Creating and Using Liturgies for the Commune sanctorum in Medieval Iberia

Abstract

Providing source material for liturgical practice on a significant proportion of feast days in each sanctorale cycle, the Commune sanctorum liturgies had crucial daily importance for medieval Christians. Despite their frequent use, or perhaps because of this prosaic nature, the Commune sanctorum has rarely been considered as a liturgical phenomenon in its own right. Focusing on the Old Hispanic liturgy, this article explores the creation and presentation of the Commune sanctorum. We address systematically a question left unexamined in previous scholarship: where did the Commune sanctorum come from? We first survey the Old Hispanic material shared with other rites. Turning then to the Old Hispanic rite’s unique material, we examine materials found only in the Commons and those shared elsewhere in the rite. We set out a methodology for determining the direction of origin for such shared chants, demonstrating the importance of proper saints’ liturgies in the creation of the Commune sanctorum as well as the creative interest in producing new Commons materials. In addition to the origin of the Commune sanctorum, this article engages with manuscript presentation, asking how Commons materials were organized and how such presentations guided liturgical practitioners. A deeper understanding of the Commune sanctorum opens a window onto one of the foundational devotional experiences of Western Christendom.

Introduction

In medieval Christian practice, the veneration of a saint was the primary ritual focus on many days of the year. On these days, the liturgical texts channelled the devotion of the gathered faithful in particular directions. These texts could adduce characteristics of the saint as a model for Christians in the medieval present and could draw parallels with biblical figures. Some texts dwelt on aspects of the saint’s life: the saint’s role as intercessor could be invoked, and the saint’s potential as a conduit for the miraculous could be emphasized. The chants, readings, and prayers for some saints’ feasts were all (or almost all) composed especially in honour of that saint. Many saints’ feasts had a few uniquely assigned (‘proper’) items while most of their texts were thematically general and shared between two or more saints’ feasts. Other saints had few or no established liturgical texts associated with them. On such saints’ days, certainly by the ninth century, liturgical practitioners drew on a repertoire of suitable chants, prayers, and readings for each saintly type (e.g., martyr/confessor, male/female, single/plural). We refer to this repertoire in general as the Commune sanctorum, with separate names for the materials associated with each type of saint: Common of a Confessor, Common of a Virgin, etc.¹ Each medieval European Christian rite has a Commune sanctorum but – to our knowledge – their development and organization have never been studied in detail.² The Commune sanctorum permeated the liturgical year, interspersed in the routine flow of the temporale and proper saints’ liturgies on which so much liturgical scholarship concentrates. Through an exhaustive survey of the Old Hispanic Commune sanctorum materials from the eighth to eleventh centuries, we position the Commune sanctorum as an important site of localized liturgical creativity and reveal some of the possibilities and constraints that guided liturgical compilers.

The veneration of saints in the medieval West has provided fertile ground for scholarly exploration of societal values. The scholarship on the cult of saints is vast, and it is impossible to give an exhaustive representation of its scope or contributors here. Key topics include the conceptual and historical foundations of the cult of saints, following the foundational work of Peter Brown,³ and the compilation, transmission, and function of hagiography in medieval society.⁴ The intersection between the cults of saints and local identity has inspired many interdisciplinary studies, integrating multiple aspects of medieval cultural production – textual, musical, liturgical, and material.⁵ Questions of cultural transmission and value systems often underlie work on relics and relic cults.⁶ In the Iberian context, Carmen Garcia Rodríguez and Pedro Castillo Maldonado have summarized the extant evidence for saints’ cults, both material and textual,⁷ while others have undertaken close readings of individual cults.⁸ Almost all of the scholarship we have encountered centres on the cults of particular saints, or medieval devotion to saints more broadly, as a cultural phenomenon.

In studying the Commune sanctorum, by contrast, we study not a particular saint or cult, but a more general liturgical and devotional practice that by definition cannot have a cult. As alluring as proper liturgies are to scholars, an exclusive focus on them is disproportionate to the evidence. By the tenth century in medieval Iberia, up to sixty saints—whose feasts were celebrated each year—lacked proper liturgical materials, while only around fifty saints were celebrated using at least some proper liturgical materials.⁹ By the eleventh century, there had been a significant increase in the number of saints appearing in liturgical calendars. In one extant calendar, for example, there are 101 saints who do not appear with proper materials in liturgical manuscripts – accounting for almost one day in three of the liturgical year.¹⁰ Therefore the Commune sanctorum materials were used far more often than the proper saints’ liturgies were. The proportion of time that medieval worshippers spent engaged with the Commune sanctorum liturgies, and the impact of this on their overall impression of the cult of saints, is not reflected in modern scholarship. Here we respond to this medieval emphasis on Commune sanctorum materials by foregrounding them in our study.

