Search results for ""author margot e. fassler""

Margot E. Fassler’s richly documented history—winner of the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society and the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America—demonstrates how the Augustinians of St. Victor, Paris, used an art of memory to build sonic models of the church. This musical art developed over time, inspired by the religious ideals of Hugh and Richard of St. Victor and their understandings of image and the spiritual journey. Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris demonstrates the centrality of sequences to western medieval Christian liturgical and artistic experience, and to our understanding of change and continuity in medieval culture. Fassler examines the figure of Adam of St. Victor and the possible layers within the repertories created at various churches in Paris, probes the ways the Victorine sequences worked musically and exegetically, and situates this repertory within the intellectual and spiritual ideals of the Augustinian canons regular, especially those of the Abbey of St. Victor. Originally published in hardover in 1993, this paperback edition includes a new introduction by Fassler, in which she reviews the state of scholarship on late sequences since the original publication of Gothic Song. Her notes to the introduction provide the bibliography necessary for situating the Victorine sequences, and the late sequences in general, in contemporary thought.

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In Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts in the Twelfth Century, Margot E. Fassler takes readers into the rich, complex world of Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias (meaning “Know the ways”) to explore how medieval thinkers understood and imagined the universe. Hildegard, renowned for her contributions to theology, music, literature, and art, developed unique methods for integrating these forms of thought and expression into a complete vision of the cosmos and of the human journey. Scivias was Hildegard’s first major theological work and the only one of her writings that was both illuminated and copied by scribes from her monastery during her lifetime. It contains not just religious visions and theological commentary, but also a shortened version of Hildegard’s play Ordo virtutum (“Play of the virtues”), plus the texts of fourteen musical compositions. These elements of Scivias, Fassler contends, form a coherent whole demonstrating how Hildegard used theology and the liturgical arts to lead and to teach the nuns of her community. Hildegard’s visual and sonic images unfold slowly and deliberately, opening up varied paths of knowing. Hildegard and her nuns adapted forms of singing that they believed to be crucial to the reform of the Church in their day and central to the ongoing turning of the heavens and to the nature of time itself. Hildegard’s vision of the universe is a “Cosmic Egg,” as described in Scivias, filled with strife and striving, and at its center unfolds the epic drama of every human soul, embodied through sound and singing. Though Hildegard’s view of the cosmos is far removed from modern understanding, Fassler’s analysis reveals how this dynamic cosmological framework from the Middle Ages resonates with contemporary thinking in surprising ways, and underscores the vitality of the arts as embodied modes of theological expression and knowledge.

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Margot E. Fassler’s richly documented history—winner of the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society and the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America—demonstrates how the Augustinians of St. Victor, Paris, used an art of memory to build sonic models of the church. This musical art developed over time, inspired by the religious ideals of Hugh and Richard of St. Victor and their understandings of image and the spiritual journey. Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris demonstrates the centrality of sequences to western medieval Christian liturgical and artistic experience, and to our understanding of change and continuity in medieval culture. Fassler examines the figure of Adam of St. Victor and the possible layers within the repertories created at various churches in Paris, probes the ways the Victorine sequences worked musically and exegetically, and situates this repertory within the intellectual and spiritual ideals of the Augustinian canons regular, especially those of the Abbey of St. Victor. Originally published in hardover in 1993, this paperback edition includes a new introduction by Fassler, in which she reviews the state of scholarship on late sequences since the original publication of Gothic Song. Her notes to the introduction provide the bibliography necessary for situating the Victorine sequences, and the late sequences in general, in contemporary thought.

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First full-length study of the role and duties of the medieval cantor. Cantors made unparalleled contributions to the way time was understood and history was remembered in the medieval Latin West. The men and women who held this office in cathedrals and monasteries were responsible for calculating the date of Easter and the feasts dependent on it, for formulating liturgical celebrations season by season, managing the library and preparing manuscripts and other sources necessary to sustain the liturgical framework of time, andpromoting the cults of saints. Crucially, their duties also often included committing the past to writing, from simple annals and chronicles to more fulsome histories, necrologies, and cartularies, thereby ensuring that towns, churches, families, and individuals could be commemorated for generations to come. This volume seeks to address the fundamental question of how the range of cantors' activities can help us to understand the many different waysin which the past was written and, in the liturgy, celebrated across the Middle Ages. Its essays are studies of constructions, both of the building blocks of time and of the people who made and performed them, in acts of ritual remembrance and in written records; cantors, as this book makes clear, shaped the communal experience of the past in the Middle Ages. Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at St. Martin's University; Margot Fassler is Kenough-Hesburgh Professor of Music History and Liturgy at the University of Notre Dame and Robert Tangeman Professor Emerita of Music History at Yale University; A.B. Kraebel is Assistant Professor of English at Trinity University. Contributors: Cara Aspesi, Anna de Bakker, Alison I. Beach, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, Margot E. Fassler, David Ganz, James Grier, Paul Antony Hayward, Peter Jeffery, Claire Taylor Jones, A.B.Kraebel, Lori Kruckenberg, Rosamond McKitterick, Henry Parkes, Susan Rankin, C.C. Rozier, Sigbjorn Olsen Sonnesyn, Teresa Webber, Lauren Whitnah

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