This paper examines musicless contrafact transmission in two late medieval Moravian manuscripts,1 CZ-Bsa R 626 and CZ-Olu M IV 6, which preserve a variant of the late fourteenth-century Visitation office Accedunt laudes virginis by Adam Easton. Composed as a contrafact of Julian of Speyer’s Franciscus vir catholicus for St. Francis of Assisi, Easton’s office features extensive melodic modifications to accommodate differences in chant structure and text length. The version presented in the two Moravian manuscripts does not preserve any of Easton’s adaptations, instead reverting to Speyer’s original melodies with unique modifications made where necessary. Analysis of the Moravian Visitation suggests that the office was transmitted to Moravia as a text-only source with an indication of the intended melodies, rather than as a fully-notated source. Consequently, the scribe – likely unfamiliar with Easton’s musical revisions – independently constructed the melodies, resulting in a distinct contrafact office based on Franciscus vir catholicus.
The authors analyse the understanding of St. Francