The Rosary Cantoral—Ritual and Social Design in a Chantbook from Early Renaissance Toledo (review)

The “Rosary Cantoral” of this study’s title is a sobriquet coined by the author to refer to a parchment choirbook that was acquired by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library as part of a larger purchase from the Connecticut book dealer Laurence Witten in 1989; it now bears the shelf mark MS 710. The manuscript’s dimensions, huge even by the standards of Spanish cantorales, and its incorporation of a brief excerpt from Josquin’s Missa Sine nomine almost guaranteed that the manuscript would be brought to the attention of the curators of such institutions as the Beinecke.

In 1990 the manuscript was introduced to scholarship by Craig Wright in an unpublished paper presented at a conference in honor of David Hughes at Harvard University. Wright not only authenticated the manuscript’s ascription of a four-voice Et incarnatus to “Jusquin,” but he also gave a thorough physical description of the source and presented a preliminary conspectus of the manuscript’s contents. By identifying concordances for the troped texts and chants, Wright convincingly proposed a Spanish provenance, even venturing the more specific possibility of Burgos. He identified and discussed the possible significance of such decorative elements as Christ’s five wounds often accompanied by the textual incipit of Psalm 50, Miserere mei, and depictions of the life of Hercules.

Since serious research on early modern Spanish music sources continues to be hindered by their notorious inaccessibility, the presence of such an important manuscript in a modern research library, supported by Wright’s thorough preliminary study, provided an ideal topic for the doctoral dissertation from which the volume under review grew. Although the author candidly acknowledges that sections of his book have already appeared in print in a handful of articles, he seems less forthcoming to reveal the study’s first incarnation as a dissertation in 2001 (“The ‘Rosary Cantorales’ of Early Modern Spain: An Interdisciplinary Study in Attribution” [Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2001]). Nevertheless, many of the errors that appeared in the dissertation have now been corrected.

In essence, The Rosary Cantoral presents the author’s conclusion that Beinecke MS 710 was commissioned ca. 1500 by a lay confraternity devoted to the rosary and closely associated with the Dominican house of San Pedro Mártir in Toledo.

In his introduction, Lorenzo Candelaria claims that a cantoral “is a large plainchant manuscript for a religious institution” and that “in modern Spanish usage” it is distinguished from a libro de coro, a term that “refers to a book consisting of polyphonic music (as opposed to plainchant) that is usually liturgical.” Since the word makes what I believe to be its English language debut in his title, it might be just as well to consider for a moment the definition the author asserts. In fact, the distinction he proposes—one based upon content (plainsong or polyphony)—contradicts both the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy, where cantoral is defined as libro de coro, and the Diccionario de la música española e hispanoamericana (Emilio Casares Rodico, ed. [Madrid: Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, 1999–2002], 3:101), where Fernández de la Cuesta explains that the cantoral is also called libro de coro, libro coral, and libro de facistol. Any suggestion that Candelaria is concerned here with usage rather than dictionary definitions, no matter how impeccably authoritative they might be, is immediately refuted in the author’s own bibliography (p. 203) where the plainsong choirbooks commissioned by Philip II for his newly constructed monastery-palace of the Escorial are referred to as cantorales in a study by Vicente Rabanal and as libros corales by Samuel Rubio. The fact that Bordonau (Revista de archivos, bibliotecas y museos 71 [1963]: 243) refers to the same manuscripts as libros de coro ought to caution us...