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The Sequences of Nidaros: A Nordic Repertory & Its European Con- text, edited by Lori Kruckenberg and Andreas Haug, Senter for mid- delalderstudier. Skrifter nr. 20. Trondheim 2006: Tapir academic press. ISBN 82-512-2105-8.
Reviewed by Gunilla Iversen
Among all known repertories of sequences one of the most expansive repertories in Europe is that of the cathedral in Nidaros in northern Scandinavia. From the first quarter of the thirteenth century up to 1519 Nidaros was the arch diocese of Norway, Iceland, the Orkney Islands, the Faeroe Islands, Greenland, and the Western Isles of Scotland. Before that Nidaros had been a provincial bishop’s see, and since 1103 sub- ject to the province of Lund (in medieval Denmark) formally placed under the au- thority of Hamburg-Bremen. Nidaros contained the shrine of St Olav (995–1030) and was the burial place for the Royal family. In her magnificent work from 1968 Ordo Nidrosiensis Ecclesiae (ON) and in sub- sequent articles the legendary Norwegian scholar Lilli Gjerløw investigated the entire liturgical repertory of Nidaros. Through this work she provided a solid basis for later scholars in their studies of different parts of the medieval Nidaros liturgy. It is im- pressive to see how many of her fine observations on different parts of the liturgical genres still hold true. The Sequences of Nidaros: A Nordic Repertory & Its European Context is a volume exclusively dealing with one particular liturgical genre, that of the sequences sung in the liturgy of the medieval mass. It includes an introduction by the editors Lori Kruckenberg and Andreas Haug and ten chapters mostly by musicologists. This col- lection of studies provides a most readable and useful summary of the sequence ma- terial in the medieval Nidaros liturgy and places the repertory of sequence in a European Continental context. The authors investigate the sequence repertories related to Nidaros and provide a number of manuscript inventories, presenting many until now unknown fragments from Norway, Sweden and Icelandic sources. They study these in comparison to other regional repertories, trying to trace ways of transmission into the Nidaros liturgy. Was England the dominant base from which the pieces building up the large thirteenth century repertoire were imported? Or was it rather Germany? Were there different regions influencing an earlier and a later layer in the final repertory?
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The first part of the volume contains five comparative studies of the Nidaros repertory seen against the background of other sequence repertories of the time, the German, the Anglo-French: ’Making a Sequence Repertory: The Tradition of the Ordo Nidrosiensis Ecclesiae’, by Lori Kruckenberg, ’Sequences in the Fragments at the Swedish National Archives’ by Gunilla Björkvall, ’The English Background to the Nidaros Sequences’ by David Hiley, ’Sequences of German Origin in the Reper- toire of Nidaros’ by Calvin M. Bower, and ’Two Selected Sequence Sources from Norway’ by Åslaug Ommundsen. The second part contains five studies of a few well chosen individual sequences where the authors try to trace the ways of transmission from German sequence tra- ditions and English as well as Anglo-French traditions: ’Oriens et occidens, immo teres mundi circulus: Notker’s Clare sanctorum in the German, Anglo-French, and Nidaros Traditions’ by Caitlin Snyder and Alison Altstatt, ’Poetry, Melody, and mode: The Transmission of Notker’s Sancte baptiste ’ by Rebecca Maloy, ’Grates honos hierachia: A Sequence by Hermannus Contractus in the Nidaros Tradition’ by Calvin M. Bower, ’Zur Überlieferung der Sequenz Sacrosancta hodierne festivitatis preconia nach Nidaros’ by Philipp Zimmermann, and finally ’Two Sequentiae Novae at Nidaros: Celeste organum and Stola iocunditatis ’by Lori Kruckenberg. In her interesting and informative opening chapter, ’Making a Sequence Reper- tory: The Tradition of the Ordo Nidrosiensis Ecclesiae’, Lori Kruckenberg remarks that ’in terms of sequence tradition, the geographic and temporal range of the Nidaros ordinarius is unmatched by any other known medieval ordinal’ (p.6). Kruckenberg presents a thorough investigation of all sequences connected with Nidaros (including 19 pages of tables of sequences referred to in the ON and other sources, listing them alphabetically, according to feasts, according to origins, etc.). As concerns the se- quence repertories, Gjerløw had listed 111 sequences for 158 liturgical occasions in the original form of the ordo (ON). Kruckenberg and the scholars involved in the project have been able to list 172 individual entries for the genre, including later ad- ditions. As Gjerløw concluded in her work the English influence is evident in all the litur- gical genres, and particularly visible in the sheer number of English saints found in the Sanctorale of the ON (29). In my own study on litanies, prayers and other litur- gical texts used in the establishment of Olav as a patron saint in the early Nidaros liturgy I could conclude that these texts were definitely influenced by or imported from England. The earliest liturgical material for the Olav cult was copied from Eng- lish liturgy for a martyr king in the middle of the eleventh century. (Iversen, Trans- forming a Viking into a Saint, in The Divine office in the Latin Middle Ages, 2000).
