medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
---- SHERRY L REAMES <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> My point was that errors which seem unthinkable to musicologists are not
> unthinkable at all to those of us whose focus is the texts of liturgical
> books-- and vice versa, no doubt.
This just illustrates the fragmented nature of the field. (Professor Reames is in a department of English, Professor Pfaff in a department of History.) But the 'manuscript people' should recognise that the running in recent years in liturgical history has been made by musicologists (both Terence Bailey and Andrew Hughes are musicologists, for example) - before that it was theologians (Pfaff's first book was published as an Oxford Theological Monograph.) With such a small field fragmented in this way, you can't just concentrate on your own patch.
And the division is quite accidental: the same people (mostly Anglican clergymen, who were the only people in 19th century England with a sufficient knowledge of Latin and an interest in liturgical history) founded both the Henry Bradshaw Society and the Plainsong and Mediaeval Music Society (Walter Frere, an Anglican monk, divided his scholarly publications between them - and also with the Alcuin Club, but that's another story.) It just so happened that there was only one private press in the country with plainchant type, and they were busy printing plainchant... So the HBS tended to print liturgical texts without the music, and the PMMS concentrated on photographic facsimiles of medieval music. So musicology and liturgical textual studies drifted apart.
John Briggs
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