Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2003, Blaðsíða 18

8
Michael Chesnutt
in one place, those of the third nocturns in another place, and selected an-
tiphons together with the responds and other verse texts in yet a third
place;16 he thus arrived by purely intuitive means at a distribution reflec-
ting the discrete sources from which the liturgy is made up (cf. section 5
below), but he made it impossible to envisage the arrangement of the me-
dieval original from the edition. Nor is Gertz’s presentation free of litur-
gical biunders: the hymn Primo proscriptos patria is entitled “Ad Ve-
speras primas post Inuitatorium” (VSD 225), showing that he did not un-
derstand where Vespers ended and Matins began, while the trope Qui
conducis seruos crucis bears the equally misleading title “Ad Laudes in
festo passionis” (VSD 226) and is divorced from its respond, which is
printed two pages earlier. In the latter case we can see that Gertz simply
took over Usinger’s incorrect localisation of the boundary between
Matins and Lauds.17 He also left out most of the psalm antiphons as well
as other ritual material belonging to the Office and Mass, dismissing
these texts as ‘unnecessary and useless dead weight’ (VSD 179).
The present edition offers a new critical and annotated text based on
the only complete manuscript source survi ving from the middle ages.
With the exception of the antiphon discussed and transcribed in section
4.2.5 below it does not include the chant, as an edition of the latter has
been in preparation for a number of years by John Bergsagel, Copen-
hagen. Such an edition by a competent musicologist is much needed, not
only because the material is a unique treasure of medieval Danish mono-
dy, but also because the charting of compositional models in the interna-
tional chant repertoire can be expected to shed additional light on the
origins of the liturgy as a whole.18 The little that has been contributed so
16 Cf. n. 14 above.
17 Another misunderstanding taken over by Gertz from Usinger is the designation Ordi-
nale for the principal manuscript text of the liturgy of Knud Lavard (cf. VSD 171, Usinger
17, etc.). In the technical sense of the term an ‘ordinal’ is a conspectus of the elements that
make up Divine Service. A medieval ordinal contained liturgical instructions and cues, but
not the lessons of Matins in extenso and certainly not the music itself (cf. Sherry L.
Reames, “The Office for St. Cecilia,” in: Thomas J. Heffeman and E. Ann Matter [eds.],
The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, Kalamazoo 2001, 245-70, here 259-60). This termi-
nological inaccuracy is all the more unfortunate because it has achieved normative status
among Danish medievalists. In Icelandic it has spawned the (equally inappropriate) trans-
lation Ordubok, cf. KnytlBG cxlv.
18 A ground-breaking musicological study along these lines that appeared many years ago in
Bibliotheca Amamagnæana is the edition of the medieval Icelandic liturgy of St borlåkr by
Robert Abraham Ottosson (n. 7 above), in which the author demonstrates the dependence of
the material on Dominican - and, as it would seem, specifically English - models.