medieval.org
Arcana A 307
2000
NOX - LUX
France &
Angleterre, 1200 - 1300
«Super omne pulchrum viride, quomodoanimus intuentium rapit:
quando vere novo, nova quadam vita germina prodeunt,
& erecta sursum in spiculis suis quasi deorsum morte calcata
ad imaginem future resurrectionis in lucem pariter erumpunt».
(Hugo von S. Viktor: Eruditiones Didascalice)
Doron D. SHERWIN, 1998
01 - Nox [1:24]
pièce instrumentale · psaltérion, harpe 4
Wipo von BURGUND, IXe s. · Graduale romanum
02 - Victimæ pascali laudes
[1:46]
sequentia · voix 1 2 3 4
PEROTINUS MAGNUS, XIIIe s.
Montpellier, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de
Médecine, MS H 196
03 - Mors a primi patris ~ Mors, que
stimulo ~ Mors morsu nata ~ MORS [1:56]
voix 1 3 4 6
Claudia CAFFAGNI, 1999
04 - Occasum [2:27]
pièce instrumentale · psaltérion
anonyme français, XIIIe s.
Firenze, Biblioteca Laurenziana, MS Plut. 29.1
05 - Pange melos lacrimosum
[4:03]
voix 3 4 · vielle, rebec, percussion
anonyme français, XIIIe s.
Montpellier, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de
Médecine, MS H 196
06 - Balaam inquit ~ Huic placuit tres
Magi [2:49]
07 - Iam nubes dissolvitur ~ SOLEM
[2:24]
voix 1 3 4 6
08 - An doz mois de mai ~ Crux forma
penitentie ~ SUSTINERE [2:20]
voix 3 4 6
09 - A la clarté qui tout
enlumina ~ ET ILLUMINARE [2:33]
voix 3 · psaltérion, vielle, rebec, harpe 4, cloches 5
10 - Porta preminentie ~ Porta
penitentie ~ PORTAS [2:54]
voix 1 2 3 4 5 6
anonyme anglais, XIIIe s. / Ella de' Mircovich
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson G 22
11 - Miri it is hwile sumer ilasts
[7:11]
voix 1 2 3 4 · psaltérion, vielle, rebec, harpe 4,
percussion
anonyme anglais, XIIIe s.
London, British Library, MS Cotton Fragment XXIX
12 - Sancta mater gracie ~ Do way robin
[1:51]
voix 3 4 · psaltérion
anonyme anglais, XIIIe s.
Oxford, Christi College Ms. B 489
13 - Rosa fragrans [3:24]
rondellus · voix 3 4 6 · harpes 1 3 4, cloches 5
Elisabetta de MIRCOVICH, 2000
14 - Mors et vita duello [4:13]
pièce instrumentale · luth, recorder, rebec, harpe 4,
percussion
anonyme anglais, début XIVe s. · Oxford, New College
Library 362, item XXVI
15 - Caligo terrae scinditur ~ Virgo
Maria [3:39]
voix 3 4 5 · cornetto muto, luth, vielle, harpe 4
anonyme anglais, début XVe s. · London, British Library,
MS Egerton 3307
16 - Anglia tibi turbidas spera lucem
post tenebras [4:34]
voix 1 2 3 4 5 · luth, vielle, rebec, percussion
Oswald von WOLKENSTEIN, 1375-1457
Innsbruck, Wolkensteinhandschrift B
17 - Ich spuer ein tyer [4:20]
voix 3 · luth, vielle, harpe 4
Guillaume DUFAY, 1400-1474
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canonici Misc. 213
18 - Resveilles vous & faites
chiere lye [2:57]
pour le mariage de Carlo Malatesta seigneur de Rimini et Vittoria
Colonna, 1423
luth, vielle, rebec, harpe 4, cloches 5
Guillaume DUFAY / Doron D. SHERWIN.
19 - Resveilles vous & faites
chiere lye [2:56]
voix 5 · luth, vielle, rebec, harpe 4
Doron D. SHERWIN
20 - Lux [3:39]
voix 3 6 · cornetto muto, recorder, harpe 4, cloches 1
LA REVERDIE
1. Claudia Caffagni, voix · luth, psaltérion,
cloches, harpe
2. Livia Caffagni, voix · recorders, vielle
3. Elisabetta de' Mircovich, voix · rebec, symphonia, harpe
4. Ella de' Mircovich, voice · harpe
5. Doron David Sherwin · voice, corneto mutto, percussions,
cloches
with
6. Elena Bertuzzi, voix
Enregistrement réalisé à
l'Abbazia di Rosazzo (Udine), du 9 au 14 octobre 2000,
par les soins de Michel Bernstein & Charlotte Gilart de Keranflec'h
Montage numérique: Charlotte Gilart de Keranflec'h
Production: Dr Richard Lorber [WDR 3] & Michel Bernstein
COPRODUCTION ARCANA
WESTDEUTSCHER RUNDFUNK [WDR 3] KÖLN
CHIARO-SCURO
MISCELLANEOUS
MEDIEVAL MANICHEISM
Ach, o ve! Tunc omnia elementa implicuerunt se in vicissitudinem
luminis & tenebrarum, sicut & homo fecit. Ahimé!
