Women and Their Sequences:
An Overview and a Case Study
By
M a r g o t E . F a s s l e r
PrefaceF
undamental to planning this lecture were warnings from a past president includ-ing the suggestion to engage with somethinclud-ing particular to my own discipline, best of all from out of recent scholarship. This meant that I should talk about liturgical sources, especially those with music, and their varied contexts, but more narrowly, probably about either drama or sequences, and I chose the latter. As some of my recent work has focused on female institutions, I decided to continue that empha-sis, which has led to some new understandings, by joining work on women’s lit-urgies with work on sequences. Butfirst I needed convincing that my topic, the late medieval sequence—fundamental to understanding the Latin Middle Ages in ev-erything from politics to art history—would be unfamiliar to many in the audi-ence. Test probes were revelatory:“What is a sequence?”A Dante scholar said, “Do you mean a sequence of ideas?”and a historian asked,“Are they the shiny objects sewn on vestments?”Enough. I planned the lecture to include an overview with plentiful definitions. For this printed recasting of the lecture, I have retained some of this introductory work. Accordingly, the piece welcomes other scholars into the workshop of the liturgiologist/musicologist, first with the introduction given in Atlanta, followed by overviews of late sequences among select female communities, and closing with an example of sequences written by and for women in the fourteenth andfifteenth centuries and their dramatic implications as found in one complicated manuscript.The Late Medieval Sequence: An Introduction
Sequences are a genre of liturgical chant with texts proper to feasts and seasons, written from the ninth century forward, even in some places and for religious or-ders after the reforms of the Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century. They were sungfirst and foremost in the Mass liturgy, after the alleluia and before the intoning of the Gospel of the day, heralds of the Word; in many French-speaking regions sequences were called prosae, and both terms are used in scholarship to-day.1If the manuscripts are any indication, sequences were intensely cultivated for This presidential address was delivered on 3 March 2018 at the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.
1Scholarship on the sequence is vast, and so I mention just a few recent works that contain
over-views, substantial bibliographies, and copious references to manuscripts. MyGothic Song: Victorine
Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, 2011), reviews
the scholarship on the later sequence in the decades since thefirst edition of this book in 1993. For
Speculum94/3 (July 2019). Copyright 2019 by the Medieval Academy of America. doi: 10.1086/704043, 0038-7134/2019/9403-0001$10.00.
centuries, and could move from out of the Mass liturgy, to the Office, especially to vespers, to processions, and to plays.2 Their texts migrated into books of hours and other devotional materials, frequently translated from Latin into the vernac-ular in later centuries, and their most famous melodies were incessantly reset. Their texts were parodied, as in the much-discussed Gamblers’Mass of the Car-mina Burana, which mocks the widespread late eleventh-century Easter sequence, “Victime Paschali laudes.”3They are through composed, that is, the music is differ-ent for every strophe. But generally, with the late sequence, each strophe divides neatly in half, and the music repeats nearly exactly for that particular strophe, there-fore begetting a double-versicle form, with music unfolding like this: AaBbCcDd, and so on.
Regular sequences, the later ones to be discussed here, are composed in rhym-ing, syllable-countrhym-ing, accentual Latin verse, with the most popular melodies of the genre frequently contrafacted.4In the most skillfully made examples, the
po-the earlier sequence, see especially Calvin M. Bower, ed.,The Liber Ymnorum of Notker Balbulus,
Henry Bradshaw Society, 2 vols. (Woodbridge, UK, 2016); and Richard L. Crocker,The Early
Medi-eval Sequence(Berkeley, 1976). Sequences in the so-called transitional period have been studied
espe-cially by Lori Kruckenberg in her classic work“The Sequence from 1050–1150: Study of a Genre in
Change”(PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1997) and in a number of ensuing case studies, including“The
Relationship between the Festal Office and the New Sequence: Evidence from Medieval Picardy,”
Jour-nal of the Alamire Foundation5 (2013): 201–33. One of the most important collection of essays on the
sequence to appear in recent years is Lori Kruckenberg and Andreas Haug, eds.,The Sequences of
Ni-daros: A Nordic Repertory and Its European Context(Trondheim, 2006). For an overview with
ex-amples, my textbookMusic in the Medieval West(New York, 2014) and its accompanyingAnthology
include several sequences, with contextualizing studies, scores, and texts in translation. A recent
over-view of the genre is Lori Kruckenberg,“Sequence,”inThe Cambridge History of Medieval Music, ed.
Mark Everest and Thomas Forrest Kelly, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK, 2018), 1:300–56.
2Electronic resources are especially important for gaining control of the manuscript sources for any
given topic that includes sequences. Basic for decades have been the editions of sequences found in the
fifty-five volumes ofAnalecta hymnica(hereafter AH); and now many of the sources drawn upon there
are online, in addition to being catalogued. The best tool presently forfinding digitized medieval
man-uscripts is Albrecht Diem’s Monastic Manuscript Project, http://www.earlymedievalmonasticism.org
/listoflinks.html (last accessed 11 March 2019). For individual sequence manuscripts, see especially
the database Clavis Sequentiarum, curated by Calvin M. Bower and now on CANTUS, http://can
tus.uwaterloo.ca/sources (last accessed 11 March 2019), which inventories 146 sources. Bower’s index
lists concordances for every sequence he has inventoried. Several hundred sources are listed in
Chris-tian Meyer,“Les sources manuscrites des séquences et des proses notées,”http://www.musmed.fr
/CMN/proseq/proseq_sources2.htm (last accessed 11 March 2019). One canfind individual works
too through his thematic catalog, which also includes melodic incipits, including those for texts that have been set multiple times: http://www.musmed.fr/CMN/proseq/proseq_proses.htm (last accessed 11 March 2019). The website Musicologie Médiévale, curated by Dominique Gatté, offers many in-ventories of digitized medieval liturgical books, and scholars are constantly contributing to it as new things come online: http://gregorian-chant.ning.com/group/lesmanuscritsduweb (last accessed 11 March 2019).
3Dirk van Betteray,“The Sequence‘Victimae novali zynke ses’—A Melodical Restitution in
Accor-dance with the Neumes,”inHortus troporum: Florilegium in honorem Gunillae Iversen; A Festschrift
in Honour of Professor Gunilla Iversen on the Occasion of Her Retirement as Chair of Latin at Stock-holm University, ed. Alexander Andrée and Erika Kihlman, Acta Universitatis StockStock-holmiensis: Studia
Latina Stockholmiensia 54 (Stockholm, 2008), 12–20.
4On the art of the contrafact in late medieval sequences, see especially Heinrich Husmann,“Notre
Dame and Saint-Victor: Repertoire-Studien zur Geschichte der gereimten Prosen,”Acta Musicologica
36 (1964): 98–123, 191–221; and Fassler,Gothic Song, esp. 241–340, with examples of the sounding
626 Women and Their Sequences
etry isfilled with tricks and puns that work upon the innate intertextuality of the form, each half strophe in a musical relationship with its“twin.”The character-istic rich rhyme, which sometimes uses four syllables, as well as the propensity for intense assonance, makes each work a kind of game, which is part of the playful-ness of the style and the joyful character of the genre as a whole. The playfulplayful-ness extends to parody and contrafact, as many works make references to other more popular preexisting sequences.5 Sequences were generally not sung during Lent, although places with high Mariologies might make exceptions to this rule for Mar-ian feasts falling in this solemn season. The music theorist Grocheio, writing in Paris in the late thirteenth century, compares the singing of sequences to the ductia:“But the sequence is sung in the manner of a ductia, so that it may lead and give joy”;6 ductia, according to Grocheio, are measured songs with a beat, works arousing the spirit to move decorously“according to the art they call dancing (balare).”
The rich rhyme of“Templum cordis,”for the Purification feast (2 February), per-haps by Adam of Saint-Victor, is wonderful to read (silently or aloud) or to sing, as can be heard in its final half strophe; the nineteenth-century English translation provides an example of how scholars once wrestled with the rhythms and rhymes of late Latin verse; many aspects of the poetry don’t make it across the linguistic di-vide with elegance.7The sheer musicality of the poetry, while not evident in most English attempts to recreate the aesthetic, can be masterful, most especially as devel-oped by the poet Adam of Saint-Victor and his school in the twelfth century.8
In-houses of memory constructed by the Victorines in the twelfth and early thirteen centuries in their
se-quence repertory. For an English example, see Helen Deeming,“Music, Memory and Mobility:
Cita-tion and Contrafactum in Thirteenth-century Sequence Repertories,”inCitation, Intertextuality and
Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Giuliano Di Bacco and Yolanda Plumley,
Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Medieval Culture 2 (Exeter, 2013), 67–81.
