St. Thomas a Becket at the Abbey of Saint Victor in Paris

I am reading Margot E. Fassler's second, revised edition of Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris (originally published by Cambridge University Press and now available from the University of Notre Dame Press):

Margot E. Fassler’s richly documented history—winner of the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society and the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America—demonstrates how the Augustinians of St. Victor, Paris, used an art of memory to build sonic models of the church. This musical art developed over time, inspired by the religious ideals of Hugh and Richard of St. Victor and their understandings of image and the spiritual journey. Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris demonstrates the centrality of sequences to western medieval Christian liturgical and artistic experience, and to our understanding of change and continuity in medieval culture. Fassler examines the figure of Adam of St. Victor and the possible layers within the repertories created at various churches in Paris, probes the ways the Victorine sequences worked musically and exegetically, and situates this repertory within the intellectual and spiritual ideals of the Augustinian canons regular, especially those of the Abbey of St. Victor. Originally published in hardover in 1993, this paperback edition includes a new introduction by Fassler, in which she reviews the state of scholarship on late sequences since the original publication of Gothic Song. Her notes to the introduction provide the bibliography necessary for situating the Victorine sequences, and the late sequences in general, in contemporary thought.

The Abbey of St. Victor was destroyed during the French Revolution, but during its height of influence, when the Augustinian Canons there were the confessions and spiritual counselors of the Parisian hierarchy, it was filled with many side altars and relics, which specially written sequences for the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints honored at those altars.

Among them was St. Thomas of Canterbury and devotion to him at the Abbey of St. Victor began even before his canonization. It continued through the 16th century as this little snippet from an article demonstrates:

In late December 1585, the abbey of Saint-Victor, on the south-eastern-edge of Paris, played host to a group of English Catholics. The journal of Guillaume Cotin, the community’s librarian, tells us that the English arrived in the run-up to the feast of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas of Canterbury. The feast itself, on 29 December, was marked by a high mass sung in honour of the saint, with a sermon [service] in English. Several supplementary masses were also celebrated by English priests. Apparently, in order to attend these celebrations, ‘English Catholics came in very great multitude’.

The Abbey of St. Victor was home for great theologians and mystics of the medieval era: Hugh of St. Victor, Adam of St. Victor, and Richard of St. Victor. As the old Catholic Encyclopedia entry for it indicates, its reforming spirit reached England and Ireland, but it lost its fervour, even being tainted by Jansenism:

The time came when abbots in commendam were introduced and signs of decay were manifested. Towards the end of the fifteenth century some efforts were made to reform the abbey with canons brought from the newly-established Windesheim congregation. A few years later Cardinal de Larochefoucauld again attempted to reform it, but in vain. The canons, moreover, were implicated in the Jansenist movement, only one, the Venerable Jourdan, remaining faithful to the old spirit and traditions. At that time there lived at St. Victor Santeul, the great classical poet, whose Latin proses were adopted by the Gallican Liturgy. The end of the abbey came with the French Revolution. In 1800 the church and the other buildings were sold, the famous library was dispersed, and a few years later everything had disappeared. There are still a few convents of canonesses, at Bruges, Ypres, and Neuilly, who keep the rule and spirit which they originally received from the Abbey of St. Victor's. [in 1912]