Music in Early Franciscan Thought by Peter V. Loewen (review)

Music in Early Franciscan Thought is an interdisciplinary study that examines the writing and thinking of men whose works on music and related arts were widely disseminated during the rise of the Franciscan Order in the thirteenth century. Peter V. Loewen’s principal contribution is the argument that Franciscans had an immense influence on late medieval ecclesiology and preaching, with music as a key part of a campaign of reform and renewal in the Church. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, and might to others, because contemporary Franciscans’ charisms are about almost anything but music. In fact, issues of peace, social justice, poverty, and reconciliation are among the primary concerns of their Order in the modern age, and no Franciscan I have ever known had an interest in music. Conversely, monastic traditions of the sung Office and Mass, along with theoretical education in music, are most often associated historically with Benedictine foundations and cathedral scholae cantorum and this still holds true today. Loewen supplies the evidence that Franciscans indeed had a deep and abiding influence on the use of music as part of a larger program of preaching, teaching, penance, and evangelization.

The book is ninth in the series The Medieval Franciscans, which explores discipline-specific topics. It culls from recent scholarship and interest in the “Franciscan vision not only in areas of philosophy, theology, and spirituality, but also in its application to social, missionary and pastoral work, art, liturgy and exegesis” (back cover). The series is an annual publication edited by Steven J. McMichael. Other volumes in the series cover diverse and fascinating topics such as Friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (2004). The collection demonstrates the interdisciplinarity of its commitment to the Franciscan movement from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries.

Through the pages of Music in Early Franciscan Thought, it becomes apparent that medieval Franciscans retained their founder’s use and understanding of music, along with dance, gesture and drama, as being essential to their work in the world. These themes were taken up by the Franciscan theologians–musicians–theorists to whose work Loewen dedicates chapters: Lotario di Segni (Pope Innocent III), Alexander of Hales, William of Middleton, David von Augsburg, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, and Juan Gil de Zamora. Loewen fluently traverses several disciplines to fashion a thought-provoking work of scholarship in medieval musicology and philosophy and demonstrates an admirable command of theological, liturgical, and art historical materials. He brings medieval sources that have not been well understood together with ones that he has brought to light.

The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 opened up a place for Franciscans to preach and serve in other pastoral capacities along with secular clergy. Six years later, they were required to sing the divine office “according to the custom of other clerics” (p. 3). The combined effect of these changes must have altered the trajectory of their self-understanding as street beggars witnessing to the poverty of Christ. Now they were placed among parochial clergy and practiced the daily round of sung prayer associated with confidence and monasteries, and required skills and understanding in the practice of chant, all the while maintaining their identity as mendicants.

Generally speaking, as chant became less an oral tradition and more a written one, music theory became more important. But why have musicologists not previously examined medieval Franciscan theory? Loewen asserts that it was embedded in encyclopedic works that had escaped the attention of modern musicologists. Furthermore, it needed to be studied within “its proper context,” which Loewen has clearly done (p. 9). Originally, he planned to show how early Franciscan theologians based their work on ancient authority in order to make a case for mission through preaching and music. Later he expanded his research and saw that the writings fell into two periods: an earlier period, the thirteenth century, and a later one...