Laus angelica: Poetry in the Medieval Mass (review)

Attempting to empathize with the minds of people in the past and especially to understand what spiritual and intellectual preoccupations drove them to study and to create ideas, is a task that requires patience and perseverance as well as sources that at first sight do not seem promising. This book, first published in French in 2001, is finally available in English for a wider audience. It is a fascinating introduction to a complex source – the liturgical works preserved in monasteries and diocesan archives all over Europe. The function of the liturgy and the ways in which it was modified and adapted in different dioceses and over a 400-year period to meet the needs of clergy and laity casts a different light on the emotional life of people in the High Middle Ages. Singing, as a key element in the coming together of oral and aural religious conviction, is highlighted as part of the union of human and angelic communities: earthly singers singing with the heavenly choirs were a route to spiritual satisfaction.

Gunilla Iversen writes with the confidence of an unchallenged expert in a field that many regard as peripheral to medieval spirituality, and she succeeds in showing just how critical a study of that field is to a fuller understanding of the topic. Iversen is one of a select group, mostly from Swedish institutions, who have worked painstakingly through the thousands of surviving special compositions or tropes and sequences, the texts and music that, from the time of Charlemagne to the thirteenth century, expanded and embellished the Ordinary of the Mass in dioceses all over Europe. These poems, and their musical settings, existed to explicate the Old and New Testament texts in the Mass of the Day and to reflect on the purpose of the feast.

The Bible was the main source of inspiration for the Latin poetry and its musical interpretation. These songs were symbolic, the human reflection of the continuous angelic hymns of praise offered to God in Heaven. The liturgy was not only a means of devotion but also a means of interpreting the hidden meaning of the sacra pagina. It was literally a Feast, a spiritual as opposed to a bodily one. The poetic tropes and sequences written in the period before 1300, for the most part by anonymous and forgotten religious, were a crucial way in which in an oral age the fullness of spiritual life was interpreted and expressed through music together with verbal and bodily expression. Contemporary commentators argued that song at the beginning of the Mass aroused ardent fervour, just as it did before a battle. The tunes were likened to types of secular song: the Gradual like an estampie, the Alleluia a cantus coronatus. Sequences later in the Mass were songs of victory, songs of exultation.

In the later Middle Ages these interpretative poems which had been added to the basic Mass structure fell into disfavour. Reformation historians have largely neglected the significance of this aspect of the abolition of the liturgy with its processions and symbolism which was the final destruction of a whole way of spiritual life, a destruction completed by the Council of Trent.

Iversen, however, argues cogently that both music and text should be a source investigated by those interested in literature, ideas, philosophy, and theology in the High Middle Ages. She engagingly develops this thesis with a number of significant examples from different areas and different periods that illustrate her case. She also shows how the associated ceremonies led to the adaptation of the architecture of some churches to fit the practices of rite and rhythm, and the dramatic presentation of the events and people associated with the feast.

One or two of the writers of poems such as these can be identified. The most prominent is Hildegard of Bingen who represented herself as...