Alas! Whereas all the elements allowed themselves to be implicated in
the struggle between light and darkness, so is it exactly what man does.
Hildegard von Bingen,
epistle to Elisabeth von Schoenau
The separation between Good and Evil, between the true and the
false, between black magic and white magic, hence manicheism, strictly
speaking, is abandoned only for the omnipotence of God.
Jacques Le Goff,
Culture cléricale et traditions folkloriques
& vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona:
& divisit lucem a tenebris. Appellavitque lucem Diem, tenebras
Noctem.
And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from
the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called
Night.
Genesis, 1:4,5
To the pole of light, midday, is opposed the pole of darkness,
midnight. Not only the existence of monks in the Middle Ages, but
the daily life of all men was determined by the divisions of the day.
For mystics, night was compared to the devil, it was the satanic image.
On the contrary, eternity was essentially luminous. 'What will happen,'
asked Saint Bernard, 'when souls are separated from their bodies? We
believe they will be plunged into a pelago eterni luminis et
luminose eternitatis'.
M. M. Davy,
Initiation à la symbolique romane
The great divisions are day and night and the seasons. Mediaeval
time was first of all an agricultural time, a natural time, a
contrasted time that sustained the mediaeval tendency to Manicheism:
the opposition of shadow and light, cold and hot, life and death. Night
was heavy with menaces and dangers in this world where artificial light
was rare, dangerous, the source of fires in a world built of wood. With
extraordinary harshness did mediaeval legislation punish crimes and
offences committed at night. Night was the great aggravating
circumstance of justice in the Middle Ages. Above all, night was the
time of supernatural dangers and death. The German chronicler Thietmar
affirms: Even as God gave day to the living, so did he give night to
the dead'. In epic and lyric poetry, night was the time of distress and
adventure. It was often linked with that other area of darkness: the
forest. The forest and night mixed together were the scene of mediaeval
anguish. On the other hand, all that was 'clear' or 'bright' —
keywords in the mediaeval aesthetic and literature was beautiful and
good. 'As lovely as the day' the expression was never more profoundly
felt as during the Middle Ages. The taste during the Middle Ages for
brilliant colours is well known. But behind that colourful
phantasmagoria was the fear of the night, the quest for light which was
salvation. Behind all that, there is what has been called 'the
mediaeval metaphysics of light', or, might we say more modestly, the
quest of security in light. Beauty is light; it reassures, it is the
sign of nobility. Light is the object of the most ardent aspirations;
it is laden with the highest symbols. Another contrast: that of the
seasons. The mediaeval Occident knew only two seasons, winter and
summer: the Winter-Summer opposition was one of the great themes of the
Minnesang.
Jacques Le Goff,
La civilisation de l'Occident Medieval
Lif sceal widh deathe leoht sceal widh
thystrum, god sceal widh yfele, geogod sceal widh yldo.
There is no life without death, there is no light without darkness,
there is no good without evil, there is no youth without old age.
MS Cotton Tiberius, Gnomic Verses 50:1
Moehte ich verslafen des winters zit,
wache ich die wile so han ich sin nit daz sin gewalt ist so breit und
so wit. Weizgot er lat ouch dem meien den strit so lise ich bluomen da
rife nu lit.
Oh, if only I could spend the whole winter sleeping! On the other hand,
I stay awake and taste all its pain, so great and far-reaching is its
power. But, thank God, soon will come the month of May, and I shall be
able to pick the budding flowers.
Walther von der Vogelweide
One speaks of the 'shadows' in which our 'world' will be
swallowed up. Let us point out that the same images are used at the
present time. For archaic and traditional societies on the one hand,
there was the cosmitised space, since it was inhabited and organised;
on the other hand, outside the familiar space, there lurked the
unknown, a fearsome region of demons, larvae, dead people,
foreigners... ; in a word, Chaos, Death, Night.
Mircea Eliade, Images et Symboles
'Aufer lumen & omnia in tenebris ignota manebunt cum non
possunt proprium manifestare decorem' Johannes Damascenus ait. Lux
igitur est pulchritudo & ornatus omnis visibilis creature & ut
ait Basilius 'Prima vox Domini naturam luminis fabricavit ac tenebras
distulit meroremque dissolvit'.
