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| We may easily be a little bewildered, however, on being faced with the vast number and
variety of sources, when we want to approach them without prejudice and with the intention
of not excluding any groups of sources because of their age or origin. Their correlation
seems to be confused and we may easily fall into a trap if we order them according to an
arbitrary pattern. It will, however, give us reassurance if we consider that, while the
sources show only the face of the past that is turned in our direction, they reflect a
life hidden behind them, and each source represents a particular tradition which was
organically connected with other traditions. This life had its own order consisting of
unity and variety alike, and our primary aim should be to investigate that order and not
merely that of the sources themselves. If there had been a total lack of unity these sources
could not have been served their purpose at all. They had to be consonant with the other
sources used simultaneously in their own environment, otherwise they would have disturbed
the liturgical life of the communities in question. |
| The variety of sources used in a given liturgical environment may be explained by three
circumstances: |
| (i) | Sometimes we don't know exactly how the sources correlate with the
different communities within one and same liturgical tradition (e.g. a collegiate church
inside a diocese). The survival of sources depends entirely on chance, their distribution
in time and place is unequal, while the number of liturgical communities was enormously
high in medieval Europe. |
| (ii) | The sources differ from one another according to the different
relationships between the books and the community. To mention only two extremes: a choir-book
used during the services of a chapter had to reflect the customs to a much higher degree than
a missale itinerantium or a private book in the possession of a member of the same chapter. |
| (iii) | The various liturgical elements vary with regard to their place in the tradition. We have
to reckon with a kind of 'hierarchy' among these elements and to be familiar both with their
significance and the technicalities of the services (e.g. parts sung solo or by the community;
peculiarities of the liturgical-musical genres; the rank of the feasts, etc.). |
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| In our case the sporadic survival of the early sources represents an additional problem.
We cannot place the surviving source in its original context. The question of age is a modifying
factor in another respect too: the early manuscripts often list items without any qualification
or exact specification. These items received their places in the liturgy according to written
or unwritten rules which are no longer known to us. The late sources, on the other hand,
generally define the exact liturgical position of an item which is characteristic of a local
tradition. And this is probably identical with the early usage that remains almost unattainable
for us. |
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