• Title : Desunctis Requiem, Sanctis Peanan Canemdum Coscripsi icopto, que pri edo, Tomo: Quem tibi, quandoquide robur, pia Virgo, dedisti Meq ipsu dono, cosecro, corde dico F.V.V.Z CICICXXXVII
• Ref #:  93521
• Size: 23 1/2in x 15 1/2in (595mm x 395mm)
• Date : 1537
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition

Description:
This large beautifully hand written and hand coloured original antique vellum Latin Antiphonary Choro (choir) music sheet, with a separate chant on each side of the page. On the first side is the Prayer to the Dead and on the second side is a prayer to St Augustine. The page was hand scribed in 1537 and is dated, dates on these vellum Antiphonary Choro sheets was rarely done and is much sort after.

The two prayers set to music and sung as a Gregorian Chant, in part, translate as follows;
1. Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine; et lux perpetua luceat eis. Requiescant in pace. Amen.
(Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen)

2. Magne Pater Augustine, Preces nostras suscipe, Et per eas Conditori Nos placare satage, Atque rege gregem tuum Summum decus Praesulum
(Great Father Augustine, receive our prayers, and by them, seek thou to reconcile us to the Creator, and rule thy flock, o highest glory of bishops)

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, green, blue, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 23 1/2in x 15 1/2in (595mm x 395mm)
Plate size: - 23 1/2in x 15 1/2in (595mm x 395mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background:
Prayer for the dead is well documented within early Christianity, both among prominent Church Fathers and the Christian community in general. In Eastern Orthodoxy Christians pray for such souls as have departed with faith, but without having had time to bring forth fruits worthy of repentance. In the Catholic Church the assistance that the dead receive by prayer on their behalf is linked with the process of purification known as purgatory. While prayer for the dead continues in both these traditions and in those of Oriental Orthodoxy and of the Assyrian Church of the East, many Protestant groups reject the practice.
The tomb of the Christian Abercius of Hieropolis in Phrygia (latter part of the 2nd century) bears the inscription: Let every friend who observes this pray for me, i.e. Abercius, who throughout speaks in the first person.
The inscriptions in the Roman catacombs bear similar witness to the practice, by the occurrence of such phrases as:
Mayst thou live among the saints (3rd century);
May God refresh the soul of . . . ;
Peace be with them.
Among Church writers Tertullian († 230) is the first to mention prayers for the dead: The widow who does not pray for her dead husband has as good as divorced him. This passage occurs in one of his later writings, dating from the beginning of the 3rd century. Subsequent writers similarly make mention of the practice as prevalent, not as unlawful or even disputed (until Arius challenged it towards the end of the 4th century). The most famous instance is Saint Augustines prayer for his mother, Monica, at the end of the 9th book of his Confessions, written around 398.
An important element in the Christian liturgies both East and West consisted of the diptychs, or lists of names of living and dead commemorated at the Eucharist. To be inserted in these lists was a confirmation of ones orthodoxy, and out of the practice grew the official canonization of saints; on the other hand, removal of a name was a condemnation.
In the middle of the 3rd century, St. Cyprian enjoined that there should be no oblation or public prayer made for a deceased layman who had broken the Churchs rule by appointing a cleric trustee under his will: He ought not to be named in the priests prayer who has done his best to detain the clergy from the altar.
Although it is not possible, as a rule, to name dates for the exact words used in the ancient liturgies, yet the universal occurrence of these diptychs and of definite prayers for the dead in all parts of the Christian Church, East and West, in the 4th and 5th centuries shows how primitive such prayers were. The language used in the prayers for the departed is asking for rest and freedom from pain and sorrow. A passage from the Liturgy of St James reads:
Remember, O Lord, the God of Spirits and of all Flesh, those whom we have remembered and those whom we have not remembered, men of the true faith, from righteous Abel unto to-day; do thou thyself give them rest there in the land of the living, in thy kingdom, in the delight of Paradise, in the bosom of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, our holy fathers, from whence pain and sorrow and sighing have fled away, where the light of thy countenance visiteth them and always shineth upon them.
Public prayers were only offered for those who were believed to have died as faithful members of the Church. But Saint Perpetua, who was martyred in 202, believed herself to have been encouraged in a vision to pray for her brother, who had died in his eighth year, almost certainly unbaptized; and a later vision assured her that her prayer was answered and he had been translated from punishment. St. Augustine thought it needful to point out that the narrative was not canonical Scripture, and contended that the child had perhaps been baptized.

