Historia Sancti Iohannis Evangeliste (traditionibus Leodiensis et Boscoducis) ed. by Catherine Saucier (review)

Reviewed by: Historia Sancti Iohannis Evangeliste (traditionibus Leodiensis et Boscoducis) ed. by Catherine Saucier Alison Altstatt Historia Sancti Iohannis Evangeliste (traditionibus Leodiensis et Boscoducis). Edited by Catherine Saucier. ( Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen / Musicological Studies LXV/34 Historiae.) Kitchener, Ontario: The Institute of Mediaeval Music, 2021. [1 score (lxi, 41 p.; 61 musical examples, 10 tables. $135 (€120).] ISBN: 9781926664606. Historia Sancti Iohannis Evangeliste (traditionibus Leodiensis et Boscoducis). Edited by Catherine Saucier. (Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen / Musicological Studies LXV/34 Historiae.) Kitchener, Ontario: The Institute of Mediaeval Music, 2021. [1 score (lxi, 41 p.; 61 musical examples, 10 tables. $135 (€120).] ISBN: 9781926664606. The proper office or historia is a musico-poetic genre that flourished within the medieval Latin liturgy from the Carolingian era on. The proper office is a cycle of liturgical chants and readings composed for the feast of a specific saint, as opposed to the common offices sung for saints according to their type, such as the Common of Martyrs, to name one example. In the performance of the liturgy, chants of the proper office were interlayered with proper readings derived from the saint's vita, along with the recitation of psalms. From the ninth century, composers of proper offices began to transform received melodic models into longer and more elaborate chants in a range of textual and musical styles. In response to current music theory, composers and compilers of proper offices began to order series of antiphons—and less frequently, responsories—by mode. These compositions are referred to as "modal offices" or "modally ordered offices." The twelfth century witnessed the emergence of offices written in accentual rhymed poetry. Known today by the term "versified office," these offices range in musical style with later examples developing distinctly non-Gregorian structures and modalities. The dating of proper offices is notoriously difficult due to their poetic and musical variety and the survival of received styles alongside new ones. Furthermore, as proper office composition was often tied to the veneration of local saints, many offices were not transmitted beyond the communities for which they were written. The study of the proper office has expanded significantly in the past few decades. This is due in a large part to the indexing and transcription of manuscript sources containing office compositions for the Cantus Database for Latin Ecclesiastical Chant and other databases gathered under the umbrella of the Cantus Index (www.cantusindex.org). The field has also benefitted from the editions of proper offices published since 1994 by the Institute of Mediaeval Music in its Historiae series, currently edited by Zsuzsa Czagány, Barbara Haggh-Huglo, and Roman Hankeln for the Cantus Planus study group of the International Musicological Society. In addition to the melodic portions of the office, editions in the Historiae series include frequently omitted textual elements such as office readings and the incipits of psalms and their tones. The editions in the Historiae series are extremely useful because they present complete transcriptions of cases whose [End Page 400] origin, authorship, and dates can often be established. The cases edited in these volumes and the analytical methodologies cultivated in the series together support the analyses of offices whose origins, authorship, and dates are less certain. Catherine Saucier's edition of the office for John the Evangelist is the latest volume in the Historiae series. The volume builds on the author's previous work on the liturgy of the Diocese of Liège and the proper office, including her monograph A Paradise of Priests: Singing the Civic and Episcopal Hierarchy of Liège (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014) and her chapter "Singing the Lives of the Saints: Hagiographical-Historical Intersections in Music and Worship" in Hagiography and the History of Latin Christendom, 500–1500, edited by Samantha Kahn Herrick (Leiden: Brill, 2020). Her Historiae volume is a welcome addition to a growing literature on the cult of Saint John in the later Middle Ages. As one of the four evangelists, John is a prominent saint of the universal church with a long and complex tradition of veneration. In his book St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (Berkeley: 2002), Jeffrey Hamburger examined the iconography of the deified Saint John as mystic...

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