5Especially useful regarding this aspect of the Victorine sequences is Jean Grosfillier,Les séquences
d’Adam de Saint-Victor, Bibliotheca Victorina 20 (Turnhout, 2008), who discusses poetic and
rhetor-icalfigures esp. at 49–197. On rhyming strategies in Victorine poetry, see also Eugene R. Cunnar,“
Ty-pological Rhyme in a Sequence by Adam of St. Victor,”Studies in Philology84 (1987): 394–417.
6Johannes de Grocheio,Ars musice, ed. and trans. Constant J. Mews et al. (Kalamazoo, 2011), 110–
11 and 72–73, respectively. On the manuscripts, see Ernst Ruhloff,Die Quellenhandschriften zum
Musiktraktat des Johannes de Grocheio(Leipzig, 1967); and for the context of the treatise, see John
Haines and Patricia Dewitt,“Grocheio and Aristotelian Natural Philosophy,”Early Music History
27 (2008): 47–98.
7Dag Norberg’s masterfulIntroduction to the Study of Medieval Latin Versification, trans. Grant C.
Roti and Jacqueline de La Chapelle Skubly, ed. Jan Ziolkowski (Washington, DC, 2004), demonstrates the classical forms and meters underlying rhyming, accentual counterparts from the Middle Ages. A short introduction to the motion from classical and medieval poetic strategies to English verse is John
Hollander,Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse(New Haven, 2001).
8For a comparison of some works of Adam to those of a somewhat inferior poet, see John F. Benton,
“Nicholas of Clairvaux and the Twelfth-Century Sequence, with Special Reference to Adam of St.
Vic-tor,”Traditio18 (1962): 149–79. The best study of the sequence texts of Adam as poetry, with
copi-ous commentary and full discussion of the many strategies employed, is Grosfillier,Les séquences
d’Adam. On the probable identity of this poet, known in his lifetime as Adam precentor, the cantor
of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Paris, see my“Who Was Adam of St. Victor? The Evidence of the
Sequence Manuscripts,”Journal of the American Musicological Society37 (1984): 233–69. Adam left
the cathedral for the Abbey of Saint-Victor in around 1133, apparently taking his prebend with him. If this identity is correct, Adam was both a poet and a highly trained musician, which may help to ac-count for the interdependency of poetry and music in this repertory.
Women and Their Sequences 627
deed, to be able to read and sing late sequences is a reward of knowing Latin. Every eight-syllable trochee has a caesura after four syllables, and a major emphasis usu-ally falls on the third syllable of each of these poetic cells. There are numerous inter-nal rhymes as well in poetry of the Victorine school, as can be seen in this sonically loaded half strophe. But thefinal line of each section of this half strophe shifts dra-matically, especially regarding the cadence, which has the accent on the antepenul-timate syllable. This can also cause a major shift in the ways the internal rhymes work too, for as the reader/singer goes ever faster down a hill of interplay, the sud-den shift provides a screeching halt, and then the process starts up again, in this long racetrackfilled with hairpin turns and inevitable speed bumps. With just another syllable, the line“Unda tui rivuli”would have kept up the previous pattern of inter-nal and end-rhyme schemes, and it has been constructed to underscore emphatically the fact that it does not.
The greatest melodies for late sequences mirror the nature of the texts in their cel-lular and modular characters. Here, too, the cadences of thefinal lines of strophes have different qualities from the other lines of individual strophes, althoughfinal lines“rhyme”with frequent repeated notes proceeded by the dip of a single pitch. One of the most essential features of the style is the sophisticated way in which the best of the poets traffic upon deliberate interplay between the musical and poetic di-mensions of the works, creating a sonic counterpoint. In fact, sequences, especially as Adam and the Victorine school conceived of them, made their meaning primarily through the interaction of words and music within their liturgical contexts. Com-prehending the full range of their sophisticated intentions is not possible without interdisciplinary exploration; to “read” a Victorine text is to know only half of what it is about. In the example below (thefinal half strophe of“Templum cordis”), the strongest accents are in bold. The encounter with sound is profound and runs on two tracks, one textual, the other musical. But beyond this, this sequence is part of a family of texts deliberately interrelated through the use of a common melody, a melody probably written by Adam, and charged with Marian meanings through quotation of the well-known hymn,“Ave maris stella.”9The multiple settings cre-ated an interdisciplinary exegesis that explores the threefold system championed by Hugh of Saint-Victor, all sung within the context of the liturgy.
Fons signate sanctitate
Rivosfunde nos infunde
Fons hortorum internorum
Rigamentes arescentes
Undatuirivuli;
Fons redundans sis inundans
Cordisprava quaequelava
Fons illimis, mundenimis
Ab immundo mundamundo
Cor mundanipopuli.
9For the melody and analysis of its mode of working, see myGothic Song, 321–40, 436–37, and 441.
628 Women and Their Sequences
Example 1. The musical setting of thefinal half strophe of“Templum cordis,”from the Victorine sequentiary, Paris, BnF, MS lat. 14452, fol. 196r (early thirteenth century).
Digby Wrangham’s attempt to capture the style (his Latin transcription was some-what faulty) demonstrates how difficult it is to make the system work in another lan-guage, especially a Germanic one:
Fountain duly Sealed as holy! Outpour for us
Rivers o’er us:
Fount of showers
For hearts’flowers!
Water ever From thy river
To all thirsting souls impart:
Fount o’erflowing!
Through hearts going, Grant ablution From pollution: Fountain, given Pure from heaven! From earth, wholly Impure, thoroughly
Purify man’s impure heart!10
Late sequences provided sharp musical and textual contrasts with the melis-matic settings of the long-established Carolingian proper chants of the Mass,
10The Liturgical Poetry of Adam of St. Victor from the Text of Gautier, ed. and trans. Digby S.
Wrangham, 3 vols. (London, 1881), 2:32–35. See also Adam of Saint-Victor,Sequences, ed. and trans.
Juliet Mousseau (Paris, 2013). Some poems of Adam are included inWritings on the Spiritual Life: A
Selection of Works of Hugh, Adam, Achard, Richard, Walter, and Godfrey of St Victor, ed.
Christo-pher P. Evans, Victorine Texts in Translation 4 (Turnhout, 2013); andTrinity and Creation: A
Selec-tion of Works of Hugh, Richard, and Adam of St Victor, ed. Boyd Taylor Coolman and Dale M. Coul-ter, Victorine Texts in Translation 1 (Turnhout, 2010).
Women and Their Sequences 629
the great majority of which have prose texts chosen from the Psalms, and even with the syllabic chants of the Mass ordinary. No wonder the strictest and most li-turgically minimalist of the new religious orders in the twelfth century, the Carthu-sians and the Cistercians, in general, did not incorporate them into their worship. They were especially beloved by Augustinians, cathedral canons, and Dominicans, with the Franciscans lagging far behind their counterparts. An emphasis on the common life was underscored by those who loved the sequences and composed new ones. As a result, sequences have a great deal to say about the religious life and its nature and often about the political concerns of institutions and of regions. Late sequences sound somewhat strange when performed in an utterly somber mode; joy is seemingly built into them. They are, in one basic sense, alleluia com-mentaries rendered in the heart of the Mass liturgy.11The late thirteenth-century “Dies irae,” which came to be sung in the Requiem Mass, is the exception that proves the rule. Here the force of the text and music switches gears and creates a statement of terror, which to medieval ears would have been especially powerful as it is so different in character from its counterparts in the late medieval repertory. Indeed, sequence repertories define what liturgiologists call a“soft spot.”In this context, the sequence is a place in the Mass liturgy where changes might be made fairly rapidly and many new works could be incorporated or composed on the spot. Sequences were abundant from the late ninth century, marked by regionality. The genre was ever in transition, changing in style and character, providing some of the richest evidence that survives from the entire Latin Middle Ages for under-standing what particular communities cared about and how they defined who they were, as community members sang these texts face to face in choir at Mass on major non-Lenten feasts throughout the church year, sometime in alternation with solo-ists or with the organ. Lori Kruckenberg has explored the ways in which the melis-mas from which the genre grew and the long association sequences had with bursts of textless melodyfit into festal occasions and the architectural contexts of perfor-mance.12
It is the ability of religious women tofind voices for their own liturgical expres-sion that interests me in this lecture, and I would argue actually that when it comes to the twelfth through the sixteenth century, the sequence as copied, as sung in the liturgy, and as prayed as a devotional text offers one of the best opportunities in the entire period to observe women, as editors, compilers, copyists (texts and mu-sic), illuminators, poets, composers, and, above all, as liturgists. Because sequences provided a soft spot, once we canfind the books women possessed and contrib-uted to in one dimension or another, we have a new way of looking and listening. Indeed, there is a wealth of information about late medieval religious women that we have not taken sufficient notice of and can now begin to uncover to greater degrees than in the past. In many ways, religious women used their sequence
rep-11This idea is especially important for earlier sequence repertories, as shown in myGothic Song, 38–
57; but the idea prevails throughout the entire Middle Ages.
