Easter Week

Hi everyone,
I hope you're having a nice break - but not too much of a break, because essays are looming! Use time off lectures and tutorials to get ahead on your research if you can. In the meanwhile, here's some medieval Easter music to pass the time...

Resurrexi, Music for Easter Sunday, British Library, Crowland Gradual, c.1240.

The image shows a manuscript called a Gradual, which is a collection of musical items for the Mass. There are two musical pieces on the page. The decorated capital R is the beginning of the introit for Easter Sunday. An introit, as you might guess from the name, is sung at the beginning of the Mass. This one comes from Psalm 138, and reads, in Latin:

Resurrexi, et adhuc tecum sum, alleluia. Posuisti super me manum tuam, alleluia. Mirabilis facta est scientia tua, alleluia. Domine probasti me et cognivisti me. 

[I rose up and am still with thee, alleluia. Thou hast laid thy hand upon me, alleluia. Thy knowledge is become wonderful to me, alleluia. Lord, thou hast proved me, and known me]

Listen to a performance of a medieval setting of this psalm by Schola Cantorum here

Then, with the large black "h", begins another psalm, no. 118:
Haec dies quam fecit Dominus: exultemus et laetemur in ea

[This is the day that the Lord made: let us be glad and rejoice in it.]

Listen to a performance of a later (16th century) setting of this psalm by The King's Singers here

Can you make out any of the words, now that you know what it should say?

See you on Monday week,
Kathleen

The Passion

The Passion, for those who don't know, is a term for Jesus' crucifixion on Good Friday. In medieval times one of the symbols of this was the pelican. A widespread story, often illustrated in Bestiaries, related how the pelican fed her starving young with her own blood; this was taken as a metaphor of Christ's sacrifice. The Pelican in her Piety, as this story was called, became a common artistic motif in medieval religious architecture, and in encyclopaedic books. The image here shows the Pelican in her Piety represented in a misericord at St Mary's Abbey, Beverley, in Yorkshire, a famous example of 14th century English Gothic style. She is pecking her own breast to release the blood and feed the chicks. (They weren't shy of graphic images in those days!)

Pelican in her Piety, St Mary's, Beverley. By awmc1 @ flickr

A misericord is a little folding seat in the quire (i.e. choir) area of churches that the monks or canons could lean on during long services. It comes from the Latin for mercy, because allowing a tired singer to sit down was like taking mercy on him! In the medieval period the underneath of misericords, like the one shown here, came to be decorated in marvellous carvings, since this was the part of the seat most often visible to those moving about the church between services. Some had religious images, and others had very surprisingly secular ones, like illustrations from tales of knightly deeds and the rescue of fair maidens, or images of monsters.