The Exultet in Southern Italy by Thomas Forrest Kelly. (review)

BOOK reviews531 There is much that will never be known about women's monastic life, in large part because the women did not write about themselves. This is a relatively brief, original, and informative approach to the development of religious life, not just of women but by implication of men as well. In spite of the ambitious title,this is not a history ofwomen's monasticism,but it does reveal a great deal about the pace of foundation, the geography of foundation (some dioceses had many nunneries and some dioceses had none at all), and the social station of founders. The book is well written in a clear, economical style. Joseph H. Lynch Ohio State University The Exultet in Southern Italy. By Thomas Forrest Kelly. (NewYork: Oxford University Press. 1996. Pp. xvi, 352; 17 plates. $95.00.) The Exultet is a chant of rejoicing and praise that is sung at the beginning of the Easter vigil service after the lighting of the Paschal candle. As a very long text that is sung by a soloist, and performed only once in the liturgical year, it must be written down. Although in many places during the Middle Ages the Exultet was included in missals, pontificals, processionals, and other types of liturgical codices, in southern Italy it was written by itself on a scroll. In this form it was illuminated; it was provided with illustrations that were usually oriented in the opposite direction from the text, so that to the person who performs the chant they look upside down. If the singer can manage to have the scroll drape down the front of the lectern as he unwinds it, the pictures will look right-side up to members of the clergy or congregation who are facing him. Hence Exultet scrolls (and reproductions of them) often seem to have either their illuminations upside down or their text, as on the dust cover of this book. A further (and apparently unanticipated) difficulty for modern publications lies in the fact that the technicians who print photographs from negatives and make plates from them cannot read Beneventan script. As a consequence, in books on this topic illustrations are occasionally printed in reverse. There are several instances of this in recent publications, including one in the work at hand (Plate 3). Most of the Exultet scrolls described in this book date from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A tiny number may be from the tenth century, and there are some that are from the thirteenth century and later. Although certain images recur in one scroll after another, there seems not to have been a standard series of illuminations, and it is difficult to argue that the pictures were ever intended to illustrate the text in any systematic way. As for the chant melody, it has not hitherto received a detailed examination. It is a holdover from the archaic Beneventan liturgy and employs only three neighboring pitches. The south Italian Exultet text is also distinctive. Its special features are extensively described here. When the Beneventan liturgy was suppressed and replaced by the Franco- 532book reviews Roman, there were some attempts to reuse old Exultet scrolls by erasing the texts and music and writing new texts and music in their place. This is shown most clearly in Plate 3. (For convenience, it may be examined in a mirror.) The original capital letters remain, though after the first line the text is now written in Gothic, rather than Beneventan characters; the Beneventan notation has also been replaced. The book has many valuable features. Among them is its description of each of the relevant surviving sources. As one example, there is an Exultet scroll in the British Library (Additional MS 30337), shown here in Plate 16, that is made up of twelve membranes, each of them measuring about eleven by twenty-four inches (except for one that is unusually short; there is more variation in length from one membrane to another than in width). Fully unrolled, it would be more than twenty-two feet long! What makes this scroll of unusual interest, apart from the exceptional beauty of its illuminations, is the fact that it may include a depiction of a feature...