12Lori Kruckenberg,“Neumatizing the Sequence: Special Performances of Sequences in the Central
Middle Ages,”Journal of the American Musicological Society59 (2006): 243–317; and Fassler,Gothic
Song, 38–57.
630 Women and Their Sequences
ertories to bring to life a variety of differing representations of historical circum-stances from the Bible and saints’lives and, in some cases, could probe deeply into mystical meanings and human emotions, all within the heart of the Mass liturgy. Many of the characteristics reported in this study of sequences hold true for male religious houses, too, but here I am investigating the ways in which female communities related to their sequence repertories, across several centuries and across religious denominations. When it comes to sequence repertories written by and for women religious, there is much to do, and this lecture offers a beginning. At present, there is no catalog of the sequence manuscripts and of ordinals and other sources that specifically mention repertories of sequences that belonged to fe-male institutions, including double houses.13 Preparing such a resource will be a complex task, but some of us have begun, much aided by the work of colleagues who patiently study the scribal habits and production of female monastics in many regions of Europe.14The database of the manuscripts assignable to women’s houses found in Munich at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Frauenklöster— Handschrif-ten und Inkunabeln), curated by Eva Schlotheuber, is an example of how to
pro-13The Monastic Matrix: A Scholarly Resource for the Study of Women’s Religious Communities from 400 to 1600 CE, ed. Alison I. Beach, https://monasticmatrix.osu.edu/ (last accessed 11 March 2019), has the Monasticon as one of its components. This is a database of medieval female religious communities, frequently with bibliographies and with useful lists of surviving sources.
14The need for detailed codicological and paleographical study of codices possibly made by or for
women has never been greater. Books are not gendered, and there is no way to tell for sure if a scribe is female or not, which makes the study of scribes within their scriptoria especially important. Work on
this aspect of monastic history hasflourished for some decades, and the more that is learned, the more
possible it will be, in turn, to study women’s liturgical books and practices in context. Some examples
from a great array of possibilities are Rosamond McKitterick,“Nuns’Scriptoria in England and
Fran-cia in the Eighth Century,”Francia19 (1992): 1–36; Michelle P. Brown,“Female Book Ownership
and Production in Anglo-Saxon England: The Evidence of the Ninth-Century Prayerbooks,”inLexis
and Texts in Early English: Studies Presented to Jane Roberts, ed. C. Kay and L. Sylvester
(Amster-dam, 2001), 45–68; Kimberly M. Benedict, Empowering Collaborations: Writing Partnerships
be-tween Religious Women and Scribes in the Middle Ages(New York, 2004); Alison I. Beach,Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Bavaria, Cambridge Studies in
Palaeography and Codicology 10 (Cambridge, UK, 2004); the publications of the ongoing series Nuns’
Literacies in Medieval Europe, such asThe Kansas City Dialogue, ed. Virginia Blanton, Veronica
O’Mara, and Patricia Stoop, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 27 (Turnhout, 2015); Kim
Haines-Eitzen,The Gendered Palimpsest: Women, Writing, and Representation in Early Christianity
(Oxford, 2012); and Cynthia J. Cyrus,The Scribes for Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany
(Toronto, 2009). The ways in which close study of manuscripts can reveal much new information about
women religious are modeled in Katie Bugyis,The Care of Nuns: The Ministries of Benedictine Women
in England during the Central Middle Ages(Oxford, 2019). Library exhibits and their catalogs have
proven very useful as well; for example, see Helmar Härtel, ed.,Geschrieben und gemalt: Gelehrte
Bücher aus Frauenhand; Eine Klosterbibliothek sächsischer Benediktinerinnen des 12. Jahrhunderts; Ausstellung der Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, in der Augusteerhalle, in der Schatzkammer und im Kabinett vom 19. November 2006 bis 28. Januar 2007, Ausstellungskataloge der
Herzog-August-Bibliothek 86 (Wiesbaden, 2006); Jeffrey Hamburger, ed.,Frauen—Kloster—Kunst: Neue
Fors-chungen zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters; Beiträge zum internationalen Kolloquium vom 13. bis 16. Mai 2005 anlässlich der Ausstellung“Krone und Schleier”(Turnhout, 2007); and Jeffrey Hamburger
and Susan Marti, eds.,Krone und Schleier: Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenklöstern(Bonn, 2005),
translated into English asCrown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries,
trans. Dietlinde Hamburger (New York, 2008).
Women and Their Sequences 631
ceed when dealing with major collections.15It is clear that some sources remain hid-den in a variety of archives, and not yet ihid-dentified or published; catalog entries, when they do exist, are too often either faulty or incomplete, especially regarding whether we can discern if a manuscript belonged to a female house. And then there are the many sequence texts in prayer books, a vast group of sources not discussed here, but awaiting further study.
Nonetheless the early evidence is provocative. It can be suggested, even in this early stage of the work, that individual women and female communities were es-pecially attracted to sequences and wanted them in their liturgies just as much, in some cases even more, than their comparable male counterparts did. Much of the study of women religious and their liturgical practices has been of the Office, and rightly so, so rich is the evidence. But this particular genre of choral song, aspects of which were shaped by the women themselves, provides a view of the female presence in the liturgy of the Mass. Most studies to date have focused on the sec-ond half of the Mass liturgy, but the Foremass, with its sequences, readings, and other chanted works, is vitally important as well and offered women a significant degree of control as well as major choral participation in various aspects of the rite. Scholars need to decide eventually what this varied presence meant to women’s un-derstanding of the liturgy as whole as well as to their spirituality both as commu-nities and as individuals. Those engaged in sound studies can look to the sequence for many ideas not only about what women heard in community and how they played their ongoing game of alternating verses of psalms, hymns, and sequences in their choirs, but also about how their sounds went out, and when, and what it meant to people outside the community and inside when the bell was rung to indi-cate that the sequence was being sung, herald of the Gospel that it was, perhaps the most ostensibly joyful moment the liturgy had to offer.
As sequences and sequence repertories were always influx, changing over time along with the communities who recorded them and sang them, to dig into their many layers and extract the evidence the repertories provide leads us into the very midst of religious communities and their most vital concerns. Sequence repertories provide understanding concerning how the past was encountered and reshaped, and more generally what attitudes were to the creation of new things and the re-tention of older ones.
Three Benedictine Communities
Benedictine sequence repertories in the twelfth century bring to the fore two of the most famous women of the era: Heloise, abbess of the Paraclete, in Thibaudian lands near Troyes; and Hildegard, magistra of a newly founded Benedictine priory on the Rupertsberg, not far from Mainz. The women were contemporaries, Helo-ise dying in 1164 and Hildegard in 1179; both were in charge of instituting litur-gical practices for newly founded female religious houses; fortunately we know a great deal about both of them, but few scholars realize, perhaps, that both women
15https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/index.html?projektp1229072566, accessed 25 April 2019.
632 Women and Their Sequences
were deeply devoted to sequences as a genre of liturgical music. Because both women were reformers and builders of something new, they could indeed have merely adapted what was inherited. They didn’t; rather they cared enough about their sequences to seek out new ones and to commission or to compose some themselves.
