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  • Interlacing Traditions: Neo Gregorian Mass Propers in Beneventan Manuscripts by Luisa Nardini
  • James Vincent Maiello
Interlacing Traditions: Neo Gregorian Mass Propers in Beneventan Manuscripts. By Luisa Nardini. (Studies and Texts, 205; Monumenta Liturgica Beneventana, 8.) Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2016. [xiv, 444 p. ISBN: 978-0-888-44205-5. $100 (hdk)]

Southern Italy was one of the liveliest cultural intersections in the medieval world, a phenomenon borne out by the arts, architecture, literature, and liturgy of the region. The former Duchy of Benevento, for example, incubated [End Page 315] one of the most complex musico-liturgical traditions in the medieval West, a pluralistic mélange of archaic, Byzantine, and Gregorian elements, as well as newly composed chants in a 'neo-Gregorian' style. Interlacing Traditions focuses on this neo-Gregorian repertory, examining its origins, nature, and diffusion.

The first part of the book addresses the various contexts in which Beneventan chant existed, beginning with an overview of local ecclesiastical archives and traditions. After acknowledging the dominant role Benedictine abbeys played in the medieval south Italian Church and its archival practices, Nardini offers a compact literature review that is at the vanguard of a scholarly tradition dating back to the seventeenth century. Her critical assessment of this scholarship provides a model for using such sources effectively. An overview of modern scholarship on Beneventan chant and liturgy follows, a useful introduction that confirms the present study as a necessary and welcome addition to the field.

Next, Nardini surveys the historical and liturgical contexts in which Beneventan chant developed before and coexisted after the arrival of the 'Gregorian' repertory. She profiles the rich pre-Gregorian repertory of southern Italy, addressing Lombard, Byzantine, and Roman influences, and shows how Beneventan liturgical manuscripts continue to bear witness to the nature and processes of its development. These same manuscripts reveal also that Beneventan musicians refused to abandon their chant completely as the Carolingians standardised music and liturgy across Europe and that they supplemented the 'Gregorian' repertory with new chants that blended both traditions. Nardini shows how these various traditions interacted, providing a contextual framework for understanding the neo-Gregorian chant detailed in the rest of the book.

Chapter 2 focuses on the institutions and locations where neo-Gregorian chant was produced as well as its reception in southern Italy and beyond. Nardini demonstrates a methodology for proposing origins for specific neo-Gregorian items based on historical, cultic, and philological evidence and for tracing the spread of neo-Gregorian chant using the movements of clergy and the diffusion of saints' cults. She shows how factors like pilgrimages, monastic movement, and the interrelationships between the secular and sacred orbits in southern Italy bore on the creation and transmission of the repertory. For example, the Mass Dirige me for the second Sunday of Lent serves as a case study to suggest that Benevento was not as isolated culturally in the ninth and tenth centuries as has been previously argued and shows how neo-Gregorian items dovetailed with Gregorian and other repertories. The bulk of the chapter treats specific locations and their institutions in detail. Beginning with the repertory's epicenter, Benevento, Nardini addresses in turn the cultic and musico-liturgical traditions of monastic institutions and the cathedral, as well as how these are manifested in Beneventan sources. Although the Benedictine abbey at Montecassino loomed large over the region, Cassinese sources show a high degree of standardisation and relatively few non-standard items; this is also true of other centers within the Beneventan orbit that shared a close affinity with Montecassino. Nardini's brief discussion of neo-Gregorian items outside southern Italy is particularly insightful in connecting the manuscript tradition to the reality of people and place.

In Chapter 3, Nardini traces the circulation of neo-Gregorian chant in Beneventan manuscripts and assesses its occurrence in these sources. In a methodological overview, she examines how a manuscript's structure, function, date, and origin affect the number of neo-Gregorian chants in a source, as well as how the cultic context of these chants provides additional data for determining a manuscript's origin. Graduals, for example, usually contain a relatively large number of neo-Gregorian items, because their...

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