The Bangor Pontifical in Context
Liturgy and Music
Continuing exploration of the liturgical and musical content of the manuscript and its Welsh, British and international contexts is central to the research of Sally Harper, a one of the Project’s directors. Dr Harper’s extended article on the Pontifical may be downloaded below.
Sally Harper, ‘The Bangor Pontifical: a Pontifical of the Use of Salisbury’, Welsh Music History, 2 (1997), 65–89. Click here to download the article.
Sally Harper, Music in Welsh Culture before 1650: A Study of the Principal Sources (Aldershot, 2007), 231–248.
An analysis of the episcopal ceremony for dedicating a church also mentions the Bangor Pontifical: see Thomas Kozachek, ‘The repertory of chant for dedicating churches in the Middle Ages: music, liturgy and ritual’ (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1995).
Art History
The Pontifical’s full-page miniature and border decoration reveal important connections with other manuscripts of similar date associated with the so-called ‘Queen Mary Psalter School’ and the ‘East Anglian School’ of manuscript illumination. Some of the most important studies on these two schools are listed below.
Lucy F. Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts 1285–1385 (A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, I) (London, 1986).
Lynda Dennison, ‘Liber Horn, Liber Custumarum and Other Manuscripts of the Queen Mary Psalter Workshops’, in L. Grant (ed.), Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology in London (British Archaeological Conference Transactions for the year 1984), 118–31.
Lynda Dennison, ‘The Technical Mastery of the Macclesfield Psalter: a Stylistic Appraisal of the Illuminators and their Suggested Origin’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, XIII, pt. 3 (2009), 253-288.
R. Marks and N. Morgan, The Golden Age of English Manuscript Painting 1200-1500, New York, 1981 (repr. 1996).
A.D. Stanton, The Queen Mary Psalter: A Study in Affect and Audience (Philadelphia, 2001)
G. Warner, Queen Mary´s Psalter (London, 1912)
Michael A. Michael, ‘The Harnhulle Psalter-Hours: An Early Fourteenth-Century English Illuminated Manuscript at Downside Abbey’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 134 (1981), 81–99.
Norton, C., Park, D., and Binski, P., Dominican Painting in East Anglia: The Thornton Parva Retable and the Musee de Cluny Frontal, Woodbridge 1987
Liturgical Manuscripts associated with Wales
There are very few extant liturgical sources from medieval Wales, and only two have substantial musical notation. One is the Bangor Pontifical; the other National Library of Wales MS 20541 E, the ‘Penpont Antiphoner’, which includes a unique Office of St David. (A full list of liturgical manuscripts with Welsh associations is given in Sally Harper’s Music in Welsh Culture before 1650, 371–87.)
Key studies and resources are listed below.
National Library of Wales MS 20541E: The Penpont Antiphonal, ed. O. T. Edwards, Institute of Medieval Music Facsimile rhif 22 (Ottawa, 1997).
Owain Tudor Edwards, Matins, Lauds and Vespers for St David’s Day: The Medieval Office of the Welsh Patron Saint in National Library of Wales MS 20541 E (Woodbridge, 1990).
Daniel Huws, ‘St David in the Liturgy: A Review of Sources’, in St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation, ed. J. W. Evans a J. M. Wooding (Woodbridge, 2007).
The Welsh associations of the Pontifical itself are also explored in the following study, albeit slightly dated:
T. Morris, ‘The Liber Pontificalis Aniani of Bangor’, Trafodion Cymdeithas Hynafiaethwyr a Naturiaethwyr Môn (1962), 55–78.
The Coventry Pontifical
The ‘Coventry Pontifical’ (Cambridge University Library MS Ff.vi.9) plays an important role in the Bangor Pontifical Project, for it enables conjectural restoration of the lost opening of the Bangor rite for the Dedication of a Church, where five leaves are missing at the beginning of the manuscript.
The Coventry manuscript was copied in the thirteenth century for the use of the bishops of the Coventry and Lichfield diocese, and though more modest in scale and decoration than its Bangor counterpart, the two manuscripts share much common textual and musical material. Examination of the opening of the Coventry Dedication rite (ff.1r-15v) suggests that fifteen plainchant melodies, several prayers, and a series of ritual instructions are missing from the corresponding Bangor rite, which begins halfway through with an incomplete item on f.12r. Thereafter, the two Dedication ceremonies continue in a markedly similar way (ff.16r-20r in the Coventry Pontifical, ff.12r-20r in the Bangor Pontifical).
The digital images below are delivered through the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music and reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. A full description of the Coventry Pontifical may be accessed via the DIAMM site.