Dies Irae - by Edward Kamau Brathwaite

It is a near-quotidian occurrence here at work, that at the beginning of sunset the great flocks of crows and jackdaws and rooks that inhabit the woods and fields around the university rise up in their entire numbers and seem to wage war on one another. I caught this image of them as they were flying across the campus buildings, and it appears as if they are rising out of the very earth itself. There is always a certain apocalyptic undercurrent, despite its daily repetition, and it also gives me a very good excuse to present to you the poem Dies Irae by Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite, printed in his 1983 poetry collection Third World Poems.

Dies Irae

Dies irae dreadful day
when the world shall pass away
so the priests and shomen say

what gaunt phantoms shall affront me
mi lai sharpville wounded knee
arthur kissorcallatme

to what judgement meekly led
shall men gather trumpeted
by Louis Armstrong from the dead

life and death shall here be voice
less rising from their moist
interment hoist-

ing all their flags before them
poniard poison rocket bomb
nations of the earth shall come

and his record page on page
forever building he shall scan and give each age
sentences of righteous rage

if the pious then shall shake me
what reply can merchants make me
what defences can they fake?

mighty and majestic god-
head saviour of the broken herd
grant me mercy at thy word

day of fire dreadful day
day for which all sufferers pray
grant me vengeance with thy sword

Working with liturgical manuscripts, part 9 - Terribilis est locus iste

One of the many challenges of working with liturgical sources - not only fragments but also complete survivals - is the condensation of information that takes place on the liturgical page. Books containing liturgical material were intended to provide the texts for a wide range of feasts with various degrees of completion. Certain types of books contained only certain chants, such as the antiphonary, so named for its predominant focus on the antiphons, a text sung before and/or after the psalms and, in the case of a saint's feast, often containing material specific to the saint of the day. In other cases, books that contained several types of texts, such as breviaries, could be divided so that one breviary contained the material for the summer season and the other contained the material for the winter season.

Another type of challenge that comes with the compression of information on the liturgical page, is to be able to identify a text when the only identifying feaure is the first word, the so-called incipit. Thanks to the work of numerous academics, there are great databases in place to help identifying chants, such as cantusindex.org and cantus.uwaterloo.ca. Even when the chant is identified, however, there sometimes remains a question of the chant's intertextuality: What does the chant point to, what texts are it meant to invoke?

RARA Musik M 4

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek

One example of such intertextuality can be found in the fragment RARA Musik M 4, as seen above. The picture shows a section from the office for the feast of the dedication of a church. This was a feast held on the anniversary of the church's dedication, and the date itself therefore varies from church to church, but the texts were for the most part common to all Latin churches.

The picture shows a responsory, a text which follows the lesson and serves as a response to the theme of the lesson, hence the name. Only the incipit is recorded, but this is also all that is needed, as this is a case of biblical intertextuality that would be well known to most of the literate members of the clerical community. The incipit refers to the exclamation of Jacob after he has wrestled the angel in Genesis 28:17, saying "terribilis est, inquit, locus iste, non est hic aliud nisi domus Dei, et porta caeli", which in the Douay-Rheims edition is translated as: "he said: How terrible is this place! this is no other but the house of God and the gate of heaven". Jacob then takes the stone that served as his pillow during the night, sets it erects, pours oil on it, and renames the place Bethel (previously called Luza).

This quotation should also indicate very clearly why this text is used in chant for the feast of the dedication of a church: When Jacob utters his exclamation, he locates on earth a locality that serves as the house of God, a place where the divine presence is particularly strongly felt. In Christianity, the church is exactly such a place, a house of God where mankind can more easily contemplate and become aware of God and the divine mystery. In this way, Jacob's words, as well as his dedication of Bethel onto God, becomes a typological forerunner for every single church in Christendom, and in singing the responsory Terribilis est, the clerical community binds its own church typologically to Bethel, to the proto-church of the Old Testament, and in this way makes itself a part of the long history of Christendom.