We interrogate the processes of composition, compilation, and transmission of the Commune sanctorum, a routine element of medieval Christian devotional practice that has hitherto scarcely been explored. There have been two main interpretations of how the Commune sanctorum came about, almost always only alluded to in passing rather than directly addressed. Some scholars have supposed that individual saints’ feasts belong to early layers of liturgical composition, and that some of their materials were later used to make the Commune sanctorum. ¹¹ Others instead assume that saints’ liturgies initially drew on a Commune sanctorum and were only properized later.¹² Certain chants may have been widely used before the Commune sanctorum was explicitly compiled: commonly used chants for saints, thought to be appropriate on many occasions, are not necessarily synonymous with the Commune sanctorum. Much liturgical scholarship conflates such commonly used chants for saints with the idea of the Commune sanctorum, leading to an assumption that material was often assigned to the Commune sanctorum before it was assigned to proper liturgies. In our study, we disentangle these different types of chant, emphasizing that the material in the Commune sanctorum was intentionally compiled through a variety of processes. As we show, the act of compiling lists of materials and fixed liturgies – named with rubrics – for certain categories of saint is what makes it the Commune sanctorum, not simply the widely shared use of certain liturgical materials on individual saints’ feasts. A study of the Commune sanctorum across medieval Europe would lie beyond the scope of a single article; we therefore focus on the Old Hispanic rite, practised widely on the Iberian Peninsula between the eighth century and the end of the eleventh century.¹³

Our approach has been guided by the necessity of first outlining the foundational elements of the Commune sanctorum in the Old Hispanic rite: where is it preserved, what are its contents, how are the materials arranged in the manuscripts, and what type of usage does such arrangement encourage or suggest? The extant sources preserving the Old Hispanic Commune sanctorum were copied between the early eighth century and the eleventh century (see Appendices 1 and 2), allowing us to trace aspects of how the Commune sanctorum was compiled across a four-hundred-year period. We first collated the evidence from all extant liturgical manuscripts containing relevant material: antiphoners, commici, sacramentaries, libri hymnorum, libri canticorum, orationals and mistici.¹⁴ Where available, we compared multiple versions of each liturgy to assess the level of variation between manuscripts. In some cases we were able to identify layers of accretion or a distillation of the options into fixed liturgies in some manuscripts. These foundations enabled us to explore processes of liturgical composition in the Old Hispanic Commune sanctorum.

In medieval devotion, each saint was conceptualized as belonging to a particular sub-category of sanctity, and the Commons of Saints were arranged and compiled in the context of such sub-categories. We therefore begin by outlining those sub-categories in the Old Hispanic Commune sanctorum, anchoring our discussion by reference to the more familiar sub-categorizations used in the Roman rite in a similar period. We then outline the variety of strategies used to generate the Old Hispanic Commune sanctorum materials in the extant manuscripts. Some of these materials are shared with other western European rites, and we discuss evidence of liturgical exchange between Iberia and areas using the Gallican or Roman rites. Next we consider the small corpus of material found only within the Commune sanctorum in the Old Hispanic rite – shared neither with other traditions nor within the Old Hispanic tradition itself. Finally, we discuss material from the Old Hispanic Commune sanctorum that is also assigned to other liturgical occasions within the Old Hispanic rite. As we show, such material could be presented or accessed in a variety of ways: appropriated from specific saints’ feasts on an ad hoc basis, presented in lists of suitable materials for particular kinds of saints,¹⁵ or crystallized into fixed liturgies for the Commune sanctorum. In several instances, we are able to propose the likeliest origin of these shared materials, whether in the Commune sanctorum or in proper liturgies.¹⁶ Through this detailed analysis, we discern the different compilation strategies and transmission processes in the Commune sanctorum.

Sub-Categories of Saint in the Commune sanctorum

Although Roman liturgical practice is often taken as paradigmatic, the Old Hispanic and Roman traditions, in fact, have different categories of saint. We outline the primary categories here as a corrective to the Roman-centric narrative that is usually summarized in the scholarship. The earliest traces of the Commune sanctorum date from the seventh and eighth centuries in both the Roman and the Old Hispanic traditions. In each case, the earliest layers offer limited information. For the Roman rite, the Old Gelasian sacramentary was compiled before 715.¹⁷ It includes eight sets of mass prayers ‘IN NAT. PLURIMORUM SANCTORUM.’¹⁸ There are general references in the first set to ‘saints’, in the third set to ‘martyrs’ and ‘confessors’ (i.e., non-martyrs), and in all the other sets to ‘martyrs’.¹⁹ There is no formal subdivision between types of saint in these prayer sets, and there seems to be no provision for prayers relating to a single saint. The Gallican lectionaries give further evidence about the seventh-century understanding of saintly categories in northwestern Europe. The Luxeuil lectionary has Commons for a martyr, martyrs, a confessor, and confessors. In the Bobbio Missal, the categories of saint are a martyr, martyrs, a confessor, and virgins.²⁰ This differs from the Roman provision for martyrs and confessors in a similar time period. In the Old Hispanic rite, the earliest extant manuscript, the eighth-century Verona Orational (OV), includes two office prayers for de sanctis (i.e., a group of saints) and six prayers for de unius justi (a just man, a martyr)²¹ copied near the end of the manuscript.²² As can be seen in Appendix 3, seven of these prayers have textual parallels with psalm verses from Psalm 3 or Psalm 50.²³ Psalms 3 and 50 were always recited at matutinum (the dawn office) on saints’ days, preceded by an antiphon and followed by a prayer. The seven OV prayers are all associated with this liturgical position in later manuscripts (Appendix 3).²⁴ Thus, these Old Hispanic office prayers make liturgical provision for saints venerated both alone and in groups, although the Gallican and Roman confessor/confessors category is not present, nor is the Bobbio missal category of a group of virgins.

