In the next 5 minutes, I will share with you some of the results of my current project, fully entitled: “Neglected Sources. A Socio-Political History of medieval Poland Based on Liturgical Manuscripts.” My overarching goal is to integrate a hitherto marginalized type of historical source, namely the books used during Christian worship, into the broader narrative of medieval Poland’s political and social history. As I speak here at the Cantus Planus Research Forum, I believe that my project might also be of interest to the scholarly community dealing with medieval music.
Although theologians and musicologists have researched Polish liturgical manuscripts, this vital source has never been adequately analyzed and utilized by scholars interested in history, despite the evident overlaps between medieval music, liturgy, and political culture. For example, the famous manuscript preserved in Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Lit. 5, is the earliest materially extant witness of the country’s new name, Polonia, coined in contrast to the previous tenth-century terms of the realm. However, the manuscript with its sequence Annua recolamus, performed on Saint Adalbert feast, is usually omitted in the debates on the construction of early medieval Polish political identity. In my recent article on the Liturgical origins of medieval Poland, I have incorporated this evidence into the broader efforts around the year 1000 to promote the new name of the medieval realm and its elevated meaning conveyed by the Slavic-derived term Polonia. The article also provides evidence about various places where the unique Annua recolamus sequence, found only in Lit. 5, could have been performed.
The main result of the project, however, is the discovery of numerous hitherto largely neglected or unknown sources. Despite the pandemic, I have traveled throughout repositories of medieval liturgical manuscripts, luckily without contracting covid. I begged nuns and priests to open their archives and libraries for me, I succeeded, and it seems that currently, I am the only still living scholar who has been able to examine nearly every liturgical manuscript that provides an insight into the medieval liturgy in Poland from the tenth until the beginning of the fourteenth century. I was able to identify numerous codices with music notation, hitherto unanalyzed correctly, nor listed in the database Cantus Planus in Polonia. For example, two high medieval Płock Pontificals, today bound together as Ms 7a-b, contain numerous antiphons with music notation and could be of interest to scholars working on the overlap of music and pontifical tradition. In Poznań, the hitherto neglected thirteenth-century Liber usuum with the local calendar provides an insight into the liturgical practice in the Ląd monastery, one of the first Cistercian centers in medieval Poland. I will analyze this codex alongside the twelfth-century Cistercian collectar from the same monastery, preserved today in Beinecke Library at Yale University. Information about this manuscript lost during World War 2, I owe to Henry Parkes, whom I immensely thank for sharing the note about this codex with me. As one of the contributors to the Cantus Planus in Polonia, I will introduce these and other sources with music notation into the platform, curated and led by Irina Chachulska, who will speak later today.
Alongside the neglected manuscripts with music notation, I have discovered twelfth-century Pontifical in Wrocław, hitherto unknown to the scholarly community. Even though it contains no music notation, it offers exciting material for researching how the liturgical tradition labeled Pontificale romano-germanique has spread into the lands of newer Christianity in the twelfth century.
Thank you very much for your attention!
A paper was delivered in July 2021 at Cantus Planus Research Forum.