Working with liturgical fragments, part 8 - The case of the blindingly obvious

RARA K 248
Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek

When working with medieval fragments, difficulties present themselves in many different forms. The main problem tends to be a lack of information, which is the nature of fragments. Other times, the problem can be to assess the information that is actually there, either because of the state of the fragment or one's own inexperience, or both. Yet other times, there can be a combination of these two, as is the case for the fragment I'm currently working on, as shown above.

This fragment is from a missal, which can be made clear from the red letters on the left-hand column say "Off", meaning "offertory", which is a part of the mass. The fragment is also badly worn, and the letters have in many cases vanished or can only be identified with limited certainty, which means that for the most part I only have a handful of words from each section of the page from which to attempt an identification. Well, a handful is an exaggeration, because in most cases I do not have even five words from which to start.

I struggled for a long time with the text in the above picture, slowly identifying individual letters, marking them down on print-outs of pictures showing the section in question, and trying to find enough material to put through the relevant databases in hope that something would come out of it. It took me a long time, but I was finally able to identify the words "Surge et", "rise and". This was not very much to go on, especially since the word "et" is so common as to provide numerous useless results in any search query. But I knew at least that the sentence started with "surge", and I had an inkling that the text might belong to the text further down on the column. This inkling might seem as a no-brainer but when you look at the way the fragment is used to bind the book, you see that the spine is quite thick and creates an artificial break in the column itself.  

RARA K 284

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek

As stated, I suspected that the text on the one cover might be connected somehow with the text on the other cover. Since I had already managed to identify the text on the other cover as belonging to the Book of Jonah, I thought that this might be the case with the text I was then working on as well. This proved to be true, and I also discovered that not only was the text connected, it was one and the same section of the fragment, running across the spine and connecting both the covers with the opening of chapter 3 of the Book of Jonah. I was elated. Both because I had finally managed to solve a rather pernicious puzzle, but also because having the text run all the way down the surviving part of the text column meant that those lines which were worn away, especially on the folds of the spine, could reasonably be filled in or reconstructed from the Book of Jonah. This in turn meant that I did not run the risk of having a single, recalcitrant, truculent line from some minor section that could not be identified.

After the excitement had abated somewhat - but only somewhat - I looked through some of the pictures I had taken, and some of the excitement started to fade because now that I had solved the puzzle, the solution seemed very clear, the letters did not seem as worn as I first had thought. And then, finally, I noticed that me identifying this text as belonging to the Book of Jonah was as unimpressive and as un-miraculous as you could possibly get. For right above the beginning of the passage from the Book of Jonah, four red letters clearly indicated "ione", Jonah, showing that if I had been more aware I would have gone to the Book of Jonah right away. I had seen those letters during my research, but I had failed to understand them, simply due to a lack of experience. I had never come across  such an indication before, and I did not know that this was done. In this way, my difficulty consisted both of lacking material - such as lacking a vast amount of the letters - and also lacking experience, not being able to read the information that was actually on the page, until after it was all sorted.

I am now prepared for another rubric indicating that the text is taken from the Book of Jonah, but I somehow suspect that if I see an indication for another biblical book, I might overlook it for the same reason I overlooked the rubric in RARA K 284.

Working with liturgical fragments, part 7 - A minor breakthrough

The world of medieval fragments can be an immensely small world sometimes, with very narrow confines for what is at all possible, and for how far you can go and how much information can possibly be found. Sometimes this can be frustrating, and sometimes this frustration comes from the tantalising possibility that there might just be enough of a clue to solve the entire riddle with only one piece of information that stands out and that makes it possible to pin some sort of identification on the fragment in question. Such breakthroughs do happen more often than one might fear, and they are always frightfully rewarding, no matter the size of the ground that has just been gained.

I recently had one such minor breakthrough, and it was a great relief to be able to solve yet one more clue and fill in one more tiny scrap of information.

