Sermons, Exegesis, and Performance: The Laon Ordo Prophetarum and the Meaning of Advent

Of the four texts that Karl Young presents as "Procession of Prophets" plays in The Drama of the Medieval Church, the example from the northern French cathedral town of Laon is distinctive.¹ The Laon play impressed Young because it has a wealth of rubrics indicating impersonation, thereby qualifying it, in his estimation, as a "genuine drama":² Nebuchadnezzar, for example, is to carry himself haughtily ("superbo incessu"), while the Erythraean Sibyl is to act insane or crazed ("insanienti simillima").³ Even for a modern reader the Laon play is striking in comparison to other Prophets Plays: the dramatis personae necessary for performance, as well as the clothing they should wear and attributes they should carry, are summarized at the beginning of the text, rather than being introduced with the entrance of each character.⁴ The level of detail provided is impressive: Isaiah, for example, should wear a dalmatic with a "red stole hanging vertically in the middle in the front and behind" (stola rubea per medium verticis ante et retro dependens), Moses is to carry the tablets of the Law ("tabulas legis ferens"), and John the Baptist wears a hair shirt and has long hair ("pilosa veste et longis capillis"; 145). This degree of detail, along with the convenient summary of all the required sartorial and iconographic symbolism at the beginning of the text, makes evident that the composer and redactor intended the text to be performed—it was not, for example, meant merely to be recited, or even simply read to oneself. Indeed, while many clerical communities had their own Prophets Plays based on the same Advent sermon, the Laon Ordo Prophetarum is distinctive in its intentionality: it made manifest the community's own understanding of the meaning of Advent, a meaning that accreted gradually during the weeks leading up to Christmas as the scriptural and homiletic readings proclaimed during the liturgy fused with the interpretive understanding of those readings.

Such complex exegetical intertextuality was to be expected from the Laon cathedral community. In the High Middle Ages, the town of Laon was not only the seat of an influential diocese and site of a royal residence, but it was also home to a prestigious cathedral school that drew students from all over Europe.⁵ The school became famous under the guidance of its master Anselm who, along with his brother Ralph and their associates and successors, compiled the famous Glossa ordinaria, the text of the Bible accompanied by interlinear and marginal commentary culled from centuries of authoritative writers.⁶ Students from all over Europe, including many of the most influential ecclesiastics of the succeeding generation, streamed to Laon to study with Anselm; there were so many, in fact, that Bernard of Pisa famously asserted that it was nearly impossible for them to find lodging in the small town.⁷ By the time the Ordo Prophetarum was copied at the end of the twelfth century, the Glossa ordinaria had for decades been the sine qua non of textbooks for the study of the Bible. The identity of the cathedral community would have been intimately tied up with its school's teaching and the understanding that Scripture was inherently enigmatic, containing hidden meanings and truths, and that any of its apparent contradictions could be reconciled and harmonized through assiduous study.⁸ In this way, to be a canon at Laon was to acknowledge the necessity of understanding Scripture in its four exegetical senses—the literal or historical, the allegorical or typological, the tropological, and the anagogical. These exegetical tenets were the foundation of the Laon canons' understanding of Advent, and they are fully integrated into—and fully evident in—the drama that the community created and preserved.

The Ordo Prophetarum appears in Laon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 263 (hereafter "Laon 263"), a codex compiled by Laon's cathedral community in the last quarter of the twelfth century.⁹ The bulk of the 189-folio manuscript contains special music and liturgy for nearly all of the liturgical year, recording optional embellishments of the standard liturgy on both a small and...