenth centuries, as well as comparing that evidence to previous studies. Chant texts added to the margins of early medieval manuscripts, most of which are not liturgical manuscripts, reveals a longevity and wider distribution of Trisagion chants north of the Pyrenees than previously thought. In comparing these unstudied sources of the Trisagion to known chants in the Old Hispanic and Aquitanian traditions, this paper reveals a complex, trans-regional spread of this chant formula in the Latin liturgy, wherein the Trisagion formula retained a clear soteriological authority from its early origins as an invocation of divine aid.

This talk presents a small but significant corpus of texts largely unknown to musicologists: short Latin entries copied before c. 750 and plausibly intended for chant. Because they predate the earliest liturgical books whose musically significant contents can be securely tied to identifiable chant repertoires, they fall outside the usual pool of evidence for early medieval chant history. Yet the absence of early chant books does not entail that pre-Carolingian practices of singing are beyond recovery.

As this paper argues, traces of less regulated forms of religious song survive as marginal additions in otherwise non-musical Latin manuscripts, plausibly written between the sixth century and the first half of the eighth. These entries often register devotion more than ritual, personal inspiration more than ceremonial formality. They have remained invisible to musicologists not only because they lie in non-liturgical codices beyond musicology\'s habitual horizon, but also because their scripts are frequently vexing to decipher. Their chronology, moreover, precedes not only musical notation but even the consolidation of fixed liturgy as a framework for straightforward plainchant discourses.

Read as evidence for ‘liminal’ chant, these materials open a new route into a time when the ideal of regulated chant was scarcely imaginable, and they may illuminate precisely the kinds of practices that the newly founded Roman Schola cantorum sought to supplant with standardized chants for professional singers. As such, they offer rare insight into early medieval religiosity and into how individuals that could at least write sought to sing to God.

This paper examines how early medieval incantations were intended to be used. Despite the linguistic relation between the terms incantatio (incantation), carmen (charm), and cantus (chant) suggesting oral, perhaps musical, performance, it is often not evident how incantations were intended to be used. Based on manuscript evidence, this paper questions how we can understand the purposes of these texts when titles are absent or ambiguous. By studying where these texts appear in manuscripts, the works that accompany them, and internal clues within the incantations themselves, it becomes possible to retrace aspects of their performance. Thereby, the paper argues that the incantations we find without titles were often just elements of larger procedures. They were parts of phrases that were supposed to be sung, recited, directly removed from manuscript margins to create amulets, or various combinations of these practices.