Corpus Processionalium Hispanarum (CPH): Sources, Music, History, Arts, 1400-1600
PID2019-105696GA-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033
Granted by the Spanish Ministry of Science (Agencia Estatal de Investigación)
June 2020 - May 2024
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information in processional books, as prescriptive sources, can differ from what is expressed in descriptive sources (historical documents such as chapter minutes, histories, travel books...).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.