Clares in Procession: The Processional and Hours of the Franciscan Minoresses at Aldgate

The cranston library, England's oldest public lending library, houses a fifteenth-century manuscript from the English Franciscan convent of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Francis outside Aldgate, near the Tower of London. This manuscript, Cranston 2322, has been cataloged as an "Horae, etc.," or book of hours, but is in fact a volume that contains a substantial quantity of noted liturgical music as well as the hours of the Virgin, devotional material in Middle English, and a variety of other prayers and antiphon texts.¹ Although a complete general description of this manuscript has been available since 1992, scholars have not examined the extensive liturgical material in the manuscript as a reflection of the communal musical-liturgical life of the convent.² Indeed, the continued listing of the manuscript as an "Horae, etc.," has almost certainly obscured the fact that this manuscript is the only extant English Franciscan processional. This volume provides the modern liturgical historian a unique opportunity to study the chants for processions, the commendatio animae (commendation of the soul), and the profession of nuns for an English Franciscan house.

In this article I will describe and analyze the contents of the manuscript, comparing it to both Franciscan and English sources. This analysis reveals the ways in which the practices at Aldgate were drawn from the corpus of Franciscan repertoire but influenced also by English monastic practices. The texts and notated chants in this single volume expand the concept of the processional beyond its usual liturgical function to include processions to and from the frater, the chapter house, and the bedside of dying nuns. On the basis of this analysis I will argue that this manuscript would more appropriately be entitled "Processional and Hours" and suggest that it may have been created for the use of the cantrix of the order.³

In the broader scholarly sense this article contributes to feminist reclamation history through a detailed source study depicting the musical life of a particular musical community. It also adds to the burgeoning literature of material on female monastic practices and women's spirituality in medieval England. Many authors have focused on the reading practices of nuns or women more generally, but few have given any detailed attention to their musical practices other than a general nod to the importance of liturgical life.⁴ Thus, in this article I illuminate many aspects of practices in one female monastic community through a study of a particular manuscript from the house. As much as possible my work attempts to create this picture without reliance on assumed norms from studies of male monastic practices.⁵ This approach partakes of the postmodern rejection of metanarratives and emphasizes the important lens of particularity in the study of historical documents.⁶

The Liturgical Context of the Manuscript

The Minories

The Minories is the name commonly given to the house of Franciscan women (minoresses) founded in 1293 at Aldgate, immediately outside of the walls of London.⁷ The founder of the Minories, Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, and his wife, Blanche, Queen of Navarre, imported nuns from the community at Longchamp in France to inaugurate the house. The one surviving English version of a rule for Franciscan nuns is a Middle English version of the Isabella rule created for the nuns at Longchamp.⁸ Thus, Aldgate and Longchamp are connected both through the written rule and through the presence of sisters who followed that rule and could transmit the unwritten traditions and expectations of the order. The Minories grew to be a moderately large establishment, as indicated by the fact that at the time of the dissolution of the house in 1539 there were twenty-four nuns and an abbess who received pensions.⁹

David Bell lists five extant manuscripts from the Minories: The Doctrine of the Heart, Walter Hilton's The Ladder of Perfection and Mixed Life, the Rule for Enclosed Minoresses, a Psalter, and the volume under discussion here. Bell also indicates other volumes that have been associated with the Minories through wills.¹⁰ The volumes indicate that...