Chapter 4 examines one of the most spectacular music-liturgical programs of the fourteenth century: the narrative office for the feast of Saint Mark’s Apparition. A work of enormous rhetorical ingenuity and historical imagination, the Apparitio office, I argue, was a product of the state’s heightened attention to and generative engagement with the cult of relics. Found as a late addition to Basilica San Marco’s thirteenth-century antiphonal (VAM¹), the office celebrated the present-day virtue of the state’s most cherished possession: the body of its patron saint, the Evangelist Mark. Careful comparison between the Vespers office chants and the legend source from which the story derives reveals an inventive process of selection, omission, and invention of texts, and as well as a high degree of sensitivity in musical setting. The result was a compelling public ritual that represented the contract between the body of Mark and the Venetians who venerated him and, at the same time, made a self-reflexive bid for music and liturgy as the means for that contract’s renewal.

The coronation of Louis XIII is generally recognized as a turning point in the history of dynastic continuity. Just hours after his father Henri IV was assassinated, Louis was proclaimed king; this chapter describes, therefore, how Louis XIII’s coronation some weeks later was concerned, for the first time, with more than just marking his accession to the throne. Instead, a complex series of ceremonies reinforced the idea that, like David, Louis acted as an agent of the Holy Spirit. At a ceremony the day before the coronation, he received the sacrament of confirmation at Vespers of the Holy Spirit. During the coronation ceremony itself, he was anointed with oil brought down from heaven by the dove of the Holy Spirit and celebrated the Mass of the Holy Spirit. On the following day, he was inducted as a member and Grand Master of the Knights of the Order of the Holy Spirit. The fiery symbolism of the Holy Spirit found a vivid counterpart in the Phoenix, one of the emblems of the order, understood to reflect the perfect continuity between father and son, and a symbol (along with the flames of the Holy Spirit itself) that underpinned both Louis XIII’s and Louis XIV’s appearances as a fire demon or the sun itself.

This chapter moves to ninth-century Byzantium and the hymnographer Kassia, who is the only known female author of hymns appearing in the liturgical books of the Byzantine tradition. Exploring the liturgical performance of Kassia’s hymn On the Sinful Woman during Holy Week, this chapter examines the genre of this hymn (sticheron idiomelon) and its manuscript tradition. The tears of Kassia’s protagonist and how they evoke the mystery of compunction and repentance in Byzantium are investigated. On the Sinful Woman was chanted a few days before Christ’s Passion, evoking the existential abyss created by the absence of the divine from the life of the faithful and unveiling how tears of compunction could bridge this chasm. This chapter concludes with a few brief remarks on the sacred music of Kassia’s hymn and reflections on the relationship between chant and compunction.

Chapter 3 follows a clerical chronicler through a typical service at the twelfth-century Monastery of the Caves in Kiev, from the moment he hears the call to prayer to the priest’s final blessing from the ambo. Over the course of the narrative, I name and describe every church book that the chronicler takes up in his hands, and every sort of hymn, prayer, and reading that leaves his lips. In so doing, I attempt to provide a modern academic audience with a glimpse into how the liturgy was lived and experienced, day after day, by the men responsible for writing history in early Rus. I further argue that church books were not simply texts or sources like any other. I suggest, rather, they are the surviving artefacts of a Roman storytelling technology that enveloped its participants in a very special kind of narrative world. In my view, the worship of God, and the ritual retelling of his saving acts, was also a covert form of Byzantine political indoctrination. The liturgical rites inculcated an explicitly eastern Roman social arrangement between ruler and ruled, and they embedded this construct in a series of sacred narratives about the conversion and salvation of the Byzantine Empire.