Restoration or Invention? Archbishop Cisneros and the Mozarabic Rite in Toledo

As archbishop of Toledo from 1495 to 1517, Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros carried out a multifaceted campaign of support for the Mozarabic rite, which had been preserved in the Middle Ages by Christians living in Toledo under Muslim rule. Although the Roman rite was introduced into the cathedral in 1086, the Toledan Mozarabs had continued to follow their ancient liturgy in their parishes. By the end of the Middle Ages, however, the rite was rarely celebrated. Fearing that it might become obsolete, in 1501 Cisneros endowed a chapel in his cathedral for the Mozarabic rite and established a clergy of thirteen chaplains to celebrate the Mass and Office regularly. Furthermore, he oversaw a committee that assisted a canon of the cathedral, Alfonso Ortiz, in preparing editions of the Mozarabic missal and breviary that were published in 1500 and 1502, respectively. Despite the contemporary descriptions of these actions as a restoration of a partly lapsed practice, the editions produced under Cisneros’s patronage and the choirbooks he had created for the chapel were as much a reinvention of the rite as a renewal of it. The resulting rite, which is more accurately termed “neo-Mozarabic,” gradually became an important component of Spanish national identity, and in this sense can be considered an instance of the “invention of tradition” as described by Hobsbawm and Ranger. This article focuses on the reception history of Cisneros’s liturgical project in the early modern period, analyzing descriptions of the creation of the neo-Mozarabic rite. The earliest narrative sources are the prefaces to the editions of the Mozarabic missal and breviary, with their nearly identical colophons. Other sources used here include the early sixteenth-century account by Juan de Vallejo, the midcentury biography of Cisneros by Gómez de Castro, the early seventeenth-century biography by Eugenio de Robles, and other writings from the seventeenth and eighteenth century. What began as a philological project in the spirit of the humanist improvement of corrupted texts soon took on other associations. In 1509, a year after the use of the Mozarabic rite in the cathedral was approved by Pope Julius II, Cisneros led the conquest of Oran, which was part of a new crusade to North Africa to convert Muslims as an extension of the idea of Christian reconquest encouraged by the Catholic monarchs. It remains open to question whether the Cisneros “restoration” of the rite was inherently nationalist in inspiration, but it is certain that he commissioned a representation of the conquest of Oran for the ceiling decoration of the Mozarabic Chapel, and the juxtaposition was noted by every writer in the early modern period. By the eighteenth century, the medieval Mozarabic liturgy had become a national symbol. When the Archbishop of Mexico (and future archbishop of Toledo), Francisco Antonio Lorenzana (1722–1804), published an edition of Mozarabic mass for Saint James in Puebla (1770), he showed himself to be a true follower of Cisneros, who had effectively reinvented the rite and ensured its future status

Cluniac Spaces of Performance

As Dominique Iogna-Prat, Didier Méhu, Barbara Rosenwein, and other historians have shown, Cluny played a central role in the shaping of sacred space in medieval Europe. The founder, William of Aquitaine, gave the abbey to Saints Peter and Paul and made it directly subject to Rome; the popes accorded it immunity and exemption. In 931 John XI declared Cluny free of the jurisdiction of secular authorities, and in 998 Gregory V made Cluny exempt from the control of the local bishop. In 1024 John ..

Troubadour Song as Performance: A Context for Guiraut Riquier’s “Pus sabers no’m val ni sens”

The songs of the troubadours present the fundamental challenge of understanding poetry as music. Although the Old Occitan lyric corpus was a sung tradition from its origins in the twelfth century, we do not know exactly how it sounded; the poetry and musical notation of troubadour song are only skeletal vestiges awaiting completion by the imagination. Miniature biographies of the troubadours known as vidas, which combine elements of fact and fiction, describe some poets as performers who sang and played instruments, while others apparently did not. Most manuscript sources of troubadour song lack musical notation; the few chansonniers that do include it provide the pitches and text underlay for one strophe of melody, with the remaining strophes of text laid out in prose format. The absence of music from so much of the written transmission of the corpus can be attributed to factors such as predominantly oral transmission of the melodies (resulting in their loss as the tradition waned) and the circumstances of compilation, which favored the presentation of the songs as poems. The repertory travelled in the thirteenth century to northern France, Italy, the Iberian peninsula and beyond through the movement of poets, singers, patrons, and not least, the formation of the manuscript tradition. As Marisa Galvez notes, the very concept of a troubadour corpus as an authorial tradition emerged from the chansonniers. The constitution of poetic personae in these manuscripts stands in for the construction of poetic agency and voice that would have occurred in performance (2012: 59–64). Many nonmusical, nonverbal components of performance that are now irrecoverable were as much part of the song as the melody and text, and were probably embedded in its early reception: the performers’ appearance and gestures, their relationship to the audience, their present or absent patrons

