Plainsong New and Old: the Versified Office for St. Ansanus of Siena *

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Plainsong New and Old: The Versified Office for St. Ansanus of Siena[*]

In the Middle Ages, religious communities such as churches, monasteries, or entire cities defined themselves in relation to the local saints whose relics they possessed and whose patronage they thus claimed.[i] No musical genre reflected this localized geography of Christian worship more closely than the versified office. Many of the more than one thousand versified offices from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries commemorate local saints, whose cults rarely spread beyond their home diocese and whose offices were thus similarly restricted in circulation.[ii][slide 1] Versified offices comprise two principal genres of plainsong – antiphons and responsories – all of which set rhymed accentual poetry and are assigned to the principal hours of the Divine Office. Medieval commentators referred to these offices as ‘histories’ (historiae) because their constituent chants recounted the events drawn from a saint’s legendary biography, a passio in Latin or Passion in English.[iii] Yet by recounting the virtues and miracles of innumerable local saints, versified offices provided not simply histories of these holy men and women but arguments for their sanctity. This vast corpus of plainchant thus buttressed the innumerable relic cults that dotted the landscape of medieval Christendom.

The versified office of St. Ansanus of Siena, known as Ansanus Rome by virtue of the text incipit of its first antiphon, would seem to exemplify the localized character of its genre.[iv] In what remains to date the only study of this office, Frank D’Accone identified three manuscript sources for Ansanus Rome, of which all are of Sienese origin and all are listed in Table 1 of the handout.[v] The earliest is an unnoted Sienese breviary from the fourteenth century now housed in the city’s Biblioteca Communale degli Intronati (or BCIS for short). It preserves the text but not the music of the office. The remaining sources for Ansanus Rome are two antiphoners housed in the city’s Archivio dell’Opera Metropolitana (henceforth AOMS). They carry the shelfmarks 11.M and Ospedale 9 and date from the second half of the fifteenth century. Unlike the aforementione breviary, they preserve the office’s music and text. The first antiphoner was compiled for the cathedral of Siena and the second for its hospital of Santa Maria della Scala.[vi] On the basis of this manuscript evidence alone, Ansanus Rome would appear to be a straightforward example of a versified office composed for a local saint.

The political and religious climate in late medieval Siena favours this conclusion. Since the twelfth century, the defining political feature of such Italian city-states had been the communes. In order to buttress their legitimacy, these municipal bodies appropriated the cults of the ancient bishops and martyrs of their cities, rewriting their Passions and rebuilding or redecorating their shrines.[vii] Siena was a case in point: in the fourteenth century, the commune embraced St. Ansanus as one of its most important patrons and protectors, second only to the Virgin Mary, the titular of its cathedral. D’Accone reasonably speculated that the origins of the versified office lay in this burgeoning civic cult.[viii] According to this hypothesis, the office of St. Ansanus thus exemplifies not only the localized character of its genre in general but also the civic religion of communal Italy in particular.

The discovery of a new source for Ansanus Romeinvites us to reconsider not only the office’s dating and provenance but also its historical and musical significance. The first manuscript listed in Table 1, it is a collection of mass and office chants preserved in the Archivio Capitolare of Arezzo, located roughly thirty-five miles north east of Siena [slide 2] as seen in this map of Tuscany and Umbria. Likely compiled, as I will demonstrate shortly, in the 1320s in Arezzo, ACA Duomo H preserves a version of Ansanus Rome that mathces that of the three Sienese sources in all but one crucial respect: its melodies for all twenty-one antiphons and nine responsories are completely different from those in AOMS Ospedale 9 and AOMS 11.M. The existence of two musical settings for one office is highly unusual and invites us to explore the relationship between them.[ix]Doing so yieldsfindings whose relevance extend well beyond a single case study, for the Aretine and Sienese melodies for Ansanus Rome refine our perception of what is old and new, traditional and modern, in the vast repertoire of versified offices. Before we embark on this musicological project, we must first consider the development of the cult that gave rise to the office in the first place.

The literary foundation of the cult of St. Ansanus was his Passion, an enigmatic text sharply at odds with its protagonist’s civic cult in late medieval Siena.[x] Its narrative unfolds in three parts: Part I recounts his childhood in Rome in the late third century and culminates in his baptism at the age of twelve.[xi] The second and longest part of the Passion is a conventional story of martyrdom.[xii] Now nineteen years old, Ansanus burns with the desire to die as a martyr for his faith. He thus declares his belief in Christ to the pagan emperors, Diocletian and Maximian, engaging them in a lengthy debate over religious matters. The cruel and perfidious emperors finally condemn him to death for refusing to sacrifice to the pagan gods, a sentence that in most Passions would lead more or less directly to the protagonist’s execution. Yet this text flouts narrative convention: rather than face the heroic death that he desires, Ansanus escapes from prison on the night before his scheduled execution, a startling turn of events for which his Passion specifies neither the motivation nor the means. This marks the beginning of the third and final part of the story. Part III is strangely perfunctory in comparison to the previous two. Ansanus flees north first to the town of Bagnoregio (near Viterbo) and then to Siena, where he is once again arrested and tried by the local Roman proconsul. Ansanus is condemned to death and executed in the nearby village of Dofana, which is included in the map. The brevity with which Passion relates these final events effectively shifts the emphasis of the narrative to Rome, thus identifying its hero with the city of his birth, that is to say Rome, rather than that of his death, namely Siena.

