The calls for the improvement of the morality and the religious practices of Christian society voiced by Carolingian rulers, as well as the resulting struggles made by local communities to achieve those improvements, have been the objects of hot debate and intense scholarly work in recent years. What was once perceived as an essentially top-down, royally-driven endeavour aiming at the establishment of standardized texts, beliefs, and practices for the devotional and religious life of the whole Carolingian world, especially by the means of authoritative texts mostly of Roman origins, is now understood and described in very different ways. [1] Standardization and homogeneity were never fully accomplished, and most probably never were the goal pursued by all those involved--in the first instance, the rulers. The Carolingian kings were more concerned with establishing a general consensus around the idea that religious things needed to be done better in order to win and maintain God’s approval toward his people and its rulers. Everyone’s eternal salvation was at stake. The Christian faithful entrusted to the spiritual care of the Carolingians were to be properly taught about the pillars of their faith, the practices they were to perform during rites, the very words they were to hear and say, and their correct meaning. Those intellectuals closest to kings actively promoted and spread models that could be used locally to improve liturgical practices and amend texts, but these models were never formally imposed as the only authoritative and acknowledged ones by the royal power. Negotiations and crossings between them and previous local traditions could bring about very different results and solutions. This is the reason why, despite a strong emphasis by Carolingian authors on an ideal authority attributed to Roman texts (or texts presented as coming from Rome), Roman liturgy, texts, and books were always only one of the possibilities available and accepted for the performance of Christian rites in the Carolingian world. As long as the words of Scripture and the key concepts of the faith were correctly transmitted to the people by a spiritual army of well-trained priests, the practicalities of how all of that was done were the matter of local, even individual choice.
In her most recent book Susan Rankin, one of the world’s leading scholars in the field of the history of early medieval music, brings one more contribution to our understanding of the transformations of liturgy in Carolingian times by focusing on a regularly underappreciated side of it, that is, chant. Her research provides extremely valuable insight into this highly technical field of study and allows to enrich furtherly the landscape of scholars’ considerations about Carolingian cultural production. Readers’ (and my own) appreciation goes to Rankin first of all for not making excessive use of the technical vocabulary of musical notations, both early medieval and that now employed by specialists of these studies. Her book is perfectly accessible to scholars with different training and research interests. This is why it promises to be so profitable for future work on Carolingian liturgy and cultural and book production, as well as representations of authority and even emotions.
One of the clearest features of Rankin’s study is the central role attributed to the practical, performative, and material sides of her topics. The core of her considerations most often comes from direct investigations of the manuscripts and thoughtful reflections on their material composition, their practical uses, the reasons why they were produced, and the ways their authors or compilers wanted them to affect their audiences. Every single element of Carolingian chant books’ materiality, from script, wording and punctuation, to dimensions and layout solutions (up to the choice of inks in different colors), is the focus of specific chapters of the book, thus defining its overall structure. Rankin effectively chose a flexible thematic frame, instead of highlighting the different categories of Carolingian books for chants in a sequence. This allows her to take into account and regularly compare products of very different origin, shape, and often quality, on the grounds of their loosely common purposes, functions, and practical uses. What was to be delivered, as Alcuin observed, was “not just comprehension of the word of God, but comprehension through the experience of sound” (95). Understanding the reasons that brought the books’ compilers, be they court intellectuals or local monastic scribes, to develop certain solutions and to discard others is thus of the utmost importance. As Rankin frequently repeats, collections of chants were not to be used or read just by specialized singers, but by a much wider audience, not necessarily trained in a specific way for performing liturgical chant. Clarity, order, and accessibility were among the key principles driving the composition of chant books. To take but one example: “The design of Carolingian music scripts was thus driven by an intense interest in controlling textual delivery and [...] in the rhetorical shaping of that delivery” (110).
Beside the thematic succession of chapters, an overall, chronologically ordered narrative also shapes Rankin’s reconstruction. Charlemagne’s times were in her eyes an initial stage from a double perspective. On the one hand, royal assessments like the Admonitio generalis and the Epistola de litteris colendis established the context and provided thorough guidelines for the revision and improvement of--among other liturgical books--chant repertories in use in the Carolingian world. On the other hand, the decades between the late eighth and the early ninth century were those of the strongest and most intense experimentation of innovative solutions, combining previous practices of both Frankish and Roman tradition but also paving the way for future developments. So, for instance, notations of punctuation and pronunciation can be seen as opening the path to the later formulation of full-fledged systems of musical notations, not attested before the mid-ninth century. The generation loosely coinciding with Louis the Pious’s rule was one of intense scholarly discussion of different musical traditions converging in Carolingian liturgical practices. The protagonists of these debates were some of the top-ranking liturgists of the time, including Helisachar, Amalarius, and Agobard. With their contribution, according to Rankin, a process of selection and simplification among the experiments inherited from the previous generation started. Some practices of book production, punctuation, and musical notation, while never fully eliciting potential alternatives, gradually prevailed and were spread throughout the Carolingian world. So, a movement from extreme and creative variety to the affirmation of more or less shared basic principles can be detected from the late eighth to the late ninth century, or at least this is the narrative brought on by Rankin. While never pushed too far, from time to time this reconstruction takes the shape of a narrative of progress from chaos to order, and probably needs to be nuanced or worded differently here and there. But this is more a matter of wording choices than the result of biased analysis.
Finally, one more reason why this book deserves appreciation is the deep connection between its contents and its physicality. The chant books described by Rankin were produced, as she so effectively points out, following criteria of accessibility and readability. Her book apparently follows very similar criteria. The richness of reproductions of manuscripts’ folios, the clear layout of the pages reporting chants or passages thereof, even the use of different scripts and script sizes seem to materially reflect the author’s considerations and put them into practice in her own book. From a scholar’s point of view, maybe the only tiny issue in the use of this volume is the choice of endnotes instead of footnotes, which should most probably be attributed to the publisher rather than to Rankin. It must be emphasized, however, that this structure contributes to the pages’ overall clarity. And this leads me to my final consideration. This book offers precious insights into practices of book production that are still in use nowadays, but were first formulated or fully developed in the context of Carolingian struggles to improving liturgy and its textual supports. The technical solutions concerning punctuation and layout--among other things--that were experimented in Carolingian chant books were paramount in shaping the object book as we know it now. Rankin’s study thus helps to appreciate one more aspect of the Carolingian legacy in the present-day cultural world.
--------
Note:
1. For what follows see R. Kramer, “The Problem(s) with Carolingian Reform(s),” in S. Vanderputten (ed.), Rethinking Reform in the Latin West, 10th to 12th Century, Leiden 2023, pp. 23-44; A. Westwell, I. Rembold, C. van Rhijn (eds.), Rethinking the Carolingian Reforms, Manchester 2023; A. Vanderputten, “À quoi sert la renovatio? Réforme carolingienne et changements institutionnels dans la vie religieuse des ixe et xe siècles,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 265/1 (2024), pp. 263-271.