Prayer to St Augustine: despite his overwhelming importance to Western theology, there was very little liturgical devotion to St Augustine in the Roman Rite during the first millenium. His feast does not appear in the majority of ancient liturgical books; his day was originally kept in Rome itself as that of an obscure martyr named Hermes, who is still celebrated as a commemoration on August 28th in the traditional rite. Towards the end of the eleventh century, however, as the great reform movement within the Western Church gained momentum, there emerged a huge number of new religious congregations of the sort which we now call canons regular, followed within a few generations by the mendicant friars. [1] Many of these, such as the Premonstratensians and Dominicans, took the Rule of St Augustine as their own, since it is very simple, and permitted a wide variety of adaptations and additional customs. Augustine himself then began to be honored in the liturgy as the great legislator of canonical life, just as St Benedict had long been honored as the great legislator of monastic life.
Sometime in the 12th century, a proper Office was composed for him, and widely adopted by many of the Augustinian orders in their various kinds. Here is the hymn which the Dominicans sing at Vespers and Matins, the Premonstratensians at Vespers and Lauds.

Antiphonary, Gregorian Choro
An Antiphonary is one of the liturgical books intended for use in choro (i.e. in the liturgical choir), and originally characterized, as its name implies, by the assignment to it principally of the antiphons used in various parts of the Roman liturgy.
Medieval antiphonaries varied with regional liturgical tradition. In 1570, following the Council of Trent, the Roman Antiphonary was declared universal. The Roman Antiphonary (Antiphonale Romanum) contains the chants for the Divine Office for the hours of Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline for every day of the year. The Vesperale Romanum is an excerpt of the Antiphonary containing the chants sung at Vespers. The music for use at the Mass is contained in the Roman Gradual (Graduale Romanum), the chants of the ordinary are also edited as an excerpt from the Gradual, the Kyriale Romanum. The Antiphonale Romanum was substantially revised in 1910/11 in the course of the reform of the Roman Breviary under Pope Pius X, notably restoring authentic Gregorian melodies. For the 1971 Liturgy of the Hours, there are two volumes, Antiphonale Romanum II and Liber Hymnarius.
The plainsong melodies found in the Roman antiphonary and the Graduale have received the general title of Gregorian Chant, in honour of pope Gregory the Great (r. 590–604), to whom a tradition, supported by internal and external evidence, ascribes the work of revising and collecting into the various texts and chants of the liturgy. Doubtless the ancient missal contained only those texts which were appointed for the celebrant, and did not include the texts which were to be chanted by the cantor and choir; and the Antiphonarium Missæ supplied the omitted texts for the choir as well as the chants in which the texts were to be sung. The importance of the Gregorian Antiphonary is found in the enduring stamp it impressed on the Roman liturgy.
Earlier popes had given, a medieval writer assures us, attention to the chants; and he specifies St. Damasus (d. 384), St. Leo (d. 461), St. Gelasius (d. 496), St. Symmachus (d. 514), St. John I (d. 526) and Boniface II (d. 532). It is true, also, that the chants used at Milan were styled, in honour of St. Ambrose (called the Father of Church Song), the Ambrosian Chant.
But it is not known whether any collection of the chants had been made before that of St. Gregory, concerning which his ninth-century biographer, John the Deacon, wrote: Antiphonarium centonem … compilavit. The authentic antiphonary mentioned by the biographer has not as yet been found. What was its character? What is meant by cento (patchwork)? In the century in which John the Deacon wrote his life of the Saint, a cento meant the literary feat of constructing a coherent poem out of scattered excerpts from an ancient author, in such wise, for example, as to make the verses of Virgil sing the mystery of the Epiphany. The work, then, of St. Gregory was a musical cento, a compilation (centonem ... compilavit) of pre-existing material into a coherent and well-ordered whole. This does not necessarily imply that the musical centonization of the melodies was the special and original work of the Saint, as the practice of constructing new melodies from separate portions of older ones had already been in vogue two or three centuries earlier than his day. But is it clear that the cento was one of melodies as well as of texts? In answer it might indeed by said that in the earliest ages of the Church the chants must have been so very simple in form that they could easily be committed to memory; and that most of the subsequently developed antiphonal melodies could be reduced to a much smaller number of types, or typical melodies, and could thus also be memorized.
