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Johann Drumbl and the Origin of the Quem Quaeritis: A Review Article

1986; Western Michigan University; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cdr.1986.0014

1936-1637

Anselme Davril, Fletcher Collins,

Medieval Literature and History

Johann Drumbl and the Origin of the Quern Quaeritis: A Review Article Anselme Davril, O.S.B. The first half of Johann Drumbl's Quern Quaeritis: Teatro Sacro dell'Alto Medioevo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1981) studies the origin of the Quern quaeritis and has as its thesis: "The Latin Quern quaeritis was composed about 930 under the influence of Abbot Odo of Cluny for the French monastery of St. Benoitsur -Loire, formerly called Fleury." The present reviewer, as editor of the Consuetudines Floriacenses,! is especially interested because the citation of the Quern quaeritis from that customary is what supplies Drumbl with support for his thesis. What follows will thus be an account of the present writer's reactions to the particular matter of the origin of the Quern Quaeritis, without attempting a complete review of the book. The originality and, I believe, the value of Drumbl's study is that he disengages himself from the problematics of his predecessors , who have been studying the Quern quaeritis for its dramatic quality and who have been seeking to explain how and why this drama was created inside the Latin liturgy. Drumbl, au contraire, considers the Quern quaeritis for its quality as a liturgical ceremony, and poses the question: Why, in the exact place we find the first Quern quaeritis, was this new liturgical ceremony created? One must therefore discover the birthplace of this first Quern PÈRE ANSELME DAVRIL is a member of the Order of St. Benedict at the Abbaye St. Benoit de Fleury, St. Benoit-sur-Loire, France, teaches at the Institut Supérieur in Paris, and is best known as the editor of Consuetudines Floriacenses saeculi tertii decimi (Siegburg, 1976), Vol. IX of the Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum. This article was translated by Fletcher Collins, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Mary Baldwin College. 65 66Comparative Drama Quaeritis, and inquire what liturgical significance the composer there intended for the original ceremony. During the first part of the tenth century the Quern quaeritis is found in three different liturgical positions: (1) in the procession which precedes the Easter Mass, (2) in direct contact with the Introit of that Mass, and (3) at the end of the monastic office of Matins, before the Te Deum. In service books of the tenth and eleventh centuries the Quern quaeritis is presented as a liturgical enrichment, a novelty, which one is free to reject, to receive, or to modify. In this fashion the editors of the Pontifical Romano-Germanique rejected it, even though it was in one of their liturgical sources.2 On the other hand, examples from the Besançon pontifical and from the English Regularis Concordia^ accepted the new ceremony at the end of Matins. In these two cases we are in the presence of extensive rubrics, a kind of interpretative description which tends not only to render explicit the development of the ceremony but also tries to justify its novelty and to make it useful and acceptable. It is evident that documents of this sort cannot be used in research on the origin of the ceremony. Au contraire, one must discover the place where the ceremony would be normally inserted without having to be justified or explained. At this point, in order to show us his way of working, Drumbl makes an excursion into the Ténèbres ceremony of Holy Week, an obscurity at the end of the office, joined to the chant Christus factus est. His conclusion is that, at the moment when there is a conflict between the two traditions—one local, the other foreign, presenting a new ceremony—it is the local tradition which overcomes and requires an adaptation of the other. Returning to the Quern quaeritis, the author stresses the importance of H. deBoor's textual study of it.5 Confronted by the large number of Italian pieces, deBoor opts for an Italian origin in the form of a trope of the Easter Introit. But in fact, counters Drumbl, any one of the churches where the composition was found with individual textual variants could be its native place. In fact the local variants were born at the same moment that the ceremony was received in churches which included it in...