It is difficult to say who did what and when in regard to the surviving liturgical texts and music from the Paraclete. Abelard said in the preface to thefirst install-ment of hymns that he wrote for the abbey that he did so at Heloise’s request, in-corporating her liturgical ideals. He also references a little collection he made of hymnsvelsequences, which Chrysogonus Waddell thinks was a collection of both kinds of pieces that no longer survives.16Several scholars have worked on the sub-stantial collection of hymn texts that survive by Abelard, including Waddell.17 They are highly variable in their forms and meters and tied to the liturgical goals apparently shared by Abelard and Heloise. If what Abelard says about her plat-form can be trusted, Heloise worked in this regard as a commissioner of chants for the liturgy celebrated in the house where she was abbess. The fact that the mel-odies don’t survive for any but one of these over one hundred hymn texts consti-tutes a major loss. Heloise praised Abelard’s exceptional melodic gifts, and his hymns must have been a treasure trove of song. His six planctus bear out her testi-mony; they are brilliantly complex both textually and musically; and the argument can be made that he wrote them for her, to console her, but seemingly, too, to con-sole himself.
What of their sequences? We are in better circumstances in some ways when it comes to the sequences written for the Paraclete, or, more accurately, chosen to be sung at the Paraclete. The liturgical contexts of the pieces can be found in Waddell’s edition of the ordinal, and this record of the liturgy proves, in spite of its late date and its copying in French, that the genre was extremely important in the liturgy designed by Abelard and Heloise. It is hard to say how many of the un-usual sequences found in the repertory were actually composed by Abelard (or even by Heloise); only one—“Epithalamica”—is now attributed to him by all scholars who work on this material.18But the repertory is significant enough to suggest that indeed they were highly attentive to the genre and that some of the pieces they chose
16Several sources of the liturgy at the Paraclete have been edited and studied by Chrysogonus
Wad-dell in various volumes of Cistercian Liturgical Studies (CSL). Most important for the present
discus-sion are the following:Hymn Collections from the Paraclete, vol. 1,Introduction and Commentary;
vol. 2,Edition, CLS 8–9 (Trappist, KY, 1989);The Old French Paraclete Ordinary and the Paraclete
Breviary: Introduction and Commentary, CLS 3 (Trappist, KY, 1985);The Old French Paraclete Or-dinary: Edition, CLS 4 (Trappist, KY, 1985);The Paraclete Breviary: Edition, CLS 5–7 (Trappist, KY,
1983); andThe Paraclete Statutes“Institututiones nostrae”, CLS 20 (Trappist, KY, 1987).
17In addition to Waddell,Hymn Collections, and the edition of the hymnal by Josef Szövérffy,
Hymnarius Paraclitensis: An Annotated Edition with Introduction, 2 vols., Medieval Classics: Texts
and Studies 2–3 (Albany, NY, 1975), see the discussions in Josef Szövérffy,“‘False’Use of‘Unfitting’
Hymns: Some Ideas Shared by Peter the Venerable, Peter Abelard and Heloise,”Revue bénédictine89
(1979): 187–99; and in Jan Ziolkowski,Letters of Peter Abelard: Beyond the Personal(Washington,
DC, 2008).
18Chrysogonus Waddell, “‘Epithalamica’: An Easter Sequence by Peter Abelard,”The Musical
Quarterly72 (1986): 239–71.
Women and Their Sequences 633
related to the lives of women at the abbey and were sung in charged dramatic cir-cumstances doubtless designed by them, for they are unique.
In“Epithalamica,”an exquisite and very long work, which is formally a cross between sequence and lai, the bride is the beloved of the Song of Songs who has lost her groom and rediscovers himin persona Christion Easter morning; through this work the handmaidens become a chorus sometimes singing in alternation with the bride, until all join in a paragon of praise. Strophes 7 and 8, chosen as an ex-ample from this long work, are interrelated by the repetition of their striking and tuneful music, making a pair, in this unusually structured piece, thefinal couplets of which create cross relationships. The playfulness of the language is striking, and the piece is wonderful to perform. The melodies for the two strophes in Example 2 below are the same, including the couplets that close out each, the places where the cross relationships occur (in bold and italics). These repetitions create a rela-tionship in the couplets between morning/day and the transformation of the sor-row at night. William Flynn has placed the sequence back into the context of the Easter liturgy at the Paraclete, and he says, of its functioning, “At the Paraclete, the choice of“Epithalamica”for the Easter sequence was inextricably tied up with its identity as an institution both created and maintained to address the specific requirements and special ministry of women.”19Through a new work such as this, the women became actors in a dramatic setting of their own acceptance and de-sign; the incorporation of this piece into their practice was a decision of their own making. This is not the only place in their liturgy where the texts and their dramatic situations may hold references to the lives and circumstances of thefirst abbess, Heloise, and the founder, Master Peter. In this example, the letters refer-ence the unfolding melodic units, beginning in this long work with A and proceed-ing through to O.
Text Melody
7a. Iam video quod optaveram, I
7b. iam teneo quod amaveram; I
7c. iam rideo quae sicfleveram, I
7d. plus gaudeo quam dolueram: I
7e.Risimane,flevinocte; J 7f.manerisi,nocteflevi. J
8a. Noctem insomnem dolor duxerat I0
8b. quem vehementem amor fecerat; I0
8c. dilatione votum creverat, I0
8d. donec amantem amans visitat. I0
8e.Plaususdie,planctusnocte; J 8f.dieplausus,nocteplanctus. J
[I now see what I had desired; I now hold what I had loved, I now laugh when before I had cried; and I rejoice more than I mourned. I laughed in the morning; I wept in the evening; at morning I laughed; in the evening I wept. // Pain created a
19William Flynn,“Letters, Liturgy, and Identity: The Use ofEpithalamicaat the Paraclete,”in
Sa-pientia et eloquentia: Meaning and Function in Liturgical Poetry, Music, Drama, and Biblical Com-mentary in the Middle Ages, ed. Gunilla Iversen and Nicholas Bell (Turnhout, 2009), 301–48, at 348.
634 Women and Their Sequences
sleepless night that love had made severe; the pledge increased with the delay until the lover came to the beloved. Clapping by day; a lament by night; by day clap-ping; by night a lament.]
Example 2.“Epithalamica,”as transcribed in Fassler,Anthology for Music in the Medieval
West, 71.
Hildegard can be viewed not as commissioner, as was perhaps the case with Heloise, but rather as a liturgical poet and composer. Most of her chants were cre-ated for the Divine Office, including, I would suggest, her playOrdo virtutum. Her chants for the Mass liturgy are few—one alleluia and one kyrie—but then there are her sequences: she wrote eight long and highly wrought works, themselves consti-tuting one of the most important genres in her compositional and poetic activities, and over a tenth of the whole: for the Virgin Mary; for the Holy Spirit; for saints of local stature, Disibod, Rupert, Matthias, Eucharius, Maximinus; and for Saint Ur-sula and the eleven thousand virgins, the latter a feast achieving major attention in her region at the time. This repertory is another testimony to the importance the genre held for her and her community.20
20Transcriptions and analyses of individual sequences by Hildegard can be found in Hildegard von
Bingen,Lieder: Faksimile Riesencodex (Hs. 2) der Hessischen Landesbibliothek Wiesbaden fol. 466–
481v, ed. Lorenz Welker, commentary by Michael Klaper (Wiesbaden, 1998); the manuscript is also
available online at http://www.hs-rm.de/de/service/hochschul-und-landesbibliothek/suchen-finden
/sondersammlungen/the-wiesbaden-giant-codex/ (last accessed 11 March 2019); Margot Fassler,“Volmar,
Hildegard, and St. Matthias,”inMedieval Music in Practice: Studies in Honor of Richard Crocker,
ed. Judith A. Peraino, Miscellanea 7 (Middleton, WI, 2013), 85–109; and Jennifer Bain,“Hildegard
of Bingen,‘O Jerusalem aurea civitas’(ca. 1150–1170),”inAnalytical Essays on Music by Women
Composers: Secular and Sacred Music to 1900, ed. Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft (Oxford,
2018), 11–46.
