Liturgical Fragments at the Library of the University of Southern Denmark

In the past few months, the Centre for Medieval Literature and the University Library of the University of Southern Denmark have been collaborating on a mini-project concerning medieval fragments found in a collection of old books in the university library’s possession. This book collection once belonged to Herlufsholm School in Næstved on Sjælland, and in the 1960s the collection was purchased by the university library of what was then Odense University, which is now part of the University of Southern Denmark. Herlufsholm School was founded in 1565 by Herluf Trolle and Birgitte Gøye, husband and wife, and from the sixteenth century onwards Herlufsholm accrued a significant number of books, some of which were produced in Denmark and some of which were purchased in other parts of Europe. Several of these books were donated to Herlufsholm by book collectors who had spent considerable time and money buying beautiful books from various parts of Europe. As a consequence, the Herlufsholm book collection contains several books from England, Germany and Switzerland. All of these countries, along with Denmark-Norway and Sweden, took part in the Protestant Reformation, which meant that as monasteries were dissolved and religious life brought into a Protestant framework, large number of books were confiscated, cut up, and then recycled as material for book-binding at printing presses. In the course of the Reformation, then, a large number of books were destroyed, and only survive in fragments large or small, scattered among books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some of these fragments have been the focal point of the mini-project at the University Library of Southern Denmark.            

The main purpose of the project has been to identify and catalogue the fragments that can be found in the book collection. Only an estimated fraction of these fragments are known to us at this point, because the collection itself contains a vast number of books that will require years of concerted research. In the project, therefore, only a small number of books and their fragments have been subject to closer scrutiny. The project has been carried out by two researchers: first and foremost Jakob Povl Holck, research librarian, who has already worked on some of these fragments for three-four years, and then myself, whose main task has been to identify the liturgical fragments and uncover as many details about them as possible.                

A large number of medieval fragments in early modern books originate from liturgical manuscripts. As the Reformation supplanted Catholicism with Protestantism, the books for the Catholic liturgy were considered outdated and useless and were discarded and recycled in high numbers. Furthermore, as any given Catholic institution – a monastery, a cathedral or a church – needed several books for the performance of liturgical ritual throughout the year, one single institution contained plenty of material for recycling. This dual factor – the number of institutions and the number of liturgical books per institution – explains why so many of the surviving fragments come from these books used in the mass and in the office cycle. 

Liturgical fragments and their challenges, part 1 – all shapes and sizes

Manuscripts fragments are like miracles, in that they come in all shapes and sizes . In some cases we have a complete page where both the recto and the verso sides have legible text. In other cases we have one complete recto and one complete verso but from different pages. There are also variations of these where the text is more or less legible, or where the pages are more or less complete, but where it is nonetheless relatively easy to access the content. Then there are those minute fragments that have been cut into such small pieces that there is hardly a single word from which it is possible to identify what the original text has been. The fragments in the Herulfsholm collection provide a very wide variety of such cases. Among the fragments that have been easier to deal with is one from RARA Musik M 4. This fragment is a complete surviving page where the text is legible and written with big letters and space between the lines. The only challenge here has been to untangle the condensed information found in the liturgical commemorations, which are short mini-services performed within the main service of a feast-day, and where the information about the chants to be used is heavily abbreviated. I will address the complexity of these commemorations in more detail in the next section. For now, suffice it to say that despite the condensed information, the size and the state of the fragment has made it easy to identify the texts.         

Liturgical fragments and their challenges, part 2 – decoding liturgy                      

For any religious institution of medieval Christendom, the most important part of the daily round was the performance of liturgical chants and readings. There are two main forms of liturgical celebration. One form is the mass, which is a single service centred on the Eucharist. This celebration is comprised of many types of chants that are specific to the parts of the mass. For instance, there is the offertorium, which is a chant performed as a part of the Eucharist and only then. There is also the sequence which consists of non-scriptural verse material sung at a specific place in the mass. The other form of liturgical celebration is the office, which consists of eight services spread out through the day, with the most important service being that of Matins, celebrated roughly three hours after sundown, and the second most important being Vesper, celebrated around six hours before Matins. Since these are the longest services, the liturgical books for the office most often contain the chants and readings for Vesper and Matins, and sometimes also Laudes (performed three hours after Matins).