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This tendency seems to hold also for the sequence material. Even though there are a number of sequences of German origin in some form or other incorporated in the Nidaros liturgy, they need not have been imported directly from German sources. Kruckenberg remarks with Gjerløw (p.29-30), that the formative period on the ON - the second half of the twelfth century - was a period of political unrest on the one hand, and renewed and active contacts with England and the Continent on the other. (37). She observes that “numerous sequences in the ON suggest a direct German in- fluence, yet many of the German sequences were adopted by French and English liturgical traditions in the decades after 1100.” (31). In the next chapter, ’Sequences in the Fragments at the Swedish National Archives’, Gunilla Björkvall (who has just concluded the cataloguing of medieval frag- ments in Sweden in the MPO-project), presents sequence material found in this Swedish collection of fragments of sequentiaries, missals, graduals, breviaries etc. She notes that these fragments represent earlier periods and more varied origins than the material presented by Moberg in his thesis “Über die Schwedishe Sequenzen” from 1927. Whereas Moberg had used 21 manuscripts and 8 printed sources, Björkvall has investigated sequence material found in 448 fragments - most of them earlier than Moberg’s sources. Of the fragments, 77 sequences slightly fewer than one third of the items - are not found in Moberg’s list. Björkvall’s new list of sequences in Swe- den confirms Toni Schmid’s suggestion that the Swedish sequence repertory was much more varied than Moberg had found in his later sources (p. 51). She observes that the German influence is more visible in the Swedish material, especially in the later sources. Some fragments had been imported to Sweden as covers for Slavonic accounts and were obviously not used in the liturgy in Sweden. She notes that 142 sequences in the Swedish fragments do not appear in sources found in Norway. David Hiley, the eminent scholar of English and Norman sequence repertories, compares the Nidaros repertory against an English background. In his chapter, ’The English Background to the Nidaros Sequences’, he presents some 50 pages of lists of sequences. Hiley confirms Gjerløw’s suggestion that a significant proportion of the sequences called for by the Nidaros ordinal would have come from England, some of them via England from Normandy and other parts of northern France. In England the repertoires in London, St.Albans and in Worcester come closest to that in Nidaros. It is of course very regrettable that there are no known sources left from places such as Lincoln or Winchester. Hiley wisely concludes that compilers of se- quence collections obviously drew upon multiple exemplars and traditions in order to create new and individual repertories (p. 66). In his chapter ’Sequences of German Origin in the Repertoire of Nidaros’, Calvin M. Bower presumes that the earlier German sequences belonged to the earliest layers,
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and that they ’had formed the basic repertoire of the genre in Nidaros sequences’. Bower suggests that a second layer, with a new repertoire of sequences from England and northern France, was introduced in the twelfth century shoving the old German sequences to the octave. ’The early German sequences seem to have been later shoved into a secondary position, having been replaced most commonly by sequences of English and French origin’ (123). There are, however, no sources confirming such a primary liturgical position for the German sequences in Nidaros. It has to be re- marked that the influence from Hamburg-Bremen seems to have been more inten- tional in theory than in liturgical practice. Finally Bower identifies a wave of new German sequences imported from Augustinians from South German foundations. Åslaug Ommundsen investigates the content of ’Two Selected Sequence Sources from Norway’. One is a thirteenth century fragment from eastern Norway, Oslo Riksarkivet, Lat. fragm. 418, a fragment that contains sequence Lux illuxit for St Olav. Her conclusion of the comparative study is that this source is rather a type of sequentiary typical for England and northern France. The other fragment studied by Ommundsen is a thirteenth –century breviary-missal from western Norway, Oslo Riksarkivet, Lat. fragm. 