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek 534.11

The fragment that yielded this minor breakthrough belongs to the book shown above, the so-called Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek 534.11, which is a seventeenth-century herbal by the German doctor and herbalist Jakob Dieter (1522-90), also known by his nome de plume Tabernaemontanus. As can be seen above, the massive book has yielded seven tiny little fragment strips, some of which have been identified, some of which are still very far from being identified. In a previous blogpost I presented one of these seven fragments, found on the top of the spine and containing text from a sequence for the mass of Saint Stephen (December 26).

The fragment on the top of the spine was easy to read and consequently easy to identify. The fragment on the bottom of the spine, however, was much more difficult as many of the letters were obscured by pieces of string that had fastened to the vellum and made parts of the words illegible. Even though I was able to read some of the letters, it remained very difficult to assess how the word was written in full, which is always essential when dealing with Latin, as a search in the databases can yield very different results. For instance, as seen above, it was possible to make out the letters "gaudi", but it was difficult to say whether it should be "gaudia" or "gaudie" (which is the medieval spelling of "gaudiae").

Fortunately, however, there was one single word which was written in full: "baratra", meaning depth or abyss, and often used as a synonym for hell. I was very excited about this find, I typed it into the database - and nothing at all came out of it. This came as a bit of a shock to me, because even though I'm used to not finding the texts I'm looking for even though I have at least one complete word to go by, I thought "baratra" would be sufficiently special to make it possible to track it down. No such luck.

After a while, however, it dawned on me that the database I'm relying on, the CANTUS index, is notoriously unwilling to accept medieval Latin spelling, and I then remembered that in classical Latin "baratra" is spelled with an h, "barathra". I tried again, and I was immensely happy to find that not only could the chant be identified, it also belonged to the same text as the fragment on the top of the spine: It belonged to a sequence for the mass of Saint Stephen, and it came from the very same page and belonged even to the same section, as only three and a half words separated the text of the first fragment with the text of the second fragment. I was elated at this, as it allowed me not only to identify yet another of the seven fragments, but also to reconstruct more fully a small portion of the original book as there were now two fragments from the same page.

A minor breakthrough, but one that made all other dead ends completely worthwhile.

From an elegy by Nicolás Guillén

In a previous blogpost, I talked about my excitement in discovering that I could read a collection of poems by Octavio Paz in Spanish, only relying on an English translation for the odd word I did not know. Incited by this literary triumph, I decided to venture further into Latin-American poetry, and while searching for poets from Cuba I found the name Nicolás Guillén (1902-89) and found, to my delight, that there existed a dual-language edition of one of his works. The work in question is the poem "En algún sitio de la primavera: Elegía", a poem in fifteen parts that was made public shortly after Guillén's death, and edited with a facing-page translation by Keith Ellis in 1994. It was a pleasure to read this poem, and although it was more difficult than the shorter sentences in Paz' work, I felt able to enjoy it in its original language, which heightened the enjoyment significantly. In the present blogpost, I give you one of the poem's fifteen parts plus translation, taken from Ellis' edition from 1994, titled New Love Poetry and published by University of Toronto Press.

En algún sitio de la primavera: Elegía

XI

La forma de la muerte no es una calavera.
Es tu ausencia
como una llanura calcinada.
Una llanura a sol y fuego por el día,
reverberante y sin un árbol.
Una llanura damasquinada por la Luna,
una extensión metálica
en la frialdad nocturna.

Si grito, no me oyen.
Si llamo, nadie viene.
En qué planta estoy viviendo?
Ah dios, si lo supiera!
Estoy muerto,
tendid al sol y al cielo,
un cadáber sin ojos
picoteado de pájaros.

Me oyes, me estás oyendo?
Ayer no más, el mismo,
el tuyo para siempre.

Silencio.
Ni aun el viento.





In Some Springtime Place: Elegy

(translated by Keith Ellis)

XI

The form of death is not a skull.
It is your absence
like a scorched plain.
A plain burned by sun and fire by day,
shimmering and treeless.
A plain
mottled by the Moon,
a metallic expanse
in the nocturnal cold.

