Original scientific paper
The Oldest Sacramentary of Medieval Istria from 1050 within the Context of European Liturgical Codices
Hana Breko Kustura
; Odsjek za povijest hrvatske glazbe ZPHKKG HAZU, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Abstract
The oldest sacramentary of medieval Istria is a part of the eleventh-century missal that is at present kept in the Convent of Franciscan Conventuals in Šibenik. In the professional literature it has been referred to up to the present day as the Liber sequentiarum et sacramentarium of Šibenik. The author presents arguments for dating the manuscript to 1050, which are based on the analysis of the Carolingian minuscule in which the codex has been written and the characteristics of its neumatic notation and illuminated initials, pointing to the technique of one of the most productive scriptoria of the eleventh century – that of the Tegernsee scriptorium.
Based on the method of hierarchical analysis and comparative sondage of the saints mentioned in the sanctorale, which was presented by the German liturgist Felix Heinzer in 1984 – starting from the most prominent saints’ names (Ger. Leitheiliger), through to regional and local ones – the author comes to new conclusions regarding the place of its origin and possible use.
The name of the leading saint, St. Thomas the Apostle, patron saint of the Diocese of Pula, is written in gilt majuscule letters in prayers, the beginning of the prayer in his honour is decorated with great curly initials, and the special chant of the appertaining sequence is noted with adiastematic neumatic notation of the Einsiedeln type in the sequentiary of this manuscript book.
The author argues for the hypothesis of the place in which the codex was written by means of a comparison of the saints’ names of the sanctorale of this codex with the feasts of saints prescribed by the oldest extant calendar of medieval Pula (from the fourteenth century), which was recently found in Augsburg.
The sacramentary of the Šibenik codex belongs to the “Gregorian Romano-German” type of sacramentary, in which, besides the basic corpus of Roman saints, there may be found also a layer of liturgical celebration of typical southern German saints, saints of the Patriarchate of Aquileia and in the first place a whole layer of saints’ names particular to Istria. Such a picture of the sacramentary, testifying to the appropriation of different saintly cults belonging to divergent European regions, is one of the characteristics of the liturgy of medieval Pula. It is in full concordance with the recent conclusion of the historian Bernharda Schimmelpfenniga, who described it with the syntagm “dissolver of different traditions of saintly cults.”
Keywords
Šibenik; Pula; liturgical books; Liber sequentiarum et sacramentarium; scriptorium Tegernsee; the Early Middle Ages
Hrčak ID:
33597
URI
Publication date:
5.1.2009.
Visits: 2.953 *