Women and Their Sequences 635
Hildegard’s chants survive primarily in two collections, both of which were cop-ied on the Rupertsberg during her lifetime.21A comparison of the writing down of these chants with those found in a local chant book from the early thirteen century demonstrates the great difference: the Hildegard manuscripts arrange the neumes precisely so the pitches can be read even by someone who doesn’t know the chants beforehand. The chants in Engelberg 103, by contrast, written, we believe, in nearby Sponheim, are unheightened, or adiastematic, and required the use of memory for their recovery.22It is fortunate that we have Hildegard’s chants in this other form of notation, for if we didn’t, the melodies could have been lost. Abelard’s planctus, for example, are very difficult to transcribe securely for this reason. The style of notation used for Hildegard’s chants is far from unique in her region, however, as study of several twelfth-century fragments now surviving in the Hes-sisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in Wiesbaden demonstrate; it is not possible to tell at this point from what monasteries these fragments originated.23 Hildegard’s se-quences are not in the style of the regular sequence, with its rhyming and accentual patterns. Rather, her works are written in a style closer to the earlier medieval se-quence, created in a kind of heightened prose, with irregular numbers of syllables in the strophes as they unfold, but still with a kind of double-versicle form prevail-ing and discernable to greater and lesser degrees dependprevail-ing on the piece. Her pro-vocative use and reuse of particular melodic cells provide numerous opportunities for text painting, and these come to the fore dramatically the more thorough a singer or choir’s familiarity with a given work is.24
21Hildegard von Bingen,Lieder: Faksimile Riesencodex; Hildegard von Bingen,Symphonia
harmo-niae caelestium revelationum: Dendermonde, St.-Pieters & Paulusabdij, ms. Cod. 9, ed. Peter van Poucke (Peer, Belgium, 1991). A transcription most generally following the Riesencodex is Hildegard
von Bingen,Lieder: Nach den Handschriften, ed. Pudentiana Barth, M. Immaculata Ritscher, and
Jo-seph Schmidt-Görg (Salzburg, 1969). The music of both manuscripts has been transcribed and is
avail-able on CANTUS. The texts of Hildegard’s chants are edited by Barbara Newman and of her play by
Peter Dronke inHildegardis Bingensis Opera minora, ed. Peter Dronke, Christopher P. Evans, Hugh
Feiss, Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Carolyn A. Muessig, and Barbara Newman, CCCM 226 (Turnhout,
2007), 337–477 and 481–521, respectively. For the chant texts translated into English, see Barbara
Newman, ed. and trans.,Symphonia, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, 1998); the playOrdo virtutumhas been
trans-lated by Peter Dronke in hisNine Medieval Latin Plays(Cambridge, UK, 1994), 147–84. See also
Hildegard of Bingen, Ordo virtutum: A Critical Edition, ed. Vincent Corrigan (Lions Bay, BC,
2013); and studies of the play in Marianne Richert Pfau and Stefan Morent,Hildegard von Bingen:
Der Klang des Himmels(Cologne, 2005); and my“Allegorical Architecture inScivias: Hildegard’s
Set-ting for theOrdo Virtutum,”Journal of the American Musicological Society67 (2014): 317–78.
22Tova Leigh Choate, William Flynn, and Margot Fassler,“Hildegard as Musical Hagiographer:
Engelberg, Stiftsbibliothek MS 103, and Her Songs for Saints Disibod and Ursula,”inA Companion
to Hildegard of Bingen, ed. Beverly Kienzle, George Ferzoco, and Debra Stoudt, Brill’s Companions to
the Christian Tradition 45 (Leiden, 2014), 193–220. This volume also provides a guide to the extensive
bibliography on Hildegard’s thought, including her poetry and music; also see Barbara Newman, ed.,
Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World(Berkeley, 1998), a pioneering group of
essays written in celebration of the ninth centennial of Hildegard’s birth.
23Discussion of these fragments is provided in my essay for theCambridge Companion to Hildegard
of Bingen, ed. Jennifer Bain (Cambridge, UK, forthcoming).
24For the workings of Hildegard’s tone painting within the framework of one sequence, see my
stud-ies of the sequence“Mathias Sanctus”found in“Volmar, Hildegard, and St. Matthias,”in Fassler,
Music in the Medieval West, 137–41; and especially in Fassler,Anthology for Music in the Medieval West, 96–102, which includes the text, translation, music, and a brief analytical study. (Matthias gen-erally has one t in German and two in English, this accounting for differences in orthography.)
636 Women and Their Sequences
The most famous of Hildegard’s sequences is“O virga ac diadema”for the Vir-gin Mary, a chant that nuns in Hildegard’s monastery after her death claimed they had heard her sing as she walked through the cloister, illumined by the Holy Spirit. Barbara Newman calls it one of Hildegard’sfinest works.25Hildegard weaves her most important ideas about the cosmos into this text, a work perhaps to be pro-claimed in community, making the liturgy, through her composition, a place for teaching and learning as well as for prayer. Whereas some of Hildegard’s sequences stretch and transform the double versicle form described above,“O virga”is fairly straightforward and readily comprehensible in this regard, as the music pairs the meanings of each half strophe: in this poem Mary refreshes and transforms the cos-mos through the floral song of the Son, and the new music sounding from her womb allows for humans to join temporarily in the angels’song from which they were once excluded by Eve.
The work is much recorded, and it is easy to hear how different in style this work is from the twelfth-century rhyming accentual verse in the sequence attrib-uted to Adam of Saint-Victor or even to Abelard, and yet the two “halves,” if you will, of each strophe are paired through the musical setting, although nothing is precisely measured here. Hildegard builds a hermeneutic of praise into the sing-ing, so the community becomes what it proclaims through her composition. Other composers do this too, as the sequence lends itself so well to this strategy, especially when there are several new and interrelated works that can play out across the en-tire year, as with Hildegard’s newly composed works, and as with those composed by the Victorines in Paris. But the difference is that Hildegard emphasizes the rec-reation of the cosmos through the Virgin’s newness, in the Mass liturgy, and she works out this theme like no other liturgical poet from the Latin Middle Ages did. Through this text (strophe 2 of“O virga ac diadema”) the idea of the Mass ritual and the central place of every human partaker was emphasized and explored through female voices, adding a new dimension to the unfolding of the more tradi-tional texts surrounding the sequence. In these proclaimed images, the resounding universe achieves sacramentality through the voice of the choir.26
2a. Ave, ave de tuo ventre alia vita processit qua Adamfilios suos denudaverat.
2b. Oflos, tu non germinasti de rore nec de guttis pluvie nec aer desuper te volavit sed
divina claritas in nobilissima virga te produxit.
[Hail, hail! From your womb came another life, the life that Adam stripped from his
chil-dren. Oflower, you did not spring from the dew, nor from drops of rain, nor did an airy
windfly over you, but the divine radiance brought you forth on the noblest bough.27]
25Newman,Symphonia, 277. On the reception of this chant, see Jennifer Bain,Hildegard and
Mu-sical Reception: The Modern Revival of a Medieval Composer(Cambridge, UK, 2015), 9–23.
26Hildegard’s chants could easily have been adapted for singing in male choirs as well, and there is
evidence that they were. Her chants for Saint Disibod, for example, were commissioned by the abbot of her former monastery, which was male and Benedictine, but had an enclosure for women as well.
27Text and translation in Newman,Symphonia, 128–32, at 128 and 131.
Women and Their Sequences 637
Example 3. Strophe 2 of Hildegard’s sequence“O uirga ac diadema.”
Barking Abbey, a Benedictine house onceflourishing on the outskirts of London, has bequeathed very few liturgical manuscripts and no sequentiary. But the outline of the sequence repertory can be established through the early fifteenth-century Barking Ordinal, a much-studied source, which records the incipits of liturgical texts and many rubrics about performance as well, as Anne Yardley and Katie Bugyis have pointed out in recent work on the ordinal.28It also contains a detailed calendar, with feasts interactive with the altars of the church. A chart of the se-quence repertory (Table 1) at Barking provides a different kind of evidence from the repertories of Heloise and Hildegard, for both their institutions were founded in the mid-twelfth century. Barking, on the other hand, was claimed by the nuns to be ancient, its founding going back to the seventh century; the nuns ignored its refounding after the Danish invasions, and clearly they used their liturgical prac-tices to substantiate this claim.29Layers of development as they designed them are present in this record of its earlyfifteenth-century practices. Most of the work on the ordinal has focused on the Divine Office and on the richly described ceremo-nies associated with the unfolding of the feasts and seasons. The sequence reper-tory is less studied, by comparison, and rightly so, as we have the incipits of the pieces only, no music, and often not even enough of the text to distinguish what
28Anne Bagnall Yardley,“Liturgy as the Site of Creative Engagement: Contributions of the Nuns of
Barking,”inBarking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture, ed. Jennifer N. Brown and Donna Alfano
Bussell (York, 2012), 267–82; Katie Bugyis,“Women Priests at Barking Abbey in the Late Middle
Ages,”inTaken Seriously: Women Intellectuals, Professionals, and Community Leaders of the
Medi-eval World, ed. Katie Bugyis, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, and John Van Engen (Woodbridge, UK, forth-coming). I am grateful to Professor Bugyis for reading this section of my essay and making useful sug-gestions for its improvement.
