The mediaeval stage, volume 1 (of 2)Chambers, E. K. (Edmund Kerchever)
History
The mediaeval stage, volume 1 (of 2)
Chambers, E. K. (Edmund Kerchever)
Drama, Medieval -- History and criticism; Theater -- History -- Medieval, 500-1500
‘Aux premières vêpres, le chantre commençait par entonner au milieu
de la nef: _Lux hodie, lux laetitiae_, etc.... À laudes rien de
particulier que le _Benedictus_ et son répons farcis. Les laudes
finies on sortait de l’église pour aller trouver l’âne qui attendait
à la grande porte. Elle était fermée. Là, chacun des chanoines s’y
trouvant la bouteille et le verre à la main, le chantre entonnait
la prose: _Kalendas ianuarias solemne Christe facias_. Voici ce que
porte l’ancien cérémonial: _dominus cantor et canonici ante ianuas
ecclesiae clausas stent foris tenentes singuli urnas vini plenas cum
cyfis vitreis, quorum unus cantor incipiat: Kalendas ianuarias_, etc.
Les battants de la porte ouverts, on introduisait l’âne dans l’église,
en chantant la prose: _Orientis partibus_. Ici est une lacune dans le
manuscrit jusque vers le milieu du _Gloria in excelsis_.... On chantait
la litanie: _Christus vincit_, _Christus regnat_, dans laquelle on
priait pour le pape Alexandre III, pour Henri de France, évêque de
Beauvais, pour le roi Louis VII et pour Alixe ou Adèle de Champagne
qui était devenue reine en 1160; par quoi on peut juger de l’antiquité
de ce cérémonial. L’Évangile était précédé d’une prose et suivi d’une
autre. Il est marqué dans le cérémonial de cinq cents ans que les
encensements du jour de cette fête se feront avec le boudin et la
saucisse: _hac die incensabitur cum boudino et saucita_.’
Dom Grenier gives as the authority for his last sentence, not the
_Officium_, but the _Glossary_ of Ducange, or rather the additions
thereto made by certain Benedictine editors in 1733-6. They quote the
pudding and sausage rubric together with that as to the drinking-bout,
which occurs in both the _Officia_, as from a Beauvais manuscript. This
they describe as a _codex ann. circiter_ 500[1017]. It seems probable
that this was not an _Officium_ at all, but something of the nature of
a Processional, and that it was identical with the _codex 500 annorum_
from which the same Benedictines derived their amazing account of a
Beauvais ceremony which took place not on January 1 but on January
14[1018]. A pretty girl, with a child in her arms, was set upon an ass,
to represent the Flight into Egypt. There was a procession from the
cathedral to the church of St. Stephen. The ass and its riders were
stationed on the gospel side of the altar. A solemn mass was sung, in
which _Introit_, _Kyrie_, _Gloria_ and _Credo_ ended with a bray. To
crown all, the rubrics direct that the celebrant, instead of saying
_Ite_, _missa est_, shall bray three times (_ter hinhannabit_) and
that the people shall respond in similar fashion. At this ceremony
also the ‘Prose of the Ass’ was used, and the version preserved in the
_Glossary_ is longer and more ludicrous than that of either the Sens or
the Beauvais _Officium_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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