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Abstract
This study seeks to clarify the date, nature, and probable origin of a noted breviary that is currently preserved as part of a greatly misunderstood manuscript, Lucca, Biblioteca Arcivescovile MS 5. The purpose of this study, and particularly its ultimate aim of correctly dating and localizing the breviary, is to lay the essential foundation for further use of Lucca, Bib. Arc. MS 5 in the service of understanding the past, and especially the way in which the rituals of the book may have shaped the inner lives and self-perceptions—the identities—of those who used it. This is because the effect of any ritual on its participant, especially the ritual’s transformative power over beliefs, hopes, expectations, and identity is historically particular, shaped by the environment in which the ritual is performed. Therefore the first task of any scholar working with a liturgical manuscript must be to correctly understand the period and place in which the book was created for use, and second, to understand if and how it was used, if possible.
This study argues from a close study of the manuscript’s many hands and codicological structure that the breviary of Lucca, Bib. Arc. MS 5 was once an independent manuscript, not part of the rest of the liturgical material now appended to it, but created sometime between 1125-1150. The notation of the breviary, taken together with the breviary’s primary hand and curious red neumes added by the rubricator, suggests that the breviary may have been compiled by a musician trained at Saint-Pèreen-Vallée in Chartres, probably a cantor.
As will be shown here, no obvious feature of the breviary connects it to the Crusader Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, but a painstaking comparative study of the breviary’s contents, both the liturgy of the temporale and sanctorale, show that its liturgy was drawn from diverse European sources, a circumstance which points to the breviary’s composition outside of Europe itself, where it would have likely represented the use of a single house or diocese.
Furthermore, methodical study of the breviary’s liturgy in the context of known manuscripts representing the liturgy celebrating in the Patriarchate of Jerusalem in the twelfth century demonstrates that breviary’s creators drew upon the early twelfth century use of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, a circumstance which limits the breviary’s production to somewhere in the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. However further comparative analysis of the breviary’s liturgy, sometimes indirectly carried out, shows that the breviary does not represent the pre-1149 office of the church of the Holy Sepulchre itself, an office for which there are in fact no direct and complete witnesses. Instead, by excluding other major churches of Jerusalem for various reasons as the breviary’s probable point of origin, this study argues that the breviary of Lucca, Bib. Arc. MS 5 most likely represents the use of one of the cathedrals of the patriarchate. Finally, archaeological and prosopographical research, and especially a study of the identity and career of Fulcher of Angoulême, Archbishop of Tyre, is used alongside the contents of the breviary’s liturgy to argue that out of all the cathedrals of the patriarchate, the breviary of Lucca, Bib. Arc. MS 5 most likely represents the use of the cathedral of Tyre as it existed sometime between 1135-1150, though the breviary itself must have been copied for the personal use of someone associated with the cathedral, probably the cantor.