29E. A. Loftus and H. F. Chettle,A History of Barking Abbey(Barking, 1954). Emily Mitchell,“
Pa-trons and Politics at Twelfth-Century Barking Abbey,”Revue bénédictine113 (2003): 347–64,
dem-onstrates the ways in which high-ranking Norman nobility were able to place their daughters in posi-tions of authority at Barking in the decades after the Conquest.
638 Women and Their Sequences
piece it might be in catalogs of possibilities; it is also not possible to tell the natures of unique works that do not survive. Still, the incipits alone provide a great deal of evidence about Barking and its sequences.
The nuns of Barking sang an unusually large repertory of over one hundred se-quences, and many of these were repeated once, twice, or in some cases multiple times for common categories of saints; some sequences were divided into sections and sung on different days of a festive octave, as for example was the case with the sequence “Lauda Sion” for Corpus Christi. There were places in which the se-quence became a substitute for the offertory chant as well. Astonishingly, nearly afifth of the Barking sequences were unique to the abbey but cannot be otherwise traced, as the sources do not survive. Regardless of who created these works, their presence shows how much the genre meant to the women of Barking as a way to honor their saints, especially early abbesses and other women.30The most extreme example is Ethelberga, thefirst abbess, who had several sequences for her octave, all unique to this place, as far as can be told, and, if not the compositions of the nuns of Barking, at least works commissioned and approved by them. The lives of the three abbesses written by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin in the twelfth century were surely related to these works; as he was a skilled musician, he may have been the composer of some of them.31
The Barking women were shaping their liturgical practices and their sense of his-tory through this reperhis-tory, as the sequences they sang related both to the liturgy more broadly and also to their shrines and reliquaries. It was common in reli-gious communities to create sequences to increase veneration to particular saints, yet the nuns of Barking were exceptional in the degree to which they celebrated their histories through liturgical veneration of early figures, singing a great number of unique sequences to underscore within the Mass liturgy connections to their major saints’cults and shrines built into the architecture of their church and its grounds.32 Continuing the emphasis of the sequence repertory are some works in afi fteenth-century Barking hymnal, Cambridge, Trinity College Library, MS 1226. It contains three unique hymns for Ethelberga and one for her brother Erkenwald, the co-founder along with Ethelberga; and a hymn for Wulfhild (abbess of the community
30In a forthcoming study, Anne Bagnall Yardley reconstructs some of the office chant texts from
Barking through study of a Barking book of hours.
31Jennifer N. Brown and Donna Alfano Bussell,“Barking’s Lives, the Abbey and Its Abbesses,”in
Brown and Bussell,Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture, 1–30; Kay Slocum,“Goscelin of
Saint-Bertin and the Translation Ceremony for Saints Ethelburg, Hildelith, and Wulfhild,”in Brown
and Bussel,Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture, 73–93; and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne,Saints’
Lives and Women’s Literary Culture c. 1150–1300: Virginity and Its Authorizations(Oxford, 2001).
Rosalind Love has made a strong case for dating the translation of Barking’s three abbess-saints to
1087, noting that 7 March, the date of the Feast of the Translation, according to the abbey’s early
fifteenth-century ordinal, fell on Laetare Sunday in that year. She also has mentioned that Goscelin
re-located to Saint Augustine’s Canterbury around 1089, which means that he likelyfinished writing the
series of hagiographical texts for Barking before this date: see herThree Eleventh-Century Anglo-Latin
Saints’Lives: Vita S. Birini, Vita et Miracula S. Kenelmi and Vita S. Rumoldi(Oxford, 1996), xliii n. 165.
32For locations of shrines and further bibliography, see Donna Alfano Bussell and Joseph M.
Mc-Namara,“Barking Abbey: A GIS Map of a Medieval Nunnery,”Peregrinations4 (2013): 173–89.
Women and Their Sequences 639
Table1
Barking Sequence Repertory Compared to Three English Traditions, Winchester,
Twelfth Century, and Sarum (3 Sources), Earlier and Later1
Incipit Feast in Barking AH Win CotCal Sarum
1 Salus eterna Advent I 53:1 Yes Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
2 Benedicta es celorum
Eve of Nativity 54:252 No No No/No/Yes
3 Nato canunt omnia Nat. 1 53:24 Yes Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
4 Celeste organum Nat. 2 54:1 No Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
5 Caste et incorrupte Nat. 3 40:04 Yes No No/No/No
Celeste organum Sun. within the Oct.
6 Magnus deus Stephen 7:221 Yes Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
7 Novo ritu John No No No/No/No*
8 Celsa pueri Innocents 53:162 Yes Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
9 Inter laudes Thomas No No No No/No/No
Celeste organum Feriae
10 Eya recolamus 7th day Nat. 53:16 No Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
11 Celica resonat Circumcision 53:19 Yes Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
Magnus deus Oct. Stephen
12 Flore vernat Oct. John 55:217 No No No/No/No
Celsa pueri Oct. Innocents
13 Epiphaniam Epiphany 53:28 Yes Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
14 Gaudete vos Sunday after the Octave
54:3 No Yes No/No/No
15 In sapientia Octave of Epiphany 54:116 No No No/No/No
Gaudete vos I Sunday within the
Oct.
“ II Sunday
“ III Sunday
16 Fulgens preclara Easter 53:35 Yes Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
17 Dic nobis Fer. 2 53:37 Yes No Yes/Yes/Yes
18 Psalle lirica Fer. 3 40:23 Yes Yes No/Yes/No
19 Sancta cunctis Fer. 4 40:24 No No No/No/No
20 Laudes Christo Fer. 5 53:45 No No No/No/No
21 Victime Fer. 6 54:7 No Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
22 Mane prima Sat. 54:143 No Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
Fulgens In Oct.
Victime Sunday within the Oct.
“ II Sunday
“ III Sunday
“ IV Sunday
23 Rex omnipotens Ascension 53:66 Yes Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
24 Cantum canamus Vespers/Ascension No No No/No/No
25 Ad honorem trinitatis2
Friday No No No/No/No
26 Omnes gentes Saturday/Ascension 54:152 No No No/No/No
27 Salve pater salutaris Sunday Octave of the Ascension
No No No/No/No
28 Ympni Monday in the
Octave
No No No/No/No
29 Adoremus ascendentem
Table1(Continued)
Incipit Feast in Barking AH Win CotCal Sarum
Begins like the second strophe of“Profitentes unitatem”(not the Victorine work) 42:35?
Rex omnipotens Octave
30 Sancti spiritus Pentecost 53:70 Yes Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
31 Septiformis Fer. 2 No No No/No/No
32 Veni sancte Fer. 3 54:153 No No Yes/Yes/Yes
33 Alma chorus Fer. 4 53:87 Yes Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
34 Veni spiritus Fer. 5 53:71 No Yes Yes/Yes/No
Veni sancte spiritus Fer. 6
35 Benedicta sit Trinity 7:96 Yes Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
36 Adoremus unitatum Trinity: Octave 40:34 No No No/No/Yes
37 Lauda sion Corpus Christi 50:385 No No No/Yes/No
For the week, Lauda Sion is divided into 4 parts for thefirst four days
38 Ave vivens hostia Day 6 31:105 No No No/No/No
39 Ysaie prophetatus Day 7 No No No/No/No
Sundays throughout the year:quicumque vult
Sanctoral Cycle
40 Congaudentes Nicholas 54:66 No No Yes/Yes/Yes
Sequences for hours of the Virgin
41 Sats. in Advent:
Missus Gabriel 54:192 No No Yes/Yes/Yes
42 Daily: Mittit ad virginem 54:191 No No No/Yes/Yes
43 Conception of the Virgin: Alle celeste 53:97 Yes Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
44 Virginis venerande Lucy 53:246 No No Yes/Yes/Yes
45 Hac clara die Annunciation 53:98 Yes No Yes/Yes/Yes
46 Letabundus Mary after Christmas 54:2 No Yes Yes/No/Yes
Ethelburga
Several sequences: These works cannot be traced with certainty; they could be contrafacta
47 Gaude virgo regia 48 Iubilemus
49 Matris nostre 50 Dulci laude 51 Salve Mater
[Ethelberga]
