Late Medieval Liturgical Offices - Texts

The liturgical office for Thomas of Canterbury was sung from Norway to Hungary. In versions for monasteries and for secular churches it survives nowadays in several hundred manuscripts. Offices for St Dominic and St Francis were similarly widespread. Did the office for Thomas of Canterbury influence them? There are eight or nine offices for Corpus Christi. How are they related to each other? Why did the Dominicans ask a Master-General of the order to write an office for Corpus Christi if Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican himself, had already done so? And why are there no adequate scholarly editions for any of these important offices? This unusual book provides tools that can help to address such questions. It maps new territory in many disciplines. It sets out concise but comprehensive methods for describing and recording liturgical material (nearly 1500 complete offices are edited); for categorizing late medieval poetry (some 50,000 poems are analyzed); for indexing and comparing plainsongs (several thousand are nearly ready for release); and for making brief inventories of liturgical manuscripts (some 2000 are in preparation). In addition, it presents a consistent system of sigla for referring to the libraries in which manuscripts are held (manuscripts from more than 400 libraries were used for this project). The repertory for which these innovative methods were evolved - late medieval offices, most of the rhymed variety - is presented in electronic editions that can be manipulated in numerous ways. These data are supplied on three 3.5-inch high-density disks with the book. Included also are computer programs written specifically to search this repertory and to produce keywords in context. No other software is required, but access to commercial wordprocessors is assumed. This volume deals with the electronic formatting, searching, and indexing of the textual data. A complementary volume, soon to be published, will provide similar information about the chants of selected offices and about the inventories of the sources. These musical and manuscript data will also be supplied on disk. For those curious to explore this huge and virtually unknown region of medieval studies, the reader will find a compass (in the symbolic language used to investigate the liturgy), a wealth of maps (in the forms of detailed explanations) of the main routes, and guidance into the multifarious and branching byways of the topic (through numerous examples, handlists, and reference guides).