Carmelite Liturgy and Spiritual Identity: The Choir Books of Kraków (review)

This is a monumental volume on a recondite and apparently narrow subject: the unique collection of twenty-six manuscript choir books dating from the late fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries belonging to the Carmelite convent in Krakow, all but one of which are still in their original home. But while I suspect that the book as a whole will not find more than a select audience of musicologists and liturgists, there is much here that would reward the attention of a wider audience of medievalists.

Of the four medieval orders of friars, the Carmelites are the least well known and the least researched. Their order has always suffered from the lack of a charismatic founder and from having a legendary rather than historical version of its origins, and since the early modern period it has been overshadowed by its more glamorous reformed and discalced offshoot. And Poland, although undoubtedly part of the Western Church, is peripheral for most Anglo-Saxon medievalists, whose gaze is so often focused on England and France.

James J. Boyce allows for this widespread ignorance by devoting much of his first chapter to an up-to-date account of the Carmelite order, its obscure and rather exotic early thirteenth-century origins in the Holy Land, its rules, and its liturgy. Only then does he move on to an account of the convent at Krakow, founded in 1397 from Prague and the first Carmelite foundation in Lesser Poland. Chapter 2 is devoted to the ‘distinctive and uniform’ Carmelite liturgy. This had originated in the rite of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, itself imported into the Latin Kingdom from France, was codified in the ordinal compiled by the German Carmelite, Sibert de Beka, and promulgated in 1312.

Chapter 3 examines in great detail the contents, organization, and relationships of the Krakow convent’s six medieval choir books (specifically antiphonaries), three of which originated in Prague. Boyce shows how the Carmelites remained independent from the local diocesan tradition, celebrating such distinctive feasts as the Commemoration of the Resurrection on the Sunday before Advent. Other specifically Carmelite observances were associated with the Holy Land (e.g., the feast of the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), with the Virgin Mary (e.g., the early adoption of the feast of the Conception, which for some time functioned as the order’s patronal festival, and of the feast of Our Lady of the Snows), and with members of the extended Holy Family (e.g., the feast of the Three Marys). Many of these feasts had distinctive chants, seventeen examples of which Boyce describes in detail. Those who wish to know more about the manuscripts themselves can find dimensions and complete lists of contents in the Appendix, though there is no systematic information provided on script, decorative schemes, or bindings.

Chapter 4 traverses even more unfamiliar territory: the various adaptations, as evidenced in the later Krakow choir books, which the Carmelite liturgy underwent in response to the reforms of the Council of Trent. The Council imposed the Roman rite on the whole church, with a few exceptions. These included the Carmelites, who were allowed to revise their distinctive rite and submit it for papal approval. But the Carmelite friars were relatively few in number and had to continue to write their revised choir books rather than resort to printing. Consequently the Krakow convent, like other Carmelite houses, continued to produce manuscript antiphonals and graduals into the eighteenth century, while some of the medieval manuscripts were adapted so that they could continue in use. Other post-Tridentine developments included the addition to the sanctorale of Polish, Swedish, and Carmelite saints, along with their offices.

A brief final chapter summarizes the previous chapters and discusses the significance of the Krakow collection as a whole. Underlying the vast array of information that the author has marshalled is a theory about the...