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Hodie puer natus est nobis: The celebration of Christmas at Piacenza in 1142*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2008

Brian Mller Jensen
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In the course of a discussion of the Christian liturgy and religious rituals in general, Mircea Eliade maintained that every religious festival, any liturgical time, represents the reactualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past, since words and gestures of a ritual are thought to be charged with a power of reactualization so that the event imitated is believed rendered present for the community's welfar. My analysis of the Piacentinian Christmas texts will be based on the phenomenological theories of religion elaborated by Eliade and Odo Casel. It will examine how the medieval Mass was not only a religious ceremony in praise of God but also a cultic experience in terms of the time and space of the ceremony. The liturgical apparatus will be considered as the actual vehicle that creates the proclaimed reality of the celebration, because it is within the power of the Mass to bring us into the same temporal dimension with the saving deeds of Christ and to place us in their immediate presence. By indicating the complexity of dimensions involved in religious practice, its ritual, mythological, doctrinal and experimental aspects, this phenomenological approach to the medieval Christian liturgy implies that the telos of each individual Mass goes beyond the liturgical celebration itself. It would seem to be of some interest, then, to subject to a detailed investigation those texts that were selected in a specific diocese at a certain time to achieve such a telos.

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Articles
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Plainsong & Medieval Music , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , April 1999 , pp. 15 - 38
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

1 Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York, 1961), 68. Similar observations on the Christian liturgy appear passim in his Cosmos and History; The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York, 1959).Google Scholar

2 Casel, Odo, The Mystery of Christian Worship (Westminster, MD, 1962), 101Google Scholar. See also Flanigan, Clifford, The Liturgical Context of the Quern quaeritis trope, Comparative Drama, 8 (1974), 4562.Google Scholar

3 Smart, Ninian, The Religious Experience of Mankind (London, 1979), 1525.Google Scholar

4 There is an identical obituary in Pia 65, fol. 442, and in Piacenza, Bibl. Cap., c. 51, fol. 279: Obiit Ribaldus huius ecclesiae canonicus et sancte Anastasie presbiter cardinalis qui dedit nobis terram de Pradegio ad libros faciendos MCXLIT. Cio per fare e mantenere i libri da adoperarsi nel Choro et allAltare, as explained by the historian Pietro Maria Campi in Delllstoria ecclesiastica di Piacenza (Piacenza, 1651; reprint, 1995), I: 414.

5 Jensen, Brian Mller, Liber Magistri. Piacenza, Biblioteca Capitolare c. 65. Commentario esplicativo (Piacenza, 1997), 12935.Google Scholar

6 See Domenico Ponzini's description in Gigli, Antonella, ed., II Libro del Maestro. Codice 65 della Biblioteca Capitolare (Piacenza, 1993), 78.Google Scholar

7 Quintavalle, Arturo C., Miniatura a Piacenza, I Codici dellArchivio Capitolare con una nota sulla liturgia piacentina e la paleografia di Dominico Ponzini Venice, 1963), 87.Google Scholar

8 Jonsson, Ritva et al. , Corpus Troporum I. Tropes du propre de la Messe 1: Cycle de Nol, Studia Latina Stockholmiensia 21 (Stockholm, 1975), 1112.Google Scholar

9 Mitrale, lib. 5 (Patrologia Latina 213: 2223): Hae tres missae tria tempora significant, constat enim tria tempora mundi per hanc singularem nativitatem salvari. Per missam quae in nocte canitur, tempus ante legem ignorantiae tenebris involutum accipitur. Per missam quae in aurora cantatur, tempus legis exprimitur in quo lux fidei mundo per Scripturas ostenditur, ideoque in aurora canitur et in ea dicitur: Lux fulgebit. Per missam tertiam quae in die ad horam tertiam celebratur, dies salutis et tempus gratiae denotatur, in quo Christus nascitur; ideoque in die canitur et in ea dicitur: Puer natus est nobis. Prima missa pertinet ad generationem, quae est de secreto, id est substantia Patris, quae est de Patre sine matre. Secunda pertinet ad illam generationem, quae est de utero virginis, quae est de matre sine patre. Ideoque diluculo canitur; quia homines legis semiplenam de ipsa notitiam habuerunt, ideoque in ea canitur: Lux fulgebit hodie super nos, quia natus est Dominus nobis. Tertia pertinet ad utramque, quod ex eius Evangelio patet, ubi namque dicitur: In principio erat verbum, aeterna significatur, ubi subditur, verbum caro factum est, temporalis ostenditur, ideoque in die cantatur, quia homines gratiae per temporalem nativitatem plenius agnoverunt divinitatem, quia per notitiam Filii pervenitur ad Patrem.

