"L'Eglise des Francais" de Strasbourg (1538-1563): Rayonnement europeen de sa liturgie et de ses psautiers (review)

Jean Calvin's Geneva has long held the attention of scholars interested in the musical and liturgical history of the French Reformation. It was here, after all, that musicians like Loys Bourgeois and other chantres crafted a repertory of psalm tunes that together formed the central corpus of congregational song for the new church. But the centrality of the Genevan musical and liturgical reforms has tended to obscure from view the varied sources of this tradition, and its equally varied uses among French Protestants in communities far beyond the Genevan orbit. In what ways were Calvin's reforms shaped by his encounter with related efforts already under way in nearby Strasburg, where he lived and studied between 1538 and 1541? And to what extent did the Strasburg liturgy maintain a distinctive character and influence, even as the Genevan Psalter spread far and wide? Robert Weeda's compact but useful volume considers these and other questions, assembling a rich body of documentary evidence about the varied musical manifestations of reform undertaken during the middle years of the sixteenth century.

The author begins by examining the work of two important reformers active in Strasburg during Calvin's sojourn there. In the writings of the German theologian Martin Bucer, for instance, Weeda finds important anticipations of Calvin's ideas on the proper relationship between civil and religious authority, as well as the place of song in congregational worship. Calvin's views on the pedagogical utility and moral character of song likewise find close correspondence in the writings of Jean Sturm, Rector of the Strasburg Gymnasium and an important member of the French Protestant community in that city. Before Calvin's return from Strasburg in 1541, Weeda observes, the Genevan liturgy was largely inattentive to music, focusing instead on scriptural text and pulpit oratory. But—as the central chapters of the book document—starting in the 1540s the new church applied itself to the musical Psalter with sudden vigour, along lines that echo but transform similar efforts undertaken in Strasburg not long before. The story of the Genevan Psalter from the early 1540s up to its completion in 1562 has been told before (notably in Pierre Pidoux's monumental Le Psautier huguenot du XVI ^e siècle (Basle, 1962) and in Weeda's own recent Le Psautier de Calvin: L'histoire d'un livre populaire au XVI ^e siècle (1551–1598) (Turnhout, 2002); reviewed in Music & Letters, 85 (2004), 99–100). Yet as the present survey reminds us, the surviving sources reveal a patchwork process that was at times chaotic, with frequent substitution, adaptation, and revisions of texts and tunes alike. Indeed, few of us remember that Calvin's first published set of psalm paraphrases and their melodies (from the Aulcuns pseaulmes et cantiques mys en chant of 1539) was issued not in Geneva but in Strasburg.

Weeda next turns to the story of the Strasburg liturgy and its continuing evolution in the mid-sixteenth century. Among the various musicians who had a hand in the crafting of the Strasburg psalm repertory, the editorial work of Jean Garnier, supervisor of a series of musical imprints issued there during the 1540s and 1550s, seems especially important. In the changing selection of text and tunes, and in his revealing prefatory remarks about the individual psalters we learn much about the varieties of local musical practice in French Protestant congregations beyond Geneva. (Among Weeda's appendices is one that charts the differences among the various Strasburg editions of the psalter.) Here, too, we learn something of the efforts of local pastors to sustain independence for the Strasburg Église des français (as  the church for the local French-speaking community was known), which seems to have been pressed between the local dominance of Lutheran parishes on one hand...