668 a.o. She concludes that this is presumably written in Norway in the mid-thirteenth century, probably used in the Stavanger area. Gisela Attinger presents a study of ‘Sequences in Two Icelandic Mass Books from the Later Middle Ages’. She returns to the material once studied by Eric Eggen in his edition of ‘The Sequences of the Archbishopric of Nidaros’ (1968). The material is found in Icelandic fragments in the Arnamagnean Collection at the University of Copenhagen. She places them as parts of two Icelandic Mass books, Missale Scardense and Missale Cufudense dating from the latter part of the fifteenth century. Attinger finds that the sequence repertoire then still followed the use of Nidaros, although the amount of sequences was by then limited, perhaps, she suggests, through deci- sions made by Eric Valkendorf, Archbishop of Nidaros 1510–1522, who ordered the printing of the missal in the early sixteenth century. The second part of the volume, devoted to studies of some specific sequences, opens with a very interesting chapter by Caitlin Snyder and Alison Altstatt, ’Oriens et occidens, immo teres mundi circulus: Notker’s Clare sanctorum in the German, Anglo- French, and Nidaros Traditions’. Through a detailed analysis of different structures of the composition, of variations in readings and in musical variations, the two au- thors offer an impressive study on the Notker sequence for the apostles. In a detailed comparative study they follow Clare sanctorum from the original form in Saint Gall and German tradition over the version found in an Anglo-French tradition, as in Worcester, and from there over to the version found in Nidaros. They provide a rich amount of tables and maps indicating the location of the different versions.
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They show the influence of the West-Frankish sequence text Salus eterna with a format retaining divisions per cola et commata and using the a-assonances. When Western singers adopted the East-Frankish Clare sanctorum, they seem to have sung and recorded this sequence with a memory of the OSTENDE/AUREA melody already imprinted in the Salus eterna text (p. 223). Finally they also show that whereas Clare sanctorum appears to have adopted the Anglo-French style of versicle division in Nidaros, the Icelandic version maintained the German style. Another Notker sequence is the subject of the following study, ’Poetry, Melody, and mode: The Transmission of Notker’s Sancte baptiste ’ by Rebecca Maloy. Her detailed analysis of Sancti baptiste in the Nidaros fragments and related English and Continental sources shows that whereas the melodic tradition of the Nidaros frag- ments reflects some traits found only among later German manuscripts, the verbal tradition of this sequence betrays a strong Norman influence. Maloy suggests that the blend of German and Norman characteristics in the Nidaros fragments may be a result of interaction between memory and writing (p. 261). Calvin Bower devotes a study in this part of the volume to ’Grates honos hierachia: A Sequence by Hermannus Contractus in the Nidaros Tradition’. This rare sequence by Hermannus Contractus Grates nunc omnes has until now been known only in South-German sources. The Nidaros tradition is recorded in six Icelandic fragments kept in the Swedish archives. Bower here calls them ‘the Stock- holm fragments’ (Sf), and he compares these with all the known South-German sources. He presents all variant readings, and provides a synoptic transcription paired with a detailed stylistic study of the characteristics of each version following the same pattern: Neums: intervals, final, syllables, assonance/rhyme, and finally Versus defi- nition in each. His conclusion is that the Nidaros version lies close to the central tra- dition. In his chapter ’Zur Überlieferung der Sequenz Sacrosancta hodierne festivitatis pre- conia nach Nidaros’, Philipp Zimmermann makes a detailed musical analysis of the twelfth century- sequence Sacrosancta hodierne, that is the sequence for the feast of St Andrew. Finally, Lori Kruckenberg presents a fine stylistic analysis of two ’new sequences’ in the Nidaros repertory, ’Two Sequentiae Novae at Nidaros: Celeste organum and Stola iocunditatis ’. She compares the Nidaros versions with a large number of English and Continental sources. Her interesting conclusion is that the two sequences seem to have found their way to Nidaros by very different paths. She finds that the two ’new sequences’ tell two very different transmission histories. Whereas Celeste or-
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ganum in the Nidaros sources indicates a secondary version of that sequence as fil- tered through an English tradition, the three Nidaros fragments attesting to Stola io- cunditatis suggest a more general path of transmission- one leading from the Continent to the north (p. 401). In all, this volume represents a valuable contribution to scholarship on the history of the medieval sequence genre. At the same time it places Nidaros with its extensive and carefully composed sequence repertory on the map of intellectual and artistic creativity in medieval Europe.
Gunilla Iversen. Born in 1941. Professor emerita from the Chair of Latin at Stock- holm University. Director of the Research Programme Ars edendi
Collegium Medievale 2009