Music and Liturgy for the Cult of Saints
- LAST REVIEWED: 27 October 2021
- LAST MODIFIED: 27 October 2021
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396584-0290
- LAST REVIEWED: 27 October 2021
- LAST MODIFIED: 27 October 2021
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396584-0290
Introduction
The Christian liturgy was a central aspect of everyday life during the European Middle Ages, not only for priests or monastics, whose duties included performing Mass or the daily Office, but also for the common person, whose life revolved around the cycles and important dates of the Christian calendar (e.g., Christmas and Easter). Religious festivals, celebrations, and expressions of lay piety disrupted the quotidian rhythms of both urban and rural medieval society. For most days in the Christian calendar, there was a specific day of veneration (“festa” in Latin or “feast” in English) for important holy figures, known as saints, who were believed to have led exemplary lives and acted as intercessors in heaven between the pious and God. The set of religious and cultural practices venerating individual saints is called a “cult.” Cultic devotion was manifested through official and non-official means; at the core of official veneration was a musical-liturgical tradition proper to a saint, and recited on that saint’s feast day. For the highest-ranking saints, this included music for a Mass, and for the eight services of the daily Office proper to the relevant saint. The veneration of saints, therefore, required vast repertories of music, and new music was constantly composed, not only for newly proclaimed saints, but also in association with the growth and development of existing saints’ cults. Music and liturgy can therefore evince the diffusion or intensification of cults over time and place. Newly created or adapted liturgies reveal chosen emphases drawn from a received text hagiography, and therefore provide evidence for cultural values. Liturgies of the daily Office, which were in flux and regionally diverse, are particularly rich in this regard, providing their creators and singers greater opportunity for personalization than the Mass. Studying liturgy can therefore furnish added nuance to a given saint’s written life, and is a good place to start when investigating the history and cultural context of a saint. Liturgy was a multimedia and multisensory ritual, involving music, spoken word, visual arts, staging in architecture, and smells, to name a few. Given its scope, modern liturgical scholarship presents unique challenges for students of the discipline, and wading through the vast ocean of current and preexisting scholarship can be daunting. This bibliography has been curated with the primary goal of guiding students of liturgy and the cult of saints toward a necessarily holistic and interdisciplinary understanding of the topic.
General Overviews
The sources in the sections Saints’ Cults, Liturgy, Music and Performance, and Manuscripts and Notation provide an accessible starting place for research on saints’ cults and liturgy. As with any academic field, there is a certain level of broader understanding that is helpful in the pursuit of more specific liturgiological study. This includes general knowledge not only of how saints’ cults and liturgy functioned and interacted during the Middle Ages, but also of systems of music theory and notation, and of how liturgical sources were disseminated in the medieval manuscript tradition. General information relating to these subjects can also be found in the following other Oxford Bibliographies entries: Liturgy, Mass, Medieval Music, Liturgical Drama, and Liturgical Processions.
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- Aelred of Rievaulx
- Alcuin of York
- Alexander the Great
- Alfonso X
- Alfred the Great
- Alighieri, Dante
- Alliterative Verse in Middle English
- Ancrene Wisse
- Angevin Dynasty
- Anglo-Norman Realm
- Anglo-Saxon Art
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- Apocalypticism, Millennialism, and Messianism
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- Art and Pilgrimage
- Art in Italy
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- Bernardus Silvestris
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- Book of Durrow
- Book of Kells
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- Carolingian Era
- Carolingian Manuscript Illumination
- Carolingian Metalwork
- Carthusians and Eremitic Orders
- Cecco d’Ascoli (Francesco Stabili)
- Charlemagne
- Charles d’Orléans
- Charters of the British Isles
- Chaucer, Geoffrey
- Childhood
- Christian Mysticism
- Christianity and the Church in Post-Conquest England
- Christianity and the Church in Pre-Conquest England
- Christina of Markyate
- Chronicles (East Norse, Rhymed Chronicles)
- Chronicles of England and the British Isles
- Church of the Holy Sepulchre, The
- Cistercian Architecture
- Cistercians, The
- Clanvowe, John
- Classics in the Middle Ages
- Cloud of Unknowing and Related Texts, The
- Coins
- Constantinople and Byzantine Cities
- Contemporary Sagas (Bishops’ sagas and Sturlunga saga)
- Coptic Art
- Corpus Christi
- Councils and Synods of the Medieval Church
- Crusades, The
- Crusading Warfare
- Cynewulf
- da Barberino, Francesco
- da Lentini, Giacomo
- da Tempo, Antonio and da Sommacampagna, Gidino