52 O beate o sancte Maurus abbot No No No/No/No
53 Letabunda (contrafact of Letabundus adapted for Agnes?)
No No No/No//No
54 Illuxit dies Julianus No No No/No/No
Virginis venerande Octave of Agnes
Isaiae prophetatus Purification
55 Exultemus [gaudeamus]
Agatha 9:111 No No No/No/No
Virginis venerande Scholastica
56 Clare sanctorum Peter’s Chair 53:367 Yes Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
[for apostles]
“ Mathias
57 Fulget dies Edith and Tortitha 55:29? No No No/No/No
[There are other possibilities; common opening words] Octave of the trans. of Ethelburga: Gaude virgo regia
Table1(Continued)
Incipit Feast in Barking AH Win CotCal Sarum
Table1(Continued)
Incipit Feast in Barking AH Win CotCal Sarum
58 Benedicte Benedict 42:185 No No No/No/No
59 Superne Hildelitha 55:37? No Yes No/No/No
Hac clara Annunciation
60 Virgini marie Mary in Paschal Time 54:18 No No No/No/Yes
61 Ad hec colenda Elphegus 8:123 No Yes No/Yes/No
62 Recolentes George 9:219 No No No/No/No
[Recolamus Georgii?]
Clare sanctorum Mark
63 Fulget clara Erkenwald No No No/No/No
Clare sanctorum Philip and James
64 Hodierna Dunstan 53:142 No Yes No/Yes/No
65 Christo Regi Augustine 40:157 No No No/Yes/No
66 Ab hoc mundo Edmund No No No/No/No
Clare sanctorum Barnabas
O beate o sancte Botulphus
67 Eya gaudens caterva
Albanus 8:120 No No No/No/No
(In some Sarum) 68 Exsulta celum Nat. of John the Baptist 9:243 Yes Yes No/No/No 69 Inter natos Sun. Oct., J. the B. 55:186 No No No/No/Yes
70 Dulce voce Peter and Paul No No No/No/No
71 Fulget dies Marcial 40:256? Yes No No/No/No
[If this is the sequence sung for Saint Just of Auxerre, whose relic was at Winchester, and adapted for Marcial. Impossible to say without more evidence.]
Inter natos Oct. J. the B.
O beate o sancte Swithun
Clare sanctorum Trans. Thomas
Clare sanctorum
Sun. in the Oct. of the apostles
Benedicta [sit deitas?] Martinus, Bishop
Clare sanctorum Oct. P. and P.
72 Spe mercedis Trans. Thom. Martyr 55:9 No No Yes/Yes/Yes
Virginis venerande Amelburga
73 Laudum canora
[carmina] Benedict
53:131 No Yes No/Yes/No
74 Audi Sion Dedication No No No/No/No
Sancte Sion Fer. 2
Gaude virgo Fer. 3
75 Laudes deo Fer 4. Pentecost theme 54:14 Yes Yes Yes/No/Yes
Sancte sion Fer. 5
Gaude virgo Fer. 6
Laudes deo Fer. 7
76 Quam dilecta Oct. 55:30 No No Yes/No/Yes
77 Mane prima Magdalene 54:143 No Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
Also on the Octave of Magdalene
78Gaude pia Magdalene/Vespers No No No/No/No
79 Ave Stella Germanus [Many sequences begin with these words and could have been adapted for this saint]
80 Nunc luce Peter in Chains 37:276 No Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
Table1(Continued)
Incipit Feast in Barking AH Win CotCal Sarum
Table1(Continued)
Incipit Feast in Barking AH Win CotCal Sarum
Magnus dominus Finding of Stephen [probably Magnus deus]
81 In celesti hierarchia Dominic 55:115 No No No/No/No
82 Fulget mundo Transfiguration 53:85 No No No/No/No
83 Stola iucunditatis Lawrence 54:61 No Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
Recolentes Oct. of Lawrence
84 Pro nobis ora Lawrence/capitular Mass
37:275 No No No/No/No
[Pro nobis ora is for Vincent in AH, and this maybe an adaptation]
85 Area virga Assumption 7:107 Yes Yes Yes/Yes/Yes
86 Ave pater Bernard No No No/No/No
[There is a sacred song with this incipit: 15:164]
87 Alle Cantabile Bartholomew 53:129 Yes Yes No/No/No
O beate o sancte Audoenus
88 Laudes crucis Presentation of the relics
54:120 No No Yes/Yes/Yes
89 Opifex in operis Vespers No No No/No/No
90 Interni festi gaudia Augustine 55:74 No No No/No/No
91 Sancti Iohannis baptiste
Decollation 53:163 No No Yes/Yes/Yes
[Sancti baptisti Christi]
92 Ave decus Egidius [Many begin with these words, but none for Giles]
Gaude virgo regia Trans. Wulfhild
O beate o sancte Gregory
Alle celeste Nat. BVM
93 Christo Virginalis Wulfhild
p. 300. In the octave the sequences are sung in the feriae following the ordo of the cantrix.
Laudes crucis Cross
Gaude virgo regia Octave of Wulfhild
Clare sanctorum Matthew
94 Celo stella Trans. Ethelburge, Hildelithe, Wilfide
Recolentes Leodogarius
95 Laetabundus [Francisco] Francis 55:131 No No No/No/No
96 Alta voce Fidis 37:167 No No No/No/No
Exultemus Osithe
97 Mater syon Denis No No No/No/No
Celo stella Ethelburg
Iubilemus [or another] Within the Octave of Ethelburg [This would be a repeat of a se-quence sung during the octave.]
98 Summi regis in honore
Vespers
Salve mater Ethelberga Vespers
Dulci laude Vespers
Clare sanctorum Luke
99 Cantemus socie 11,000 virgins of Cologne [Opening of a Hymn by Sedulius]
Clare sanctorum Simon and Jude
100 De profundis christe meus Eustachius No No No/No/No
Benedicta [sit deitas?] Leonard
101 Sacerdotem Christi
Martin 53:181 Yes No Yes/Yes/Yes
Table1(Continued)
Incipit Feast in Barking AH Win CotCal Sarum
in the late tenth century).33The sequences were part of a larger campaign of literary, liturgical, artistic, and architectural production, the sum total of which served to establish the power and historical significance of Barking Abbey in England after the Conquest:“in the uncertainty of post-Conquest England, Barking acquired a rich literary corpus, which defined the Barking sisters’collective identity through their relationship to their relics and their past.”34
It is possible to compare the sequentiary of Barking to those of other English establishments, although only a handful of books with music survive from the re-gion and so conclusions remain tentative.35Still, some observations about the
na-33See Anne Bagnall Yardley,Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries
(New York, 2006); and her“Liturgy as the Site of Creative Engagement,”with special attention to
the hymn for Wulfhild.
34Thomas O’Donnell,“‘The Ladies Have Made Me Quite Fat’: Authors and Patrons at Barking
Ab-bey,”in Brown and Bussell,Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture, 94–114, at 94.
35Further comparison of pieces listed in Table 1 can be made by consulting the writings of David
Hiley, who has written extensively on the sequence in English sources: see Hiley,“The Rhymed
Se-quence in England—A Preliminary Survey,”inMusicologie médiévale: Notations et sequences; Actes
de la table ronde du C.N.R.S. à l’Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, 6–7 septembre 1982(Paris,
1987), 227–46; Hiley,“The Repertory of Sequences at Winchester,”inEssays on Medieval Music in
Honor of David G. Hughes, ed. Graeme M. Boone, Isham Library Papers 4 (Cambridge, MA, 1995),
153–93; and Hiley,“The English Background to the Nidaros Sequences,”in Kruckenberg and Haug,
The Sequences of Nidaros, 63–117. Helen Deeming’s work on a variety of sequences includes close
study of manuscripts, especially of fragmentary sources. Her edition Songs in British Sources,
c.1150–1300, Musica Britannica 95 (London, 2013), and the accompanying website http://www .diamm.ac.uk/resources/sbs/list-of-sources-chronological-groups/ (last accessed 11 March 2019) in-cludes many sequences and songs written in double-versicle form.
