Mass by Design: Design Elements in Early Italian Mass Books

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Mass by Design: Design Elements in Early Italian Mass Books

Abstract: The combination of the various individual and seriated textual elements – readings, rubrics, chant, and prayers – in a single “mass book” was one of the most successful and widely disseminated innovations of western book, liturgical, and cultural history. What has remained largely obscured is just how early scribes combined different kinds of texts and series of texts (fixed and variable; read silently, aloud, sung, instructions to be followed, and material to be consulted) in a single volume.
Liturgical scholars have long proposed diverse reasons for the adoption of the integrated “missal” format of mass books (instead of separate books for different texts). These hypotheses have remained unconvincing however, in part because they neglect to examine sufficiently closely the extant mass books as material witnesses of what is at base a question of design: how scribes combined different texts, and different series of texts in a single volume intended to be used in the course of ritual performance. Before developing theories regarding the reasons for this integration, what is needed is a careful, quantitative, description and analysis of extant early mass book manuscripts, and comparison with sets of contemporary anthologies, in order better to understand how, when, and where early medieval mass texts were integrated.
It is now becoming clear that integrated mass books were a more common and earlier than has been previously thought. While the attribution of universal change in preference in format to integrated mass book (missal) to the long-twelfth century now appears to be accurate, a picture is emerging of an overwhelming preference for the integrated mass book format in the Beneventan scribal zone from our earliest surviving evidence, long before the dominance of the format elsewhere. Moreover, recent analysis of Berhard Bischoff’s Katalog of ninth-century manuscript identifies no fewer than fourteen integrated mass book fragments all identified as Italian, and all dating before the turn of the tenth century.
This paper will explore quantitatively the codicology, layout, and use of readers aids of Italian integrated mass books prior to 1100, and compare the results with scribal practice in anthologies of other texts.
Period7-Sept-2017
Event titleXXe Colloque international de paléographie latine: Les scribes et la présentation du texte
Event typeConference
LocationNew Haven, United StatesShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • Medieval Liturgy
  • Palaeography
  • Beneventan Liturgy
  • Beneventan script
  • Missals
  • Southern Italy
  • Codicology
  • Medieval Studies