The Devil Made Me Do It: Demonic Intervention in the Medieval Monastic Liturgy

The manifold appearances of demons and the Devil are central themes in the monastic literature of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Just as a more general fascination with the diabolical infuses medieval visual culture with grotesque or startling images, a more specific instance of this preoccupation produced texts in which demonic interventions interfere and sometimes even intersect with the central activity of monastic life: the divine office. Appearances and interventions by demons are mentioned in a variety of sources including early monastic rules, the Five Books of the Histories by the eleventh-century monk Radulfus Glaber, Hildegard of Bingen's Ordo Virtutum and her letter to the Prelates of Mainz, Peter the Venerable's De miraculis, the Dialogue on Miracles by the Cistercian novicemaster Caesarius of Heisterbach, and the Cistercian Exordium Magnum, among other texts. The theme of demonic intervention underlines the theology of the liturgy that also shaped Cistercian anecdotes about the presence of angels who evaluated the quality of singing monks' devotion

Les coutumiers clunisiens

Le séminaire international qui s’est tenu les 7 et 8 juin 2002 au Centre d’études médiévales d’Auxerre et réunissait une bonne vingtaine de chercheurs de France, d’Allemagne, d’Italie, d’Angleterre, des États-Unis et du Canada, portait sur les coutumiers clunisiens. L’objectif principal des discussions et présentations de cette rencontre était de mieux cerner l’emploi de ces textes tant par les moines d’autrefois que par les médiévistes d’aujourd’hui. Du fait de sa très grande richesse, ses ..

Formation and degradation of chaotic terrain in the Galaxias regions of Mars: implications for near-surface storage of ice

Galaxias Chaos is a region of low plateaus separated by narrow fractures – a chaotic terrain. Galaxias Mensae and Galaxias Colles are characterised by mesa and knobby terrains of individual landforms, or small assemblages, separated by plains. Galaxias Chaos has been attributed to ground disturbance due to sublimation in shallow subsurface ice-rich deposits, Galaxias Mensae and Galaxias Colles to sublimation and degradation of icy surface materials, without production of chaotic terrain. Liquid water has not been regarded as a product of the degradation of these icy terrains. This paper asks two research questions: (1) what was the total extent of the different modes of landscape degradation, especially chaotic terrain, involved in producing the present landscapes of Galaxias Chaos and Galaxias Mensae–Colles; (2) can the generation of liquid water as a product of landscape degradation be ruled-out? Using a morphological-statistical approach, including power spectrum analysis of relief, our observations and analyses show that present mesa-knobby terrains of Galaxias Mensae–Colles evolved from a landscape that had the same directional pattern and relief as presently found in Galaxias Chaos. This terrain extended across ∼440,000 km2 but ∼22,000 km3 (average thickness, 77 m) have been lost across ∼285,000 km2. This represents a significant loss of ice-bearing deposits. Moreover, this surface degradation was spatially partitioned by landforms associated with elevated ground heating and the transmission of a fluid in the shallow subsurface towards a distal channel. In answer to research question 2, it cannot be determined definitively if the fluid involved was groundwater, generated by the thermal destabilisation of the icy deposits, or low viscosity lava. However, it is likely that the degradation of Galaxias Mensae–Colles was not a consequence of sublimation alone. These findings underscore the significance of cryo-volcanic interactions in the cycling of water between the Martian surface and the atmosphere

Visibilité et présence de l’image dans l’espace ecclésial

Cet ouvrage met au cœur de son propos une interrogation simple : dans l’organisation complexe de l’espace de l’église médiévale, les emplacements choisis pour les images qui ornent les murs et les objets n’offrent pas toujours la possibilité de voir celles-ci, d’en déchiffrer le contenu. Certaines semblent réservées à des groupes de l’assemblée stationnant dans des espaces spécifiques, d’autres ne sont pas visibles depuis les principales zones affectées aux fidèles ou aux clercs, d’autres encore sont situées trop haut. Le rapport, a priori évident, entre représentation et visibilité se trouve donc souvent démenti, appelant alors une nouvelle notion, celle de présence. Analyser la tension existant entre ces trois catégories – figuration, visibilité et présence – implique une étude croisée des œuvres figurées, des monuments et des sources écrites. Les notions de mobilité et de fixité permettent également de prendre en compte les multiples jeux d’échelles à l’œuvre dans ce lieu rituel qu’est l’église, impliquant des objets, des manuscrits, des dispositifs liturgiques, des gestes, des déplacements physiques, dialoguant avec un décor appliqué au corps même du monument, épousant l’immobilité de l’architecture. Les cinq chapitres thématiques qui organisent ce volume mettent en regard différents cas issus de l’Occident médiéval et de l’Orient byzantin, selon une chronologie longue (de l’Antiquité tardive à la fin du Moyen Âge), dans une volonté de décloisonner les disciplines et les aires géographiques afin de tirer tous les enseignements d’une approche transversale de l’image médiévale