The Exultet rolls are unique among their manuscript contemporaries not only for their employment of the rotulus format, but for their content and their connection to the liturgical culture of southern Italy in the Middle Ages. A product of the Beneventan tradition that arose in southern Italy between the years leading to the invasion of Italy by the Lombards and the loss of religious and political autonomy, the Exultet roll provides insight into changing ideas about the power of the Church and the meaning of its doctrine. The growth and geographical expansion of the Beneventan rite across southern Italy allowed there to be many Exultet rolls produced across the region, and the later suppression of the Beneventan rite met slow adoption or even resistance as the shift to Franco-Roman liturgical material got underway after 1058. The Beneventan Exultet was in use in southern Italy long before the introduction of the Franco-Roman text into the area. The gradual adoption of the imported text and the eventual transition to including illustrations specific to the Franco-Roman text indicates a certain degree of tension between the traditional text and images of the local Beneventan Exultet and those of the interloping Franco- Roman. The transition to Franco-Roman text did eventually take hold, but the persistence of the rotulus for the Exultet and the insistence on maintaining some iconographic conventions leads one to believe that the acceptance of the Beneventan rite’s suppression was met with some continued adherence to established tradition.
This dissertation deals with questions as to the nature of Exultet rolls themselves, both as rotuli and as objects intended for the single annual Easter Vigil. The study suggests that the text
and images of the Exultet, along with the use of the roll format come together to indicate the possibility of a female-centered subtext to the manuscripts and their content.
A number of the Exultet rolls’ qualities can be reexamined in light of the transition from Beneventan to Franco-Roman text for the Exultet, as the differences between the two elucidate shifting interpretations of the Easter narrative and changing values for the virtues it celebrates. The shifting language of the Exultet invites a new reading of both text and images through the lens of allegorical figures, female virtue, and female potency. With reforms intent on
standardizing the hierarchical relationship of local churches to the Roman Church at the heart of the change from the Beneventan to the Franco-Roman Exultet, it is not surprising that the content of the Exultet would change as well. This dissertation suggests that one of the major changes to the Exultet, its changing engagement with female potency, represents a changing interpretation of the place of the female and its individual power and value with regard to the Church
hierarchy. The change from the Beneventan to the Franco-Roman Exultet reflects the attenuation of the Exultet’s praise for female potency, reducing it from an essential role in the economy of salvation to a position of service to the common good.
While there has been abundant scholarship concerned with the origins of the Exultet rolls as objects, their textual and musical content, their images, and their liturgical use, there is not a great deal of work that takes a speculative tone and asks what deeper meanings might be
readable across the group. Musicology can tell us the lineage of the melodies and liturgical rites that gave rise to the Exultet, and paleography can tell us where and how the texts were written into the rolls. History can paint a picture of what the social, political, and liturgical landscape was like when the rolls were made, and art history can unpack the iconography of the rolls and make connections between these and other related works. These are all invaluable fields of study
and insight into the Exultet rolls, and there is often much interaction among fields concerned with these manuscripts. There is still room, though, to consider the communicative possibilities of the Exultet rolls in new and speculative ways. In order to begin thinking about the Exultet rolls as multidimensional objects with a variety of stories to tell, it is necessary to draw together scholarship from different disciplines and look for new angles to examine. This dissertation is an attempt to turn the Exultet rolls a different way and contemplate new facets of the objects. Far from presuming to apply a feminist theoretical lens to the Exultet, this paper focuses on signs and symbols, allegory and exegesis, as ways to get a fresh look at the place of the female figures, natural imagery, and bees in the Exultet rolls and in the imagination of the Church during a period of reform.
Through the particularities of the Exultet rolls’ composition, with text, musical notation, and images combined in a continuous vertical roll, attention is drawn to the format and to the content in a more focused way than might be the case were the Exultet to be included in a codex containing other texts, too. The choice of the rotulus evokes not only the prestige status of the bishop to whom the roll belongs, but also the solemnity of the Easter Vigil. In addition, the roll carries associations of continuity and perpetual extension, linking it to the genealogies, histories, and lists that are so often recorded in similar formats. As a shape of endless extensibility and potential perpetuity, the roll might also be associated with female potency and considered a fitting reflection of the necessity of female participation in the perpetuation of family lines, patterns or succession, and historical continuation.
The repeated use of female allegorical figures, natural imagery, and depictions of bees provides ample material for the consideration of female-centered language and imagery in the Exultet. The dwelling of the Exultet on feminine language and virtues valued in women indicates
a deeper set of associations that change with the shift from the Beneventan to the Franco-Roman text. The imagery in both text and illustration most strongly links the the bees with the Virgin Mary, proclaiming the value of virginity and the superiority of the virginal birth associated with each. The chastity and selflessness of the bee, along with her industriousness, is praised in echo of the virtue of sophrosyne that provides a template for the ideal of female virtue. The symbolic relationship between Mary and the bees is evident in the frequent placement of the Elegy of the Bees image near a Nativity scene. While images in books can sometimes obscure this proximity, the intentionality of the arrangement becomes clear, as do the colors and details, when
encountered in person. Montecassino 2, for example, is much easier to visualize as a unified whole when stretched across a table than when divided among the printed pages of a
photographic reproduction. The same can be said of the rolls on display in Gaeta, where the full length of the Exultet rolls (Gaeta 1 and Gaeta 2) can be taken in all at once.
In considering the transition from the Beneventan to the Franco-Roman Exultet, the texts’ differing approaches to the Easter narrative reveal an underlying shift in thought concerning the female and its place in the history of salvation. With the suppression of the Beneventan rite, the Beneventan Exultet was eventually replaced by the Franco-Roman, and its deeply female-
centered imagery began to give way to the more institutionally focused Franco-Roman text. Over the course of this change, most evident in in the Elegy of the Bees, it becomes clear that the role of the bee, the Virgin, and the earth changes from being understood as a central or essential part of the economy of salvation to being at the service of the Church and its needs.
The bee, “though she be tiny in the smallness of her body,” is a driving force in the textual and visual landscape of the Exultet.299 As a symbol of female virtue as well as female
power, the bee is an effective allegorical figure for the individual female in relation to the
Church or community. The necessity of female participation in the process of salvation history is abundantly clear in the language of the Beneventan Exultet, but the subsequent use of the
Franco-Roman Exultet lessens the strength of this position of power. With the bees’ change of station in the Franco-Roman Exultet, the attenuation of female power in the progress of salvation takes hold, changing the relationship between the Church and its female constituents, historical and contemporary.
FIGURES
Figure 1: Rome, Casanatense 724 (B I 13) 1, 957-984
Figure 3: Pisa Exultet 2, 1059-1071
Figure 5: Rome, Casanatense 724 (B I 13) 3, 12th century
Figure 10: Gaeta, Exultet 3, before 1130
Figure 12: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Barb. Lat. 592, late 11th century
Figure 14: Montecassino, Codex Casinensis 132, 11th century, page 298
Figure 18: Pisa, Exultet 2, 1059-1071