If I shout, they don't hear me.
If I call, nobody comes.
What planet am I living on?
Oh God, if I only knew!
I am dead,
laid out under sun and sky,
an eyeless corpse,
picked over by birds.

Do you hear me, are you hearing me?
Only yesterday, hte same,
yours forever

Silence.
Not even the wind.

Working with liturgical manuscripts, part 6 - Penmanship practice from pages past

As mentioned in previous blogposts, I'm currently engaged in a projects researching manuscript fragments in bindings from a book collection formerly at Herlufsholm School at Næstved, and purchased by the university library of University of Southern Denmark in 1968. In these relics there are many little details that provide interesting and curious glimpses of the past lives who have at various points been engaged with these books, either with the manuscripts before they were cut up for binding, or with the books in their manuscript bindings. One such case is Jacob, presumably a young boy who studied at Herlufsholm School (founded in 1565 and treated more extensively here), who seems to have practiced his penmanship, and his Latin, in a scrap of residual vellum on the inside of the covers of one of these books.

Inside of the back cover

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA Musik L 43

The book in question is a booklet of musical notation and lyrics by various composers, and its estimated date of print is sometime in the 1580s. It is one of several collections of songs that were kept at the school. We do not, to my knowledge, know how these books were used in the the study of music, whether they were handed out to students or not, but it is clear that young Jacob did have this book in his possession for long enough - and sufficiently out of sight - for him to practice writing his name, first in Latin and then in Danish, both of which were presumably taught at Herlufsholm.

Of Jacob nothing more is known to me at least, although I am sure his name can be located in school registers, and possibly also in other books throughout the collection, serving as evidence for his efforts to write his own name correctly in two languages.

Working with liturgical fragments, part 5 - Dead ends

As every academic will know, in any given research project, no matter how big or small, there's always a risk of seeing signs in the material that point enticingly somewhere, which in the end turn out not to go anywhere at all. Excursions or leads such as these are very rarely written about because they do not yield any positive information. After following these leads we are only able to say that this is not going anywhere. And since it is not going anywhere, the time, the energy, the mental ingenuity spent following the lead to its uttermost possible dead end rarely get accounted for. In the humanities, at least, it is only natural that these dead ends are not made part of a research report, an article or a presentation. These are only dead ends, they do not contribute to our understanding of the material we have been researching.

Most of the time I follow this practice myself: Dead ends go unrecorded, failures are not written down. Recently, however, I ended up in a dead end myself, and the realisation that the lead I had been preparing to follow would not go anywhere was a significant blow to the enthusiasm and excitement that had been building up in the past days. The realisation itself came in the wake of a very basic check of the source that I was researching, and had I had the wherewithal do so so earlier in the process I would not even have started to prepare for the journey down the dead end.

In this case, however, I had already managed to build a great deal of castles in the air from a very insubstantial amount of material, and I have decided to write this blogpost to present those thougths and explain why it was so easy to go down this road. I write this perhaps in part to vent about what amazing results could have been if reality had been different. But I also write because I think there is something of an important methodological consideration to be found in cases like these, namely that it sometimes is possible to build reasonable hypotheses on very scant material, and that this is sometimes what we as researchers have to do. In this particular case, however, I had source material that demonstrated conclusively that my ideas were wrong, but if I had not been in possession of this material I could easily have written extensively about something that would have been incorrect.

Fragment from Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek, MS. 58.2
Photo by Jakob Povl Holck

The material in question was a fragment from a book cover that belongs to the collection of old books at the university library of University of Southern Denmark, Odense. This collection was purchased in 1968 from Herlufsholm School in Næstved, Sjælland, a school that was founded in 1565 by admiral Herluf Trolle (1515-65) and his wife, the noblewoman Birgitte Gøye (1511-74). After the admiral's death in the year of the school's founding, Birgitte Gøye was the overseer of the school until 1567. This school accrued an impressive library from the very beginning, a library that was amplified by donations from book collectors at different periods, and these books are now being researched by the university library in Odense. My part in this job is to examine the fragments that have been found so far.

