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:
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:
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