- da Todi, Iacopone
- Dance
- Dance of Death
- d’Arezzo, Ristoro
- de la Sale, Antoine
- de’ Rossi, Nicolò
- de Santa Maria, Cantigas
- Death and Dying in England
- Decorative Arts
- delle Vigne, Pier
- Drama in Britain
- Dress
- Dutch Theater and Drama
- Early Italian Humanists
- Economic History
- Eddic Poetry
- El Cid
- England, Pre-Conquest
- England, Towns and Cities Medieval
- English Prosody
- Exeter Book, The
- Falconry
- Family Letters in 15th Century England
- Family Life in the Middle Ages
- Feast of Fools
- Female Monasticism to 1100
- Feudalism
- Findern Manuscript (CUL Ff.i.6), The
- Florence
- Folk Custom and Entertainment
- Food, Drink, and Diet
- Fornaldarsögur
- France
- French Drama
- French Monarchy, The
- French of England, The
- Friars
- Froissart, Jean
- Games and Recreations
- Gawain Poet, The
- German Drama
- Gerson, Jean
- Glass, Stained
- Gothic Art
- Gower, John
- Gregory VII
- Guilds
- Hagiography in the Byzantine Empire
- Handbooks for Confessors
- Hardyng, John
- Harley 2253 Manuscript, The
- Hiberno-Latin Literature
- High Crosses
- Hilton, Walter
- Historical Literature (Íslendingabók, Landnámabók)
- Hoccleve, Thomas
- Hood, Robin
- Hospitals in the Middle Ages
- Hundred Years War
- Hungary
- Hungary, Latin Literacy in Medieval
- Hungary, Libraries in Medieval
- Hymns
- Icons
- Illuminated Manuscripts
- Illustrated Beatus Manuscripts
- Insular Art
- Insular Manuscript Illumination
- Islamic Architecture (622–1500)
- Italian Cantari
- Italian Chronicles
- Italian Drama
- Italian Mural Decoration
- Italian Novella, The
- Italian Religious Writers of the Trecento
- Italian Rhetoricians
- Jewish Manuscript Illumination
- Jews and Judaism in Medieval Europe
- Julian of Norwich
- Junius Manuscript, The
- King Arthur
- Kings and Monarchy, 1066-1485, English
- Kings’ Sagas
- Knapwell, Richard
- Kraków
- Lancelot-Grail Cycle
- Late Medieval Preaching
- Latin and Vernacular Song in Medieval Italy
- Latin Arts of Poetry and Prose, Medieval
- Latino, Brunetto
- Learned and Scientific Literature
- Ælfric
- Libraries in England and Wales
- Lindisfarne Gospels
- Liturgical Drama
- Liturgical Processions
- Liturgy
- Lollards and John Wyclif, The
- Lombards in Italy
- London, Medieval
- Love, Nicholas
- Low Countries
- Lydgate, John
- Machaut, Guillaume de
- Magic in the Medieval Theater
- Maidstone, Richard
- Malmesbury, Aldhelm of
- Malory, Sir Thomas
- Manuscript Illumination, Ottonian
- Marie de France
- Markets and Fairs
- Masculinity and Male Sexuality in the Middle Ages
- Medicine
- Medieval Archaeology in Britain, Fifth to Eleventh Centuri...
- Medieval Archaeology in Britain, Twelfth to Fifteenth Cent...
- Medieval Bologna
- Medieval Chant for the Mass Ordinary
- Medieval English Universities
- Medieval Ivories
- Medieval Latin Commentaries on Classical Myth
- Medieval Music Theory
- Medieval Naples
- Medieval Optics
- Melusine
- Mendicant Orders and Late Medieval Art Patronage in Italy
- Middle English Language
- Middle English Lyric
- Mirk, John
- Mosaics in Italy
- Mozarabic Art
- Music and Liturgy for the Cult of Saints
- Music in Medieval Towns and Cities
- Music of the Troubadours and Trouvères
- Musical Instruments
- Necromancy, Theurgy, and Intermediary Beings
- Nibelungenlied, The
- Nicholas of Cusa
- Nordic Laws
- Norman (and Anglo-Norman) Manuscript Ilumination
- N-Town Plays
- Nuns and Abbesses
- Old English Hexateuch, The Illustrated
- Old English Language
- Old English Literature and Critical Theory
- Old English Religious Poetry
- Old Norse-Icelandic Sagas
- Ottonian Art
- Ovid in the Middle Ages
- Ovide moralisé, The
- Owl and the Nightingale, The
- Papacy, The Medieval
- Paris
- Peasants
- Persianate Dynastic Period/Later Caliphate (c. 800–1000)
- Peter Abelard
- Petrarch
- Philosophy in the Eastern Roman Empire
- Pictish Art
- Pizan, Christine de
- Plowman, Piers
- Poland
- Poland, Ethnic and Religious Groups in Medieval
- Pope Innocent III
- Post-Conquest England
- Pre-Carolingian Western European Kingdoms
- Prick of Conscience, The
- Pucci, Antonio
- Pythagoreanism in the Middle Ages
- Queens
- Rate Manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61)
- Regions of Medieval France
- Regular Canons
- Religious Instruction (Homilies, Sermons, etc.)
- Religious Lyrics
- Rímur
- Robert Mannyng of Brunne
- Rolle, Richard
- Roman Law
- Romances (East and West Norse)
- Romanesque Art
- Rus in Medieval Europe
- Ruthwell Cross
- Sagas and Tales of Icelanders
- Saint Plays and Miracles
- Saint-Denis
- Saints’ Lives
- Scandinavian Migration-Period Gold Bracteates
- Schools in Medieval Britain
- Scogan, Henry
- Seals
- Sermons
- Sex and Sexuality
- Ships and Seafaring
- Shirley, John
- Skaldic Poetry
- Slavery in Medieval Europe
- Snorra Edda
- Song of Roland, The
- Songs, Medieval
- Spain
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- Textiles
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- Theater and Performance, Iberian
- Thirteenth-Century Motets in France
- Thomas Aquinas
- Thomism
- Thornton, Robert
- Tomb Sculpture
- Travel and Travelers
- Trevisa, John
- Tropes
- Troubadours and Trouvères
- Troyes, Chrétien de
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- Usk, Adam
- Usk, Thomas
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- Welsh Literature
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