Subsequent layers of Roman liturgy include provision for more types of saint. Here, we give two illustrative examples from the sacramentaries. The ‘Frankish-Gelasian’ or ‘eighth-century Gelasian’ sacramentary lists mass prayers for many categories of saint in the Commune sanctorum. ²⁵ These categories are a martyr, martyrs, a confessor, a virgin martyr, and saints (in a group). The Gregorian sacramentary has a similar list of categories in the Commune sanctorum, with the addition of a Common for more than one Apostle.²⁶ In later medieval books of the Roman rite, according to Andrew Hughes, the Commune sanctorum is conventionally presented in the following order:

Apostles, evangelists, martyrs, confessors (including doctors, abbots), and virgins. Each may be subdivided, and apostles are frequently provided with a Common for the Vigil. Each class is normally subdivided into the Common for a single saint, followed by the Common for several saints of that kind: beyond this, virgins are usually classed as martyrs or non-martyrs. Confessors and martyrs are often qualified as bishops.²⁷

Sub-categories of saint had similarly crystallized in Iberia by the tenth century, although the terminology is not the same as in the Roman rite, nor are the categories identical. Iberian liturgical books usually present the Commune sanctorum in this order (see Appendix 2): de sanctis (a pair or group of saints); de unius justi (a just man, a martyr); de uno confessore (a non-martyr holy man); de virginibus (a pair or group of virgins); and de una virgine (a virgin).²⁸ The tenth-century León antiphoner L8 additionally has unius virginis confessoris (a virgin confessor) at the end of the list. This is a shorter set of categories than those listed by Hughes for later manuscripts containing the Roman rite, and is much more similar to the earlier Frankish-Gelasian and Gregorian sacramentaries. The Old Hispanic manuscripts do not have Commons for apostles or for groups of martyrs (although groups of martyrs are included within the de sanctis category), and the Roman sacramentaries do not have de virginibus or unius virginis confessoris. ²⁹ Both rites, however, have de sanctis, de uno confessore, and de uno virgine, as well as a Common for a male martyr (albeit with different terminology in each rite).

Commune sanctorum Materials Shared between Rites

Like the saintly categories, some Old Hispanic Commune sanctorum materials are also found in other rites, although most remain exclusive to the Old Hispanic rite. There are many hymns and readings shared across one or more rites. Most Old Hispanic Commune sanctorum hymns are also present in the Frankish Hymnal (Table 1), Helmut Gneuss’s name for the hymn repertory found in a group of six eighth- and ninth-century western European manuscripts.³⁰ This shared repertory was used across western Europe for saints lacking proper hymns. Whilst we cannot pinpoint the origin of these hymns or the direction of their transmission, we can confirm that they were indeed shared across traditions. They point to broader networks of liturgical exchange in the early Middle Ages.³¹

Table 1. Hymns for the Commune sanctorum

	Hymn	BN01 (hymnorum)	BL51 (hymnorum)	BL51 (misticus)	Silos 3	Silos 6	Other assignments (Old Hispanic)	Frankish Hymnal
de unius justi	Deus tuorum militum	✓	✓		✓	✓	n/a	✓ (martyrs)
	Deus inmensa trinitas unita	✓	✓				n/a
	Martir dei	✓	✓	✓			✓ (T3, a Just, terce)	✓(martyrs)
de uno confessore	Summe confessor	✓	✓	✓		(lacuna)	n/a	✓(St Gregory)
	Deus immensa trinitas corona	✓
	Confessor hic			✓	✓		n/a
	Ihesu redemtor omnium			✓			n/a	✓(confessors)
de una virgine	Virgines proles	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	n/a	✓ (virgins or a virgin)
de virginibus	Jesu corona virginum	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓		✓ (virgins)
de sanctis	Rex gloriose	✓	✓		✓			✓ (martyrs)
	Sanctorum meritis	✓	✓		✓	(lacuna)	Acisclus in L8, 29v	✓(martyrs)

Old Hispanic hymns for saints typically detail elements of the life and passion of the saint in question. The specificity of these hymns prevents them from being shared between different saints’ feasts, or between a saints’ feast and the Commune sanctorum. Instead, the Commune sanctorum hymns – largely shared between the Roman and the Old Hispanic traditions – have generic texts, suitable for use on multiple occasions. For example, the hymn Rex gloriose discusses the crowning and triumphs of the martyr and beseeches the saint for mercy and forgiveness. The lack of specifics about the individual saint’s characteristics or life story made such hymns suitable for borrowing across the Roman and the Old Hispanic traditions, despite these rites having different sets of saints and different liturgical emphases for saints, even those who were venerated in both traditions.