Table1(Continued)
Incipit Feast in Barking AH Win CotCal Sarum
102 Benedicta sit deitas
Erkenwaldus No No No/No/No
103 Omnisfidelium Edmund
104 Ave mundi Oblation/BVM 54:217 No No Yes/Yes/Yes
105 Sponsa Christi Cecilia 55:120 No No No/No/No
106 Dilecto regi Katherine 40:258 No No No/Yes/No
As above for Edmund Octave of Edmund
1I am grateful to Professor Anne Bagnall Yardley for her comments on this table and suggestions to
improve its contents.
2Hard to see what piece this might be from the evidence, but for some possibilities, see Peter Jeffery,“A
Four-Part‘In Seculum’Hocket and a Mensural Sequence in an Unknown Fragment,”Journal of the
American Musicological Society37 (1984): 1–48.
Note. Thefirst time a sequence title appears in Barking, it and its row are in bold. Only the bolded
instances are evaluated in other sources.Abbreviations: AH5Analecta Hymnica(listed by volume:
number of work). Win5Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 473 and Ob 775, Winchester,first
half of the eleventh century; CotCal5London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A XIV, twelfth
century; Sarum5Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Lat. 24, mid-thirteenth century; Paris,
Bib-liothèque de l’Arsenal 135, late thirteenth century; and London, British Library, MS Add. 11 414, third
quarter of the fourteenth century.“Yes”5the work is present in the source;“No”5not present in the
source (note the sequence may be sung in another liturgical location). Table1(Continued)
Incipit Feast in Barking AH Win CotCal Sarum
644 Women and Their Sequences
ture of the repertory provide evidence for understanding life, liturgy, and literary production in the monastery. It is clear,first of all, and as argued above, that the creation of new works, especially for the veneration of local saints from the distant past, was of high interest to the sisters; evidently, they had an expansive program and the energy and means to carry it out. The time in which this work took place can be told to a degree as well. First, the sequence repertory of Barking seemingly was not early, dating to the decades before the Conquest. Thefirst column in Ta-ble 1 compares the sequentiary at Barking with that found in Winchester in the first half of the eleventh century; there are very few correspondences, and these are only of sequences for major feasts, works that were of such widespread accep-tance that they would be found in many repertories throughout Europe, including works for Christmas and the Octave, Circumcision, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity, and“Clare Sanctorum”(Notker) for the common of the apos-tles. There are hardly any surprises—places where an early work survives at Bark-ing and practically nowhere else. The distinctions are rather in the later layer of the repertory.
The situation for the four sequences at Christmas is telling of the nature of the collection as a whole (vigil Mass and three Masses of the day), although there are no newly composed works in this set. For the eve of the feast, the nuns sang“ Ben-edicta es caelorum,”a Marian work written in the thirteenth century, and probably in northern France; this piece was coming into England from the Continent in course of the thirteenth century and, although lacking in early Sarum sources and in most Benedictine sources, is found in London, BL 11414, from the third quarter of the fourteenth century. Its presence here shows both that Barking was open to new, rhyming rhythmic sequences and that Sarum repertories were prob-ably known and influential at Barking. The three sequences of Christmas show three different situations and kinds of decisions.“Nato canunt”for thefirst Mass is a tried-and-true tenth-century work, present in southern French sources and found in the Winchester repertories as well as the twelfth-century repertory repre-sented by London, BL, MS Cotton Caligula A XIV, and many Sarum sources as well. With this work Barking adhered to tradition. The second piece,“Celeste or-ganum,”most likely written in the mid-eleventh century, is thefirst work in Ana-lecta hymnica, vol. 54, seen as an early“transitional style”piece, work demonstrat-ing a propensity toward rhyme and rhythmic regularity yet exhibitdemonstrat-ing variety of form within individual strophes.“Celeste organum,”foundfirst in southern French sources, was sung at Cluny and in northern France and was in England already in the twelfth century, where it remained popular and was adopted by Sarum sources from the thirteenth century forward. The third work, however, “Caste et in-corupte,”sung for the major Mass of Christmas Day, is a rare work that shows upfirst in the late eleventh century in London, BL, MS Harley 2961, a collection copied in Exeter. It appears in no other major English collection, save London, BL, MS Additional 74236, a fourteenth-century sequentiary from Sherbourne. Em-bedded in the sequence is the opening of an eleventh-century trope for Christmas, “Ecce puerpera”(AH 37:6), and verses from the tenth-century Aquitanian sequence “Celebranda”(AH 7:24). With such an array of works for Christmas, the Barking nuns put forward an energetic program, one that reflected a willingness to choose the pieces desired from a range of possibilities, combining the old, the new, the
Women and Their Sequences 645
well-known, and the rare, and creating a set of works with a strong Marian empha-sis at Christmas, one in keeping with an overriding emphaempha-sis on the female saints venerated at the abbey, especially those saints that belonged to the Anglo-Saxon his-tory of this abbey. This sequentiary was shaped by women who worked to recover and sustain their institutional history in the centuries after the Conquest, women who continued to refresh their practices with newly created sequences decade by decade.
Two Contrasting Communities: Cistercians and Dominicans in Germany Cistercians
Among the many female communities who sang sequences that would lend them-selves well to this study were Augustinian canonesses, some of whom, such as the women of Klosterneuberg, sang large repertories.36The Bridgettines, by contrast, had a small repertory, but they cycled through this carefully chosen group of se-quences for stages in the life of the Virgin Mary every week and added some fes-tive pieces as well.37One of the most intriguing sequentiaries from a female house is Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, MS Sankt-Georgen 3, dated to around 1500, which I believe may be from the Franciscan house dedicated to Saint Ursula in Villigen.38In general Franciscans did not have large sequence repertories, nor-mally only a handful of well-known pieces, but this manuscript suggests that the genre was beloved by these reformed Franciscan sisters: there are seventy-five works, some of them quite rare. In this part of our discussion, we look at two con-trasting groups: Cistercian nuns, on the one hand, who were generally not supposed to sing sequences at all; and Dominicans, on the other, who were mandated to sing
36Transcribing music so the pitches are secure is characteristic of several houses of female religious,
with the canonesses of Klosterneuberg among the most telling. In fact, books belonging to the canon-esses of Klosterneuburg are marked by this practice, and the gradual Klosterneuberg 588, from around 1300, has a large repertory of sequences, all of which can be securely transcribed (the manuscript is
digitized and online). See Franz Karl Prassl,“Psallat ecclesia mater: Studien zu Repertoire und
Ver-wendung von Sequenzen in der Liturgieösterreichischer Augustinerchorherren vom 12. bis zum 16.
Jh.”(PhD diss., Karl-Franzens-Universität, Graz, 1987) for further discussion. This dissertation is
now online, with searchable comparative tables of the many sequence repertories studied in the work, at http://www.cantusplanus.at/en-uk/austriaca/prassl/index.php (last accessed 11 March 2019). Prassl
was thefirst scholar to realize that the notation of the canonesses of Klosterneuberg, which is placed
on a staff (unlike that of the men, which is unheightened), is a way to distinguish which of the liturgical books from this house belonged to the women. For further discussion of differences between the
litur-gical practices of the canons and canonesses, see Michael Norton and Amelia J. Carr,“Liturgical
Man-uscripts, Liturgical Practice, and the Women of Klosterneuburg,”Traditio66 (2011): 67–169; Robert
Klugseder, “Studien zur mittelalterlichen liturgischen Tradition der Klosterneuburger
Augustiner-klöster St Maria und St Magdalena,”Musicologica austriaca27 (2008): 11–42. Antiphoners from
Klosterneuberg have been studied in some detail by Debra LaCoste,“The Earliest Klosterneuburg
Antiphoners,”(PhD diss., University of Western Ontario, 2000).
37On Birgittine sequences, see Karin Strinnholm Lagergren,“The Birgittine Mass Liturgy through
Five Centuries: A Case Study of the Uden Sources,”Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft57 (2016): 49–71.
38The manuscript is tabulated in Bower’s Clavis Sequentiarum. My study of the historical context of
this manuscript and of its repertory is currently in progress.
646 Women and Their Sequences
