CORPUS PROCESSIONALIUM HISPANARUM (CPH)
Phase I: Sources, Music, History, Arts, 1400-1600
PID2019-105696GA-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033
June 2020 - May 2024
Phase II: Uses and Customs in Iberian Cathedrals up to 1600
PID2023-146551NB-I00
September 2024 - August 2028
Granted by the Spanish Ministry of Science (Agencia Estatal de Investigación)
Project hosted at the Facultad de Geografía e Historia
Departamento de Musicología
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
This project establishes a multidisciplinary and international research team around one topic: The Processional, which is a liturgical book of chant used in processions. While not limited, the main focus of this project is on Processional books in Spain, or for Spanish/Iberian Use in the Iberian territories and/or now located elsewhere.
The main hypothesis of the project is that although diverse scientific interpretations may be inferred from the reading of one particular primary source, the information in processional books, as prescriptive sources, can differ from what is expressed in descriptive sources (historical documents such as chapter minutes, histories, travel books...). In order to corroborate or reject this hypothesis, two complementary lines of research will be pursued.
The first action will be to study a corpus of processional books to continue and widen previous scholarship on this type of book. Processionals to explore are dated from 1400 up to 1600. There are many processionals from this time and most of them are very rich in information and rubrics; unfortunately, they have hitherto been neglected. The goal of this action is to link the results of this exploration with the Spanish Early Music Manuscript database (a brand of Cantus Index) as a part of the digital humanities, and to serve as a base for the second action.
The second action will try to confirm or reject the initial hypothesis, as well as to get a better understanding about processional chant and liturgical processions as a part of the Roman rite in the Iberian territories. Thus, two interdisciplinary case studies on significant Iberian cathedrals are proposed: these will be in the hands not only of musicologists but also of historians and art historians. The goal in this case is to know to what extent the processional books (the prescriptive sources), coincide or collide with other historical sources (the descriptive ones). This approach is quite unusual in the humanities, where scholars have been more used to contribute to one or other of these approaches, but not both. The immediate targets are two representative Iberian cathedrals, from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon (Toledo and Zaragoza), each of which holds several processionals and a lot of historical sources for the proposed time- from 1400 until 1600. Two main reasons support this election: members of this research team have previously published on one or the other cathedral, and both metropolitan churches have a great deal of primary and secondary sources which could be related to processional chant and other features related to it. Additionally, other researchers in the project will deal with some particular issues related to processional chant in other cathedrals from the Spanish realm.
Phase II of the project will do research on new ecclesiastical institutions, following the previous division into the Crowns of Aragon and Castile. As a result, the cathedral churches of Leon, Huesca and Tortosa will be prioritised. The three have processional books and enought historical documents to achieve good research findings. They are small but important churches, in contrast with the previous project targets (metropolitan churches). Nonetheless, we will also continue with the cathedral of Toledo, as previous findings have allow us to know that we barely covered the gigantic number of sources saved in the archive and library of that cathedral. We also propose to continue in Zaragoza, but in other importan church, the older collegiate church of St Mary the Major (El Pilar de Zaragoza), as its archive has revealed a large quantity of historical documents that inform about processional practices in that church. In all the cases, the members of the CPH team have worked and done research on those institutions and all the members know the important sources and publications on those churches.