Similarly, we were able to identify concordances between some Old Hispanic Commune sanctorum mass readings and other liturgical traditions. The Old Hispanic rite had three mass readings (Old Testament, Epistle, and Gospel) compared with the Roman lectionary’s two. The Gallican rite shared many features with the Old Hispanic rite, including its use of three mass readings.³² Here we compare readings for the Old Hispanic de sanctis, and the closest Gallican equivalent, the Common of Martyrs (i.e., a group of martyrs).³³ The Old Hispanic commicus manuscripts have six sets of readings for de sanctis. ³⁴ One of the gospel readings in one Old Hispanic commicus (PB71) is Luke 21, also found in the Gallican Luxeuil lectionary for the Common of Martyrs, but the other two Luxeuil readings for this Common are not included in the Old Hispanic de sanctis mass readings. There is somewhat more overlap with the Bobbio Missal. The Epistle (Hebrews 11:33–34) is used for Martyrs in the Bobbio Missal and for the Old Hispanic de sanctis. ³⁵ The Gospel reading (Matthew 5:1–12) is also found in both traditions.³⁶ However, in all of these cases, the shared reading is one item among many sets of readings in the Old Hispanic rite, while the Gallican manuscripts preserve only one set of readings for each category of Common. We cannot be certain about the relationship between the Old Hispanic and Gallican Commune sanctorum readings, partly because there are so many Old Hispanic readings without extant Gallican cognates. Possibly there was borrowing or sharing of mass readings between the rites, but it is also possible that the liturgical compilers independently selected the same biblical texts as suitable for the Commune sanctorum.

Materials Preserved Only in the Old Hispanic Commune sanctorum

While some Old Hispanic Commune sanctorum hymns and readings have cognates in Commune sanctorum liturgies outside Iberia, other materials are uniquely preserved in the Old Hispanic Commune sanctorum. These include some hymns (those without Frankish hymnal cognates in Table 1), the vast majority of mass readings, and several canticles. Here we discuss the materials that are found in the OH Commune sanctorum and nowhere else in OH liturgical manuscripts. We cannot know whether these materials were truly unique to the Commune sanctorum due to the poor survival rates of medieval books produced on the Iberian Peninsula. However, the lack of assignment of these liturgical materials to any other occasion in the extant Old Hispanic manuscripts encourages us to explore them as compositions specifically for the Commune sanctorum, offering a new perspective on its use and compilation. Whereas new proper liturgies are often seen as the locus of liturgical creativity, this evidence indicates that the Commune sanctorum could also provide such creative opportunities.

Some materials uniquely assigned to the Commune sanctorum were not widely transmitted, and the lack of verses or melodies for some of them may indicate that they were rarely used. L8 and the ninth-century orational BL52 both preserve examples of such materials. Towards the end of BL52, a vespers prayer set for de sanctis is followed by six matutinum missa prayers.³⁷ A missa comprised an antiphon followed by a prayer, a second antiphon followed by a prayer, an alleluiaticus followed by a prayer, and a responsory, sometimes followed by a prayer. BL52 was laid out to include only prayers, but later hands intervened to add incipits for many matutinum chants.³⁸ There are no chant incipits, however, with BL52’s de sanctis missa prayers. Those who added chant incipits either did not know which chants should accompany these prayers, or did not use this de sanctis liturgy. The ephemeral nature of BL52’s liturgy for de sanctis is further illustrated by the fact that none of the eight prayer texts are found elsewhere in the corpus. Either they were not widely known, or they had fallen out of use by the time the other extant manuscripts were copied.

The repertory of unique Commune sanctorum materials in L8 may have been similarly fleeting, even while showing an interest in new composition or compilation for the Commune sanctorum. L8 preserves lists of Commune sanctorum matutinum missa chants. The lists for de sanctis, de unius justi, and de una virgine include many uniquely assigned chants. Several of these sets form thematic units, suggesting that the lists were not simply repositories but were also created as coherent, meaningful liturgies.³⁹ There are questions about the extent to which they were used, however. In L8, de unius justi includes five sets of matutinum missa chants, arranged as a list of five groups of antiphon + antiphon + alleluiaticus, followed by a list of five responsories.⁴⁰ Fourteen of the twenty chants are uniquely assigned to this Common in this manuscript and, of the remaining six chants, only one is preserved in other manuscripts for de unius justi:⁴¹ apparently this repertory did not circulate widely. Some of these chants may not even have been in use in León. Five of the fifteen antiphons/alleluiatici – four of them unica – lack verses.⁴² The verse was a crucial part of a missa chant, carefully selected to complement the antiphon, alleluiaticus, or responsory text.⁴³ These five chants were incomplete without verses. If they were in use, one might expect a manuscript user to add the verse text and, in fact, this is exactly what seems to have happened with the last set of antiphon + antiphon + alleluiaticus for de unius justi in L8. Here, the verse texts, omitted by the original scribe, were added by a later hand (marked with boxes in Figure 1).⁴⁴ The chants with added verse texts are more likely to have been used than the L8 de unius justi chants that lack verses entirely. As with the BL52 de sanctis prayers, the L8 chants assigned only to the Commune sanctorum may have been composed specifically for the Commons. Both BL52 and L8 illustrate the phenomenon of localized liturgical creativity associated with the Commune sanctorum.