And yet many say that it is scarcely credible that the developed melodies of St. Gregorys time had never possessed a musical notation, had never been committed to writing. What made his antiphonary so very useful to chanters (as John the Deacon esteemed it) was probably his careful presentation of a revised text with a revised melody, written either in the characters used by the ancient authors (as set down in Boethius) or in neumatic notation. We know that St. Augustine, sent to England by St. Gregory, carried with him a copy of the precious antiphonary, and founded at Canterbury a flourishing school of singing. That this antiphonary contained music we know from the decree of the Second Council of Cloveshoo (747) directing that the celebration of the feasts, in respect to baptism, Masses and music (in cantilenæ modo), should follow the method of the book which we received from the Roman Church. That this book was the Gregorian antiphonary is clear from the testimony of Egbert, Bishop of York (732-766), who in his De Institutione Catholica speaks of the Antiphonarium and Missale which the blessed Gregory … sent to us by our teacher, blessed Augustine.
It is impossible to trace here the progress of the Gregorian antiphonary throughout Europe, which resulted finally in the fact that the liturgy of Western Europe, with a very few exceptions, finds itself based fundamentally on the work of St. Gregory, whose labour comprised not merely the sacramentary, and the Antiphonarium Missæ, but extended also to the Divine Office. Briefly, the next highly important step in the history of the antiphonary was its introduction into some dioceses of France where the liturgy had been Gallican, with ceremonies related to those of Milan and with chants developed by newer melodies. From the year 754 may be dated the change in favour of the Roman liturgy. St. Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz, on his return from an embassy to Rome, introduced the Roman liturgy into his diocese and founded the Chant School of Metz. Subsequently, under Charlemagne, French monks went to Rome to study the Gregorian tradition there, and some Roman teachers visited France.
The interesting story of Ekkehard, concerning two monks, Petrus and Romanus, sent from Rome to teach chant, is not to be taken as historical. But a certain Petrus, according to Notker, was sent to Rome by Charlemagne and at the Abbey of St. Gall trained the monks in the Roman style. Besides Metz and St. Gall, other important schools of chant were founded at Rouen and Soissons. In the course of time new melodies were added, at first characterized by the simplicity of the older tradition, but gradually becoming more free in extended intervals. With respect to German manuscripts, the earliest are found in a style of neumatic notation different from that of St. Gall, while the St. Gall manuscripts are derived not directly from the Italian but from the Irish-Anglo-Saxon. It is probable that before the 10th and 11th centuries (at which period the St. Gall notation began to triumph in the German churches) the Irish and English missionaries brought with them the notation of the English antiphonary.
It would take too much space to record here the multiplication of antiphonaries and their gradual deterioration, both in text and in chant, from the Roman standard. The school of Metz began the process early. Commissioned by Louis the Pious to compile a Graduale and antiphonary, the priest Amalarius of Metz found a copy of the Roman antiphonary in the monastery of Corbie, and placed in his own compilation an M when he followed the Metz antiphonary, R when he followed the Roman, and an I C (asking Indulgence and Charity) when he followed his own ideas. His changes in the Graduale were few; in the antiphonary, many.
Part of the revision which, together with Elisagarus, he made in the responsories as against the Roman method, were finally adopted in the Roman antiphonary. In the 12th century, the commission established by St. Bernard to revise the antiphonaries of Citeaux criticized with undue severity the work of Amalarius and Elisagarus and withal produced a faulty antiphonary for the Cistercian Order. The multiplication of antiphonaries, the differences in style of notation, the variations in melody and occasionally in text, need not be further described here. In France especially, the multiplication of liturgies subsequently became so great, that when Dom Guéranger, in the middle of the 19th century, started introducing the Roman liturgy into that country, sixty out of eighty dioceses had their own local breviaries.
That the word antiphonarium is, or was, quite elastic in its application, is shown by the remark of Amalarius in his Liber de ordine Antiphonarii, written in the first half of the 9th century. The work which in Metz was called Antiphonarius was divided into three in Rome: What we call Graduale they style Cantatorius; and this, in accordance with their ancient custom, is still bound in a single volume in some of their churches. The remainder they divide into two parts: the one containing the responsories is called Responsoriale; while the other, containing antiphons, is called Antiphonarius. I have followed our custom, and have placed together (mixtim) the responsories and the antiphons according to the order of the seasons in which our feasts are celebrated (P. L., CV, 1245). The word cantatory explains itself as a volume containing chants; it was also called Graduale, because the chanter stood on a step (gradus) of the ambo or pulpit, while singing the response after the Epistle. Other ancient names for the antiphonary seem to have been Liber Officialis (Office Book) and Capitulare (a term sometimes used for the book containing the Epistles and Gospels).

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