How were the medieval chant repertories assembled? Even in the earliest manuscripts, each is a vast arrangement of thousands of texts, organ- ized to follow a daily sequence of liturgical services, endlessly varying throughout the fixed and movable cycles of a complicated liturgical year. Since our oldest sources already reveal a high level of organization, which remained stable throughout the medieval period, there must have been a long prehistory, during which the texts and melodies wre not only created, but collected, categorized, and assigned to a specific day, service, or function.
But there is little documentation for these processes, which is why they should be referred to prehistory rather than to recorded history. In general we do not have primitive or transitional sources, in which we can observe a chant tradition gradually taking shape over time. On the other hand, there are a few marginal documents that can help us visualize the development of the medieval repertories. At first, chant texts may have been written down individually.
Chrysogonus WaddeU, "The Oldest. We still await the full cataloguing and evaluation of this materiaJ. An example is on exhibit at the Metro- politan! It was found during excavations of the Monastery of Epiphanios, built over the ruins of a Pharaonic tomb near Thebes in Egypt. According to the sign on the exhibit, the shard was discovered on a sleeping mat in one of the monks' cells, and is thought to have been written between the years and The ostra- con is placed too far behind the exhibition glass for a visitor to make out the Greek text, but the following English translation is given on the sign:.
A virgin conceived, a virgin was with child, a vir- gin was in travail, a virgin brought forth and remained virgin, before bearmg virgin, and in bearing virgin, and after bearing virgin.
The next stage logically, if not also chronologically, was for groups of chant texts to be assembled into small collections of various sorts. A fascinating example from sixth-century Egypt consists of three texts. Elizabeth A. I,ivingstone Lcuvcn: Peters Press,. Scric "Papyrologic" 1 Paris: Publications de la Sorbonnc, , The ljuotc in the middle of the rcxt is, of course, from lsaiah 7: The resulting complex is perhaps an early form of the monastic mid- night office or Mesonuktikon.