Figure 1. Matutinum missa chants with added verses in L8, f.251^r.

Commune sanctorum Materials Shared with Other Old Hispanic Feasts and Their Origins

Many Old Hispanic Commune sanctorum materials are unique to Old Hispanic practice, but are also assigned to other liturgical occasions. We examine how this repertory is cued or organized in the extant manuscripts and what the original assignments may have been. The evidence is preserved in the manuscripts in the form of lists, fixed liturgies, or sometimes simply rubrics instructing practitioners to find materials in other saints’ feasts. Examining both ordinatio and compilatio allows us to imagine something of the liturgical creation process.⁴⁵

Ad hoc Selection of Chants for Saints, with and without Rubrics

Underlying the fully developed Commune sanctorum is the fundamental principle that liturgical materials can be shared between multiple saints’ feasts to provide a complete liturgical observance for saints without a fully compiled liturgy. This principle is evident as early as the Verona Orational, where manuscript users were instructed to draw four chants for Saints Justus and Pastor from the feast of the Holy Innocents.⁴⁶ Thus we know that, by the end of the Visigothic period, materials could be shared between similar saints’ feasts. We can infer that a similar practice was in place for some other saints. For example, OV includes concluding vespers and matutinum prayers for four saints’ feasts that lack matutinum missa prayers.⁴⁷ Since the missa was an essential component of matutinum, liturgical practitioners presumably used a missa from the liturgy of another suitable saint, in the way that was explicitly instructed for Saints Justus and Pastor. We cannot know which liturgical materials were used in such cases, but these partially properized saints’ feasts imply that chants and prayers could be pressed into service across more than one saints’ feast as needed, anticipating the practice of sharing materials across multiple feasts that was later made explicit and codified in the extant Commune sanctorum liturgies.

The practice of borrowing from saints’ feasts to provide materials for the Commune sanctorum is explicitly signalled in L8. Here, de unius justi begins with a rubric instructing manuscript users to look at the feasts of martyrs earlier in the manuscript to supply the vespers chants.⁴⁸ Similar to OV’s missing matutinum missa prayers, entire parts of the liturgical day are sometimes missing from an L8 Common liturgy, without explanation.⁴⁹ In such cases, manuscript users probably drew chants from similar feasts, as is instructed in L8’s de unius justi. While OV preserves a specific instance, L8 provides direct evidence of the general case: on a saints’ day that lacked proper chants, sometimes the cantor should select suitable chants from feasts of similar saints. It was thus understood that the Commune sanctorum could be generated by drawing materials from suitable saints’ liturgies.

Lists of Shared Chants in the Commune sanctorum

As noted, materials for the Commune sanctorum are often presented in lists.⁵⁰ These materials are frequently also assigned to specific saints’ feasts. The libri canticorum present canticles in lists for each type of saint in turn (Table 2); many of these canticles are assigned to specific saints in other manuscripts. Similarly, several L8 Common liturgies comprise lists of chants – multiple options for each genre – that are also assigned to specific saints elsewhere in the manuscript. L8’s de sanctis, for example, includes substantial lists of vespers and matutinum chants. The vespers lists are almost entirely drawn from liturgies of groups of saints earlier in the manuscript, presented in liturgical year order: the first sono is shared with the feast of Saint Acisclus and companions (17 November); the second sono with the feast of Saint Romanus and companions (18 November); the third sono with the feast of Saint Cecilia and companions (22 November); etc. The compiler of this Common was as comprehensive as possible, offering all the suitable options in one place. Because the choices made for these lists follow the liturgical order of the Sanctorale, the list’s creator likely thought through or paged through specific saints’ feasts, in turn, rather than simply remembering generic saintly chants that happen to be from these distinct liturgies, and happened to come to mind in liturgical order. When using such lists, liturgical practitioners retained the element of choice that we have also encountered in the ad hoc selection of materials for the Commune sanctorum, although in this case their choices were constrained by the lists’ compilers.

Table 2. chants shared between the Old Hispanic Commune sanctorum and proper saints’ feasts