Why does the Passion of St. Ansanus do so little to extoll its progonist as a patron and protector of Siena? The answer to this question lies in the time and place of its composition. Various literary details from the Passion, which time does not permit me to discuss today, suggest that it is a remarkably old text, likely dating from the seventh century. The Passion was likely written at the monastery of Sant’Ansano, which, as its name indicates, was dedicated to that saint and located at his burial site at Dofana. Sant’Ansano was located just within the boundary of the diocese of Arezzo yet also within the civil jurisdiction of Siena. On this account, this monastery became the object of heated disputes between Aretine and Sienese bishops in the early Middle Ages.[xiii] On at least one occasion, Ansanus’s relics became a flashpoint in the on-going conflict: around 750, a Sienese official moved, or translated, his body to a new altar without the requisite approval of the Aretine bishop, an act of effrontery that elicited a stern rebuke from no less an authority than the pope of that time.[xiv] The monastery of Sant’Ansano thus found itself caught in the middle of a territorial conflict between Arezzo and Siena, which explains the strangeness of the Passion. Were one its monks to have written this text, as seems likely, this author would have been reluctant to give Siena a prominent place within the narrative for fear of angering the lawful superior of his community, the bishop of Arezzo.[xv]

We enounter a new chapter in the development of St. Ansanus’s cult with the translation of his body from Dofana in 1107. According to a contemporary Sienese account, no less than Divine Providence itself called the citizens of Siena to bring the relics of their patron into their city. As often occurs in medieval narratives of this kind,the lawful translators are pitted against relic thieves. The Sienese encounter just such villains at Dofana but set them to flight, ‘scattering them hither and thither like madmen or (dare I say) panic-stricken dogs’.[xvi] Yet the thieves were likely more than a narrative fiction. The Translation notes that they came ‘from nearby places’ (ex ipsis vicinis), which immediately suggests Arezzo, given the city’s proximity to Siena as well as its long-recognized claim to the monastery of Sant’Ansano at Dofana. The Translation indicates that the thieves absconded with Ansanus’s head before their hasty retreat, leaving the Sienese to bring only his body back to their cathedral. This accords with reports from the sixteenth century that the Aretines in fact possessed his head and bore it through their city streets in an annual procession.[xvii]The division of St. Ansanus between the two cities, as we shall see, sowed the seeds for the creation of parts of his versified office in both cities approximately two centuries later.

The events of 1107 likewise set the stage for the flowering of the saint’s civic cult in Siena the first half of the fourteenth century. With St. Ansanus’s body (if not his head) safely deposited in the religious heart of the Siena, its cathedral, civic leaders turned their attention to elevating his status among the faithful. In 1325, the General Council of Siena bestowed its formal endorsement by elevating his feast day, December 1, to the status of an official holiday.[xviii] Six years later, in 1331, it commissioned the famous triptych for the saint’s altar now housed in the Uffizi in Florence. [slide] Executed by Simone Martini, its central panel depicts the Annunciation the Virgin, the titular saint of the cathedral.[xix] Its side panels show Ansanus on the left and his godmother, Maxima, on the right. This is the earliest known example of the use of the balzana to signal the affiliation of any saint with the commune and perhaps provided a model for the numerous examples of painting and manuscript illumination that would subsequently represent Ansanus in this way.[xx]

The discovery of a new source for the office of St. Ansanus compells us to ask how well the versified office accords with this civic. The source in question, ACA Duomo H, is a large, illuminated miscellany of mass and office chants from the cathedral of Arezzo.[xxi] Seventeen contiguous folios distributed across two fascicles of the manuscript preserve the office of St. Ansanus[slide], who appears in an illuminated initial that adorns the ‘A’ of the opening antiphon [slide]. He holds a cross rather than the Sienese balzana, of which the absence accords with the Aretine provenance of the manuscript. Based on the style of the miniature, the art historian Dr. Sonia Chiodo has recently convingly dated it to the early 1320s. There is nothing to suggest that the music and text of the office was copied substantially earlier than the illumination. ACA Duomo H is thus the earliest notated source for Ansanus Rome, predating the antiphoners AOMS Ospedale 9 and AOMS 11.M by more than one hundred years. It may well be older than the fourteenth-century breviary, BCIS F.VIII.12, which, as noted above, preserves only the text of the office. Finally, the miscellany cast doubt on the hypothesis that Ansanus Rome originated wholesale in Siena by placing the office at the cathedral of Arezzo in the 1320s, the very decade in which the Sienese commune endorsed Ansanus as its official patron.

