Singing the New Song Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England PDF
Preview Singing the New Song Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England
Singing the New Song D l d D t | 5/11/18 224 PM THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor Edward Peters, Founding Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher. D l d D t | 5/11/18 224 PM Singing the New Song Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England Katherine Zieman UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS Philadelphia D l d D t | 5/11/18 224 PM Copyright © 2008 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4051-1 ISBN-10: 0-8122-4051-0 D l d D t | 5/11/18 224 PM Contents LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS vii PREFACE ix 1. EX ORE INFANTIUM: LITERACY AND ELEMENTARY EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND 1 2. SINGING THE NEW SONG: LITERACY, CLERICAL IDENTITY, AND THE DISCOURSE OF CHORAL COMMUNITY 40 3. LEGERE ET NON INTELLEGERE NEGLIGERE EST: THE POLITICS OF UNDERSTANDING 73 4. EXTRAGRAMMATICAL LITERACIES AND THE LATINITY OF THE LAITY 114 5. “ÞE LOMES ÞAT Y LABORE WITH”: VERNACULAR POETICS, CLERGIE, AND THE REPERTOIRE OF READING AND SINGING IN PIERS PLOWMAN 150 6. READING, SINGING, AND PUBLICATION IN THE CANTERBURY TALES 181 NOTES 211 BIBLIOGRAPHY 263 INDEX 285 D l d D t | 5/11/18 225 PM This page intentionally left blank D l d D t | 5/11/18 225 PM Illustrations Figure 1. Initial “C” of Psalm 97 (Cantate Domino canticum novum) in the “Derby Psalter” 45 Figure 2. Initial for Psalm 80 (Exultate Deo adiutori nostro) depicting King David striking bells 46 Figure 3. Miniature from Livre des propriétés des choses, depicting King David striking weighted bells 46 Figure 4. Initial “C” of Psalm 97 (Cantate Domino canticum novum) in the “Ellesmere Psalter” 67 Figure 5. The Education of the Virgin, Church of All Saints, North Street, York 132 Figure 6. St. Anne and Virgin reading from the “Burnet Psalter” 141 A th ti t d This page intentionally left blank A th ti t d Preface This study began—and in fact still begins—with Chaucer’s “litel clergeon,” the infantile hero of the Prioress’s Tale. My initial interest was not so much in the tale itself but in the early educational practices it represented and their formalization in that distinctively medieval institution, the “song school.” Presuming, as I did, that reading ability was regularly acquired by learning to sing, I had hoped to discover the implications of such a practice for a historical understanding of literacy. After I had surveyed the extant evi- dence and current scholarship, however, two things became apparent: fi rst, that the “song school,” as a determinate institution that remained a stable element of elementary education throughout the medieval period, was in part the creation of modern scholarship; and second, that this creation was infl ected by attitudes toward and investments in the medieval liturgy that had not been fully examined. As the project continued, the “song school” became merely the starting point for a much more extensive study of medieval liturgical practice and its relationship to literacy. The present book represents only a partial result of this investigation. Many scholars acknowledge innovations in literate practices in England in the fourteenth- and early fi fteenth-century period covered by this study. Most of these innovations, however, have been related to the ascendancy of the vernacular, which is seen as competing with, and even subverting, Latin as the fi rmly installed language of privilege.1 Such changes are fre- quently attributed to an aspiring laity, often characterized as “increasingly literate,” though this literacy is most often associated with vernacular spec- ulative and devotional writings. Liturgical practice—Latin textual practice governed by ecclesiastical institutions—rarely enters signifi cantly into such discussions. The cultural function of the liturgy is generally considered one of conservative repetition, not innovation or creation. My study of patterns in educational benefaction connected with song, however, suggested a dif- ferent picture: that liturgical practice was in fact central to fourteenth- and fi fteenth-century developments in the fi eld of literacy. In attending to the terms by which young boys would be initiated into some form of cleri- cal status, patrons of liturgy and learning were able to dissect and stratify A th ti t d x Preface components of clerical literacy at an institutional level. Further research revealed that the institutional gestures of wealthy benefactors represented merely one instance of the centrality of liturgy to issues of learning and literacy. Whatever innovations emerged elsewhere, liturgy remained a site in which changing textual practices and religious values were integrated in a culture that still conceived of itself as a Christian textual community for whom the performance of sacred texts played a vital role. Because my primary interest is literacy, for the purposes of this study I have treated liturgy—at least the central liturgical activities of reading and singing on which I focus—primarily as verbal practice. In so doing I by no means wish to deny the importance of the musical textuality of song;2 I merely concede that song’s relationship to other uses of the writ- ten word can be elucidated most easily by focusing on its verbal aspects. In like fashion, I have privileged the verbal aspects of the liturgy over other ritual and sacramental action, using the term “liturgy” to refer above all to the Liturgy of the Word and related verbal practices.3 While isolating the verbal does limit the investigation, it has the virtue of focusing attention on the salient paradox of medieval Christian liturgy: that it participated simultaneously in the worlds of both orality and literacy. My examina- tion of this hybrid textual practice and the institutions and social relations it engendered is meant to serve as a counterpoint to studies by M. T. Clanchy and Richard Firth Green that have clearly demonstrated that the late medieval period was a time of transition in terms of uses of writing in other spheres of social interaction.4 Both have described how writing came to supplant oral forms of communication or how it objectifi ed relations of power formerly transacted through ritual and ceremony. The presence and persistence of a ritual practice that from its inception was based on the written word does not contradict their fi ndings, but it does complicate any binary distinctions between oral and written and between ritual and docu- mentary culture that one might be tempted to extrapolate from them. Though it involved both oral and written practices, medieval liturgy is more commonly associated with orality and ritual or traditional culture. As a performative practice centered on the voice, it elicits notions of embodied, communal knowledge that requires physical proximity to be enacted. Liturgy is thus the quintessential signifi er of presence or, more specifi cally, of a recuperative presence that allowed the Word of God to be re-presented and thus heard as the voice of God. The common claim that punctuation used in manuscripts is descended from neumatic notation of music—a claim Leo Treitler has persuasively called into question5—suggests that A th ti t d
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