	L8	Silos 3	Silos 6	BL51	Libri hymnorum (Sal, Sant, BL51)	Commici (A22, L2, PB71)	Libri canticorum (Sal, Sant, BL51)
de sanctis	Chants shared with other feasts for plural saints (L8)	Chants shared with other feasts for plural saints and de sanctis (L8)	(not present)	Chants shared with other feasts for plural saints and de sanctis (L8)	Sanctorum meritis shared with Acisclus (L8)	Six sets; seven readings are shared with other feasts for plural saints	Chants shared with other feasts for plural saints and de sanctis (L8)
de una virgine	Chants shared with a limited set of virgin feasts (L8): Eulalia, Leocadia, Columba, Agatha, Mary	Vespers and end–of–matutinum chants shared with Eulalia and Columba (L8); matutinum missa shared with de una virgine (L8); mass shared with Eulalia (L8)	Vespers and end of matutinum chants shared with Eulalia and Columba (L8); vespers, missa and sono shared with L8 de una virgine	Chants shared with Eulalia and Agatha (L8)	n/a	One Old Testament reading shared with Leocadia Two commici have rubric pointing to Eulalia	Chants shared with Leocadia, Columba, and de una virgine (L8)
de virginibus	Chants shared with Justa and Rufina (L8)	Chants shared with Justa and Rufina (L8)	Chants shared with Justa and Rufina (L8)	Chants shared with Justa and Rufina (L8)	n/a	All commicus manuscripts have rubrics pointing at Justa and Rufina	Chant shared with Justa and Rufina (L8)
de unius justi	Chants shared with other feasts (L8)	Chants shared with other feasts (L8) and other manuscripts	Chants shared with other feasts (L8) and other manuscripts	Chants shared with other feasts (L8) and other manuscripts	n/a	Five sets; three readings are shared with Justa and Rufina, one with John the Apostle and one with Leocadia	Some chants shared with other feasts of Just saints and de unius justi (L8)
de uno confessore	(fol. 252r) Chants shared with Aemilian, Martin and Leocadia (L8)	Most chants shared with Leocadia or Martin in L8 Occasional chants shared with Saturninus, Peter’s chair, Aemilian (L8)	Most chants shared with Martin and Leocadia (L8) Almost identical to the BL45 Aemilian liturgy	Chants shared with Martin, Leocadia and Aemilian (L8)	n/a	Six readings, three are shared with Martin and one with Leocadia	Chant shared with Martin and de unius justi (L8)
de unius virginis confessoris	(fol. 255r) Chants shared with Leocadia (L8)	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a

Origins of Chants: Shared Chants in Lists or Ad Hoc Selection

Sometimes we can be certain that materials shared between the Old Hispanic Commune sanctorum and specific feasts (summarized in Table 2) originated in a liturgy for a specific saint, based on the liturgical assignment of chants in the Visigothic period (preserved in OV) and the use of saint-specific language. In OV, liturgical texts for feasts lacking proper materials were shared on an ad hoc basis, as outlined earlier; there is no evidence for fully formed Old Hispanic Commune sanctorum liturgies in the early eighth century. Thus, when prayers are assigned to a saint in the eighth-century OV and to a Common in a later manuscript, we consider that it almost certainly originated in the properized saints’ liturgy. For example, the de uno confessore matutinum missa prayers in BL51 are also present in the OV liturgy for Saint Martin. Such Commune sanctorum items were created first for the proper liturgies with which they were associated in the Visigothic OV.

In chants preserved only in manuscripts from the tenth century onwards, we assert that a chant originated in a saint’s proper liturgy rather than in the Commune sanctorum when it is assigned only to that saint and to the Common, or when the topic or scripture source connects closely with the saint’s passio or vita. The soni provide several examples of this phenomenon.⁵¹ For example, the L8 de unius justi sono Alleluia, iudicium datum, shared with the feast of Saint Michael, has a verse beginning Ecce Michael, indicating that the chant was originally assigned to this saint, despite its assignment also to de sanctis and to Saints Adrian and Natalie.⁵² Similarly, the sono Alleluia, caeli enarrant gloriam Dei is assigned in L8 to de sanctis and also to Saint Torquatus and companions. The text describes ‘those going down to the sea in ships’, resonating with the vita of Saint Torquatus and companions who arrived by ship to evangelize Iberia, thus making it likely that this sono was originally assigned to Saint Torquatus, and it was subsequently taken into the Common. A third sono, Lex domini inmaculata, is assigned in L8 to de sanctis vespers and also to Saints Justus and Pastor. The chant refers to the ‘wisdom of the boys’, a phrase that is ubiquitous in the chants for Justus and Pastor. Further, the sono reuses and mirrors language from the preceding vespertinus, a chant assigned uniquely to these boy saints.⁵³ Thus, Lex domini inmaculata was almost certainly first assigned to the boy saints Justus and Pastor, and drawn from their liturgy for use in de sanctis. Beyond the soni, a paired vespers antiphon and alleluiaticus for Saints Fructuosus, Augurius, and Eulogius is also present in L8’s de sanctis lists. The main topic of these chants is fire, certainly applicable to Fructuosus and his companions whose passio and liturgy mirror the biblical story of the three young men in the fiery furnace (Daniel 3).⁵⁴ We are confident that these chants originated in the Fructuosus liturgy rather than in de sanctis. These soni and the Fructuosus chants are the most striking examples in the repertoire where the chant texts are strongly connected to the saint’s vita. In all such cases, the direction of travel is most likely from the proper saints’ feast to the Commune sanctorum. ⁵⁵