'Let the light go out, and all things would remain unknown in darkness,
in the impossibility of manifesting their harmonious form', says John
the Damascene. Light is, in fact, the beauty and ornament of every
visible creature since, as said Basilio Ole, 'the first word pronounced
by the Lord was to create the essence of light, to dispel the darkness
and alleviate distress'.
Robert Grosseteste, Hexaemeron, 147, 567
Studying the culture of the Middle Ages, one is constantly
confronted with a paradoxical confusion of polarised contradictions:
of the sublime and the minuscule, the spiritual and the crassly
material, the lugubrious and the comical, life and death. Grouped by
poles, these extremes continually get closer and change places at the
same time, before separating anew. The culture of the Middle Ages is
presented to us in the form of a combination — at first sight,
impossible — of oppositions. Life and death, extreme opposites in
any system making up a conception of the world, are reversible, and
their limits are not impenetrable: there are those who die temporarily,
and the dead who come back amongst the living to tell them about the
torments of Hell. The tendency towards the paradoxical reversal of
habitual ideas concerning the established order, top and bottom, the
sacred and profane, is seen as an element of the mediaeval
comprehension of the world that we would be unable to neglect. One
might say that traits of the grotesque are organically congenital to
this perception of reality. The modern conscience has difficulty
accustoming itself to the continuous inversion of the mediaeval world
and conceives as comical scenes which, in those days, provoked pious
stupefaction. There is no better sign of the distance separating
mediaeval culture from modern culture. The contrasts between the
eternal and the transitory, the sacred and the profane, body and soul,
the celestial and the terrestrial, find their basis in the social life
of the time, in the irreconcilable contrasts between wealth and
poverty, domination and subordination, liberty and non-liberty,
privilege and submission. The Christian conception of the world in the
Middle Ages obliterated the real contradictions by transferring them to
the highest levels of ultra-terrestrial categories understandable by
all. In the model of the mediaeval world there are no ethically neutral
forces or things: they are all linked to the cosmic conflict between
Good and Evil.
Aaron Gurevich
Cum autem dies noctem in homme
opprimit, homo bonus miles nominator, quoniam in militari virtute malum
superat. Unde vos, o fui Dei, Christo per diem militemini, & in
quiete mentis nebulam fugite que diem obnubilat, ac etiam nocturnas
insidias, & estote dies. Nox enim per tenebras tristitiam &
dies per lucem gaudium profert. Onnes creature surit Eum in creationem
sentientes, scilicet gyrantem ab oriente, quod est in ortu omnis
iustitie, & ad occidentem, ubi tenebre mortis lucem vite volunt
opprimere.
Whereas, in Man, day wins out over night, it deserves the title of
valorous combatant, since it is capable of vanquishing Evil with its
warlike ardour. And then, oh Son of God, serve Christ in the splendour
of the day, and with the spirit firm, flee the cloud that darkens the
day; flee the snares of night, be as the day! Night, indeed, with its
darkness, symbolises affliction; day, with its light, joy. All
creatures perceive God in His Creation: in the part of it that lies
towards the East, that is to say, the place where justice appears, and
in that which lies towards the West, where the shadows of death aspire
to stifle the light of life.
Hildegard von Bingen, Epistolarium
The order of the world rested upon a fabric of tenuous connections,
filled with magic influxes. Everything that the senses perceive was a
sign: the word, the sound, the gesture, lightning. Evangelisation had
shrouded profound beliefs in a certain number of images and formulas,
but had not really vanquished the mythical representations in which the
instinctive faith of the people has always sought the explanation of
the unknowable. These mental images tended towards the most naive
manicheism and prompted a conception of the universe like the combat
area for a duel between Good and Evil, between God and the rebel armies
that deny His order and disrupt it. The ascendancy of chivalry
introduced the alternatives of military action at the centre of all
mental representations. The entire universe was combat. For the troops
led by God, it was important for every man to incorporate himself and
to assail with Him the shadows, those magic powers whose existence were
sensed only here and there, in the premonitory visions of death, in all
the rustlings that filled the night at that time, but which, as all
know, governed entirely a mysterious universe of which Man's senses may
never discover more than the shell. These masked forces were terrifying
and irresistible. Monastic Christianity now welcomed the beliefs that,
in the past, the clergy strove to repress. It annexed a whole funerary
folklore, faith in the survival of the dead, in the apparition of lost
souls. Thus did demons come to haunt the cloisters. In order to thwart
their pitfalls, Cluniac customs stipulated always having a light in the
dormitory. The Romanesque church was oriented, turned towards the dawn,
towards the first light that comes to dissipate the darkness and all
the night's anxieties, towards that light which, each day in the
shivers of dawn, the cycle of the liturgy hails by praising the Eternal.