10 Bjrkvall, Gunilla and Haug, Andreas, Tropentypen in Sankt Gallen, in Bjrkvall, Gunilla and Arlt, Wulf, eds., Recherches Nouvelles sur les tropes liturgiques, Studia Latina Stockholmiensia 36 (Stockholm, 1993), 12330.Google Scholar

11 Jonsson, et al. , Corpus Troporum, I: 115.Google Scholar

12 I am most grateful to my Italian colleague Piero Panzetti who, besides confirming my musical observations, suggested other melodic features in support of the texts. See his analyses and transcriptions of the sixty-one sequences of Pia 65 in Piacenza 65: Un manocritto liturgico-musicale del sec. XII (unpub. diss., Rome, 19961997).

13 Brunner, Lance W., Catalogo delle sequenze in manoscritti di origine italiana anteriori al 1200, Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, 20 (1985), 237 and 219Google Scholar. See also Crocker, Richard, The Early Medieval Sequence (Berkeley, 1977), 160.Google Scholar

14 Corpus Troporum, I: 823, 100, 83, and the Puer natus table, pp. 2269.

15 For an explanation of my spelling of Maria and a detailed interpretation of Marian aspects in the tropes and sequences of the Piacentinian repertoire see my Beata Maria semper virgo in Piacenza, Bibl. Cap. c. 65, in Lillie, Eva L. and Petersen, Nils H., eds., Liturgy and the Arts in the Middle Ages: Studies in Honour of C. Clifford Flanigan (19411993) (Copenhagen, 1996), 13467.Google Scholar

16 See Lance Brunner, Catalogo delle sequenze, 237.

17 Quern quaeritis in presepe, pastores? dicite!

Christum natum infantem pannis involutum

secundum sermonem angelicum!

Adest hic parvulus cum Maria matre eius,

de quo dudum vaticinando Ysaias dixerat propheta:

Ecce virgo concipiet et pariet fllium.

Et nunc euntes dicite, quia natus est!

Instead of the Marian text Adest hie parvulus cum Maria matre sua de qua, found in most versions of the trope, Pia 65 offers the reading Adest hie parvulus cum Maria matre eius de quo. This reading clearly makes the child and not his virgin mother the essential figure in the already quoted Isaian prophecy Ecce virgo concipiet et pariet filium (7.14). The identification of the newborn child with Christ is evident in the Piacentinian version of the trope: the shepherds seek Christum natum infantem, while the other versions read salvatorem Christum dominum infantem; see Corpus Troporum, I: 1734.

19 The edition in Analecta Hymnica (= AH) 10.21 is based only on Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 222, fols. 9394; but since one folio is obviously missing between fol. 93 and fol. 94 in this manuscript, the last stanzas of the edition of this text printed in AH belong instead to the French sequence Querm superne tripudatim for St Benedict. An edition of the northern version may be found in Bannister, Henry M., Una sequenza per la Purificazione di origine italiana, Rassegna Gregoriana, 2 (1903), 6976Google Scholar. For an additional interpretation see my study, Beata Maria semper virgo in Piacenza, Bibl. Cap. c. 65, in Liturgy and the Arts in the Middle Ages, 1524.

18 See Lance Brunner, Catalogo delle sequenze, 286. My collation indicates that the northern version appears in Ivrea, Bibl. Cap. 60, Modena, Bibl. Cap. 1.7, Monza, Bibl. Cap. c. 1376, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 222, Torino, Bibl. Naz. F.IV.18, Vercelli, Bibl. Cap. 162, and the southern version in Benenevento, Bibl. Cap. VI 34, Benenevento, Bibl. Cap. VI 35, Monte Cassino, Archivio dellAbbazia 546, Piacenza, Bibl. Cap. c. 65.

20 See Jensen, B. M., in between are doors! Porta caeli in Italian Medieval Liturgical Poetry, Ecclesia Orans, 15 (1998), 3958.Google Scholar

21 Jungmann, Josef A., The Early Liturgy to the Time of Gregory the Great (London, 1959), 1318.Google Scholar

22 See my study La dedicazione della cattedrale di Piacenza: 1123 o 1132? Bolletino Storico Piacentino, 91 (1996), 11123, and the revised English version Callixtus II consecrated the Cathedral of Piacenza in 1123? Classica & Medievalia, 48 (1997), 389106. The Piacentinian tropes are included in Corpus Troporum VIII: The Tropes to the Dedication of the Church. Edition of Text and Music by Bodil Asketorp-Andolf, Stockholm (forthcoming).

25 Ennodius, Carminum liber I: XVIIII 45; Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiae Latinorum VI: 5523