In contrast, some chants may have been composed first for the Commune sanctorum. When Commune sanctorum chants are also assigned to multiple saints’ liturgies, with texts generic enough to have no obvious origin, it may suggest that they were not drawn from a specific saints’ liturgy. The sono Quis deus magnus, for example, is assigned to twenty-two saints’ liturgies across the Old Hispanic manuscripts.⁵⁶ Its verse text opens ‘you are honourable in the saints’. The appropriateness of this text for saints’ days is self-evident, but it is not specific to any particular saint. Similarly, the vespertinus Exortum est was assigned to fifteen saints’ liturgies in the extant sources and has no specific textual references that might pinpoint the origin of the chant in a proper liturgy.⁵⁷ There are dozens of similar examples and, in each case, the multitude of assignments to saints’ feasts and the lack of language alluding to any particular saint led us to hypothesize that these chants originated in the Commune sanctorum or were commonly used chants,⁵⁸ never uniquely assigned to one proper liturgy.

Shared Chants Crystalized into Fixed Liturgies and Their Origins

The liber mistici BL51, Silos 3, and Silos 6 – books containing all the materials for the public services of vespers, matutinum, and the mass – exemplify a third option of manuscript presentation of the Commune sanctorum. In these books, rather than rubrics signalling ad hoc selection or offering lists of chants, there are complete, fixed liturgies for each Common. Additionally, L8 has fixed, but incomplete, de virginibus, de unius virginis confessoris, and de uno confessore liturgies. These fixed Common liturgies share materials with saints’ feasts that appear in the same or other manuscripts; they are related but not identical across manuscripts. In other words, while there is evidence of sharing in these fixed liturgies, no one authoritative liturgy was used across multiple institutions.

On closer inspection, it becomes clear that the materials chosen for the fixed Common liturgies are derived from the liturgies of specific saints – as we have already seen – or from the sets of materials already collected in lists for use in the Commune sanctorum. Sometimes a whole Common liturgy is derived from a specific saints’ feast. L8’s de virginibus is derived (except the sacrificium chant) from the liturgy for Saints Justa and Rufina.⁵⁹ L8’s matutinum missas for Justa and Rufina are also found in OV, showing the Visigothic association of these chants with this virgin martyr pair. We can thus claim with confidence that the compilers of the L8 de virginibus modelled their liturgy on the specific saints’ feast. Sometimes, even if a full liturgy is not taken over from a specific saint into the common, large blocks of material, such as an entire matutinum missa, are shared elsewhere in the rite with only one or two saints. L8’s de una virgine, for instance, draws all its chants from Saint Columba and from Saint Eulalia. Once again, the compilers must have had these saints in mind as the source of their material.

A striking parallel between Silos 6’s de uno confessore and BL45’s Saint Aemilian feast illustrates how liturgical compilers could generate Commune sanctorum materials directly from specific saints’ feasts. Twenty items for Saint Aemilian in BL45 are also present in Silos 6’s de uno confessore. ⁶⁰ Silos 6 has two additional prayers for this Common: a completuria and a benedictio. These prayers specifically refer to venerating the bones of the saint, and they most likely originated in the Saint Aemilian liturgy at the saint’s home institution of San Millán de la Cogolla, where there was a great emphasis on venerating Saint Aemilian’s relics.⁶¹ If this is the case, then the whole BL45 Aemilian liturgy – itself a creative balancing of materials from the liturgies for Saints Martin and Leocadia – was subsequently recycled in Silos 6 as a fixed liturgy de uno confessore. Regardless of the varied origins of BL45’s Aemilian materials, the compilers of Silos 6 understood themselves to be creating their de uno confessore liturgy from the feast of one model confessor saint, a rare type of saint in the Old Hispanic liturgy: Saint Aemilian, as preserved in BL45. As these examples illustrate, individual feasts had an important role in shaping the Commune sanctorum.

Generally, however, the fixed Common liturgies in the mistici seem to draw from lists of Commune sanctorum materials – lists that must have been similar to those in L8 – rather than chants being selected directly from proper saints’ liturgies. Each chant in vespers (say) might have a cognate in a different saint’s feast, but most of the selected chants are present in L8’s list of Commune sanctorum chants for that category of saint. Vespers for de sanctis in BL51, for example, has chants that are shared with many L8 saints’ feasts: Saint Eugenia, Saints Peter and Paul, Saint Acisclus, Saint Romanus, etc. The shared factor across all of these chants, though, is cognates with L8’s de sanctis lists (Table 3). We can also discern the direction of transmission in the Common de una virgine in Silos 3 and BL51. In both manuscripts, every matutinum missa chant has a cognate in L8’s de una virgine list of seven complete missas, but each chant comes from a different missa or is arranged in a different order from L8. Although each of these chants also has cognates in various other saints’ feasts in one or more manuscripts, every one of them has a cognate in L8’s de una virgine lists. This correlation means that the likeliest source for these versions of the Common de una virgine is L8’s lists, or lists similar to those preserved in L8. The concluding prayers in BL51’s de sanctis vespers are shared with the Common de unius justi in BL51 and Silos 3, further supporting this line of argument: some aspects of the fixed Common liturgies were compiled from materials already designated for use in the Commune sanctorum. The compilers of the liturgies preserved in these mistici seem to have viewed particular categories of Common (e.g., de sanctis, de una virgine) just as earlier compilers viewed individual proper saints’ liturgies as models from which to draw material. Rather than selecting material from any and all material in the rite, the compilers of some of these fixed Common liturgies confined themselves to materials already gathered together into the Commune sanctorum. The liturgical veneration of a generic virgin or a group of martyrs (say) was created first in proper liturgies, taken into the Commune sanctorum where it was reified and solidified, and then distilled into single fixed Common liturgies. While the compilers of each fixed liturgy had an element of creative choice themselves, their fixing of the liturgies controlled which materials were used within liturgical observance.