The fragment that led med down this dead end is MS 58.2. This fragment is unforunately mostly hidden behind the cover of the fragment carrier, and all that remains visible of the manuscript fragment at this stage are the folds on either side of the front and back covers, as shown in the picture above. As these folds are not very thick, it has so far only been possible to identify three of the texts of the original manuscript.

What we know so far, however, that the fragment comes from a breviary and contains chants for the feast of Saint Clare of Assisi (1194-1253), the founder of the Poor Clares and the sister of Saint Francis (1181/82-1226). I was very excited when it became apparent that these chants belonged to the feast of Saint Clare (August 11). In the material from the book collection that I have so far investigated, there have been very few cases where the liturgy does not belong to an old saint either from the Bible, the apocrypha, or the first Christian centuries. The reason why I was so excited about a newer saint was that a newer saint might make it possible to say something about the manuscript's provenance. The old saints were venerated throughout Christendom and could not provide any indication as to where the manuscript came from. In the case of Saint Clare, however, it became possible to make some more accurate suggestions.

It should be stated, however, that Saint Clare was also venerated widely as her cult spread quickly with the Franciscan Order and the Poor Clares, reaching Denmark in the 1230s and in 1257 respectively. Nonetheless, an office for the feast of Saint Clare would most likely have been commissioned or produced by the mendicants and it was this that opened up for the great, exciting possibility.

Fragment from Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek, MS. 58.2
Photo by Jakob Povl Holck

As stated, Herlufsholm School was situated in Næstved. In this town there was also a Franciscan friary, which had been established sometime in the mid-thirteenth century and was eventually dissolved in 1532 during the Reformation, a dissolution that was chronicled in the anonymous De expulsione fratrum minorum, the thirteenth chapter of which details the dismantling of Næstved friary. In the process of the dissolution of the monasteries in Scandinavia, an immense amount of manuscript were confiscated and recycled as, for instance, book bindings. This was also the case in England and in the German counties were the Reformation was carried through, and this is, as we see, what happened with the breviary in MS. 58.2.

Since MS 58.2 was most likely a document from a Franciscan house, and since there had been a Franciscan house in the same town as the school, I quickly fell for the tantalising possibility that this fragment might originate from the Næstved friary. After all, this was a very real possibility, as discarded manuscripts were often gathered locally in Denmark, and if the fragment carrier had been printed near Næstved it would at least merit an article outlining the possibility that we were here in possession of a manuscript fragment that could reasonably be linked to Denmark. This is rarely the case for the manuscript fragments that we have investigated so far in the book collection, and if MS 58.2 could be linked to Næstved it would be possible to connect it to the wider history of medieval Denmark. I fantasised about the article I could write based on this, and I went on an ordering spree at the university library, borrowing books on the Franciscan order, the liturgy, on Denmark in the Middle Ages.

I let this fantasy stir in my head for a few days, building all kinds of wonderful imaginary roads down which my hypothesis could be pursued. It was only a few days later, however, that I realised that the manuscript fragments belonged to a book, and that the provenance of this book could easily be checked by looking at the frontispice. This I did, and it was then that all my imaginary roads and castles fell abruptly to ground, because it turned out that the book was printed in Frankfurt, and so the manuscript must have come from a nearby Franciscan friary, a long way away from the Danish context I had been hoping for.

It was a frustrating discovery, but not an unusual one in my experience with researching the Middle Ages, and it is an inevitable part of this kind of engagement with a past that comes down to us in fragments and which we often meet in lacunae and in silences. It shows how easily we can misinterpret the facts we do have, and it shows that many of our ideas of aspects of the Middle Ages are precarious and in need of constant revision, reinterpretation and rethinking.