Medieval Cantors and Their Craft

<p>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 and promoting 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.<br />This volume seeks to address the fundamental question of how the range of cantors' activities can help us to understand the many different ways in 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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</p>