Table 3. De sanctis vespers, BL51

Chant	Sanctorale cognates in L8
VPR: Lux orta est iustis et rectis corde	Eugenia, fol. 74v; Allisio infantum, fol. 90v; Torquatus, fol. 195r; Peter and Paul, fol. 216r; Acisclus, fol. 29r (different verse)
SONO: Gaudete iusti in domino	Babylas fol. 9v; Romanus fol. 31r (different verse)
ANT: Dabo sanctis meis	Romanus, fol. 31r
ALL: Dabo vos nominatos in gloria	Romanus, fol. 31r; Peter and Paul fol. 217;
HYMN: Rex gloriose martirum	n/a

Summary

The Old Hispanic Commune sanctorum is preserved in several different formats in different manuscripts: with instructions for, or the implication of, an ad hoc selection of suitable materials; as lists of suitable materials; or as compiled fixed liturgies. We encounter only the first two of these formats in the eighth-century OV; the ad hoc selection in OV is still present in the tenth-century L8. All three formats are present in the tenth- and eleventh-century manuscripts, with different levels of reliance on each format in different manuscripts. We encounter lists of materials in L8, in the libri hymnorum, libri canticorum, commici, sacramentaries, and to a lesser extent in Silos 3. Fixed liturgies are found in both L8 (de virginibus) and in the mistici Silos 3, Silos 6, and BL51. Even in these fixed liturgies, an interest in options is still present, evident in the two complete, fixed choices for de unius justi masses in Silos 3, and two de sanctis vespers and matutinum options in BL51. We are wary of drawing any chronological inference from this evidence, because there are so few manuscripts.

Although the origins of many of the liturgical texts are uncertain, we have been able to pinpoint three separate processes by which materials arrived in the Commune sanctorum: materials could originate in a particular saints’ feast before being appropriated for use in the Commune sanctorum; materials may have been shared across a group of saints’ feasts before being collected for more general use in the Commune sanctorum; and materials were apparently drawn from Commune sanctorum lists in order to compile fixed Common liturgies. A further repertory of liturgical materials originated in the Commune sanctorum and were subsequently assigned to particular saints’ feasts as well. It is sometimes possible to ascertain which of these processes was most likely in play, but it is necessary to proceed on a case-by-case basis. There is no single answer for the whole of the repertory.

Conclusions

As we have shown, liturgical compilers sought and used a variety of strategies to generate, and sometimes fix, materials to supply the liturgical veneration of many saints. In our study of the Old Hispanic materials, we have found that these different strategies do not belong to clearly differentiated chronological strata, rather, the evidence points to different processes in operation simultaneously and to layers of accretion. While we avoid proposing an overarching chronology of which came first, the Commune sanctorum or proper saints’ liturgies, we have been able to determine several convincing cases of material originating in the Commune sanctorum as new compositions, and conversely, of material preserved in the Commune sanctorum that originated in proper saints’ liturgies. Further, our evidence suggests that compilers of the Common liturgies preserved in later manuscripts themselves drew from materials already associated with the Commune sanctorum. As exciting as it is to tease out the origins of some of the chants, readings, and prayers, perhaps what is even more significant is the insight such study offers into the needs, motivations and preferences of liturgical compilers and practitioners. If our interpretation is correct, the compilers creating fixed Common liturgies in later mistici preferred chants already associated with the Commune sanctorum. We have also seen that compilers desired variety, evidenced by the compilation strategy of listing, while ensuring that their choices fitted within a range of acceptable options.

The Commune sanctorum was an integral part of medieval Christian devotion, and as we have demonstrated, there was some liturgical exchange in the Commune sanctorum materials across rites. Our preliminary exploration suggests that, along with examples of parallel repertoire, there may have been parallel compilation processes in play in different rites that have yet to be explored. The complexity of the extant evidence, however, admonishes us to proceed step by step, analysing the development of the Commune sanctorum in each rite separately before drawing more global conclusions.

Across the European rites though, present even in some of our earliest liturgical sources, we witness liturgical practitioners’ need for material that could be used on a variety of occasions in the sanctorale, evidenced by the compilation of the Commune sanctorum. Providing source material for liturgical practice on a significant proportion of days in each liturgical year, the Commune sanctorum was of crucial importance. The Commune sanctorum is an act of compilation and composition deserving of study in and of itself, offering us greater understanding of medieval Christians’ creative responses to liturgical needs.