Georges Duby,
Adolescence de la Chrétienté Occidentale
Sic Mors Vitam, risum luctus umbra diem
portum fluctus mane claudit vespere. Fit flos fenum gemma lutum
homo cinis dum tributum homo Morti tribuit. Cuius vita cuius esse pena
labor & necesse vitam morte claudere. Nostrum statum pingit rosa
nostri status decens glosa nostre vite lectio. Que dum primo mane
floret defloratus flos effioret vespertino senio.
Just as Death concludes Life, and suffering put an end to laughter,
darkness to the day, the high tide to the security of the port, after
the dawn, it is the evening which falls. The flower wilts, the precious
stone turns to mud, and man to ashes when he pays his tribute to Death:
his life, his very nature are only pain and torment to which Death
inevitably puts an end. We are like the rose, a graceful metaphor for
our condition, which can teach us so much about our life: it flowers at
dawn, and wilts that very evening, henceforth old and bereft of all its
charm.
Alanus ab Insulis: Sequentia de Rosa
Devils and angels, benevolent or evil spirits, powers active in
grasses, fruits, animals and in men's bodies are part of the reality in
which existences are explained and fulfilled, with their stock of joys,
sorrows, worries and hopes. That implies an infinitely more alive, more
living conception of natural reality than what had generally been
believed, and that explains to us, in its horizon of life, the presence
of the supernatural and miraculous as something thoroughly normal, even
accepted as a daily dimension. Rather shall we say that magical
symbolism, in its blend and in the coexistence of varied and multiple
forms, tells us, for men of the Late Middle Ages, the existence of a
mentality open to magic in much greater proportions than we might have
been led to believe from other testimony relative to the religious and
spiritual world of those populations. The great importance of this
magical dimension is proved later on, if need be, by the consideration
of the Church, be it in its opposition and the effort to rub it out, or
— on the other hand — in the bold attempt, we might say, to
take hold of it and make it Christian.
Raoul Manselli,
Simbolismo e magia nell'Alto Medioevo
Lux quotidie interfecta resplendit,
sidera defuncta reviviscunt.
Light, destroyed every day, shines once again, the dead stars coming
back to life.
Tertullianus, Apologeticus, XLVIII
'Day and night show us the resurrection: the sun goes down, the
sun rises, the day goes, the night comes,' said Clement of Rome.
Minutius Felix exhorts: 'Vide adeo, quam in solatium nostri
resurrectionem futuram omnis natura meditetur: sol demergit &
nascitur, astra labuntur & redeunt'. Faith implies recognition
of a correspondence between the archetypal images proposed by religious
society and archetypal images which are the common property of the
human psyche. The proof is found in the Fathers: one of their most
constant treatments was precisely demonstrating to non-believers the
correspondence between the great symbols that are immediately
expressive and persuasive for the psyche, and the dogmas of the new
religion. The act of faith thus carries but a division in the world of
archetypal representations. Henceforth, shadows, the serpent and Satan
designate what one renounces. The confrontation with the shadows is
indeed a recognition of Evil as a given, but it leads to taking a stand
against it. Salvation is precisely the act of being delivered from it,
after having looked it in the face and acknowledged it. Jung, very
astutely saw what, on this point, separated he who had experienced the
archetypes empirically from the be ever as such. For one, in fact, Good
and Evil are closer to each other than twins, an empirical totality.
For the other, Good and Evil are antinomical, and one must decide on
one against the other. Faith is this decision... One might then
consider it as the recourse to protection against the risks of an
immediate experience that would be redoubtable to bear, since it would
embrace Evil itself. Jesus became an image of protection against the
archetypal powers that threaten to take hold of everyone. The function
of positive religion is to replace an experience too powerful for its
subjects with an experience that is somehow filtered by the dogmas and
rituals. The commitment of faith would thus be an operation of
spiritual hygiene.
Louis Beirnaert,
La dimension mythique dans le sacramentalisme chrétien
& nox ultra non erit: & non egebunt lumine lucerne neque
lumine solis, quoniam Dominus Deus illuminabit illos.
And there shall be no more night, and they shall no longer need the
light of lamps nor that of the sun, for the Lord God shall illuminate
them.
Apocalypse, XXII: 5
POST SCRIPTUM:
Durch Flandern Franckreich Engelant
und Schottenland hab ich lang nicht gemessen.
Across Flanders, France, England and Scotland, I paid no heed to the
distance.
Oswald von Wolkenstein
ENVOI:
Nearly all theories are crap, but some are less crap than others.
Jan Stewart & Jack Cohen: Figments of Reality