An examination of the texts of Ansanus Rome further our suspicion that this office originated in Arezzo rather than Siena, and it at this point that I will direct your attention back to Table 2 in the handout. Versified offices of this period typically include chants whose texts are either narrative or panageric. Narrative texts, as the term suggests, tell part of the saint’s story and thus feature the third person. Panageric ones, by contrast, feature exhortations and requests and thus features the first and second person: ‘intercede for us, O Ansanus’ or ‘let us celebrate this glorious feast of St. Ansanus.’ Ansanus Rome is unusual in that its antiphons and responsories are exclusively narrative and consequently lack the calls to worship and petitions for intercession that often channel the voice of a particular community such as Arezzo or Siena. Much like the office prayer, Celestis gratie, the texts of its antiphons and responsories gives no hint as to who is singing.

Furthermore, the story told in these chants is remarkably neutral in its tone, which can be in part attributed to their literary source. Their account of Ansanus’s life accords in every particular with the saint’s original, early medieval Passion. The tripartite structure of this text aligns with unusual precision with the principal divisions of the canonical hours in Ansanus Rome. The antiphons of first vespers relate Ansanus’s childhood, culminating in his baptism in the Magnificat antiphon, Sub mandatis angeli. The antiphons and responsories of matins and lauds, which were celebrated without intermission, in turn recount his trial and imprisonment in Rome and conclude with the execution of his godmother, Maxima, in the Benedictus antiphonIstos mane milites. Finally, second vespers pertains to the events that occur after Ansanus’s initial flight from Rome.[xxii] By virtue of their strict dependence on the original Passion, these chants focus squarely on the saint’s activities in Rome, thereby avoiding the issue of the presence of his relics in both Arezzo and Siena.

Yet in one respect the antiphons and responsories present a distinctly partisan view of St. Ansanus. Given the distribution of biographical information over first vespers, matins, and lauds, we would expect Ansanus Rome to conclude with a full complement of five proper antiphons for second vespers that would recount Ansanus’s ministry in Siena and martyrdom at Dofana.[xxiii] Instead, the final hour of second vespers comprises only one proper antiphon, Ad civitatem (V2-Am), which relates a vision that Ansanus experienced before his arrival in Siena: ‘When you, with a kindled spirit, fled to the city of Bagnoregio, the Lord calls you in a vision and places you as the column in his temple’.[xxiv] This is a startling conclusion to Ansanus Rome for three reasons. First, it gives pride of place to an episode that obtained only moderate importance in the early medieval Passion and, second, the ending ignores the defining moment in the life of any martyr, namely his death, which previous antiphons in fact forecast by referring to Ansanus as a ‘martyr’.[xxv]Third, it means that the antiphons and responsories never even mention Siena and thus effectively write the city out of the saint’s legendary biography. Who but an Aretine would have engaged in such an extraordinary act of literary transformation?

The literary evidence culled from Ansanus Rome thus favours the following scenario. This office datesfrom the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century but originated not, as previously thought, in Siena but instead in Arezzo. Unlike the Sienese, however, the Aretines did not claim this saint as their exclusive patron but nonetheless venerated him due to the presence of his head in their city. The texts but not necessarily the music of Ansanus Rome circulated in Siena by the end of the fourteenth century as evidenced by their inclusion in the unnoted breviary from that city, BCIS F.VIII.12, which is listed in Table 1. Yet the city’s most important ecclesiastical institutions, the cathedral and hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, seem not to have adopted these Aretine chants until the fifteenth century. Its antiphons and resposories – music and text – appear in their choirbooks only from 1450 onwards.

That the Sienese ultimately adopted the office of St. Ansanus confounds our expectations concerning relic cults in the Middle Ages. In this period, religious communities regularly engaged in fierce struggles with each other over the control of local saints, using the liturgy in general and offices in particular to articulate their claims to these holy men and women. The city of Tours provides a particularly prominent and well documented case in point. As amply documented in a recent monograph by Yossi Maurey, by the thirteenth century the abbey of Saint-Martin had consolidated its monopoly over the relics of its titular saint, who was considered to be the third bishop of the city. The local cathedral responded by promoting the rival cult associated with St. Gatian, whom it celebrated as the first bishop in a new Life and office.[xxvi] Closer to home, as my own work has shown, the Passion and office of the Florentine martyr, St. Minias, reflected the competing claims to his relics by the cathedral of Santa Reparata and the monastery of San Minato al Monte.[xxvii] The struggle between Arezzo and Siena over St. Ansanus’s original shrine at Dofana and the subsequent division of his relics between them set the stage for a similar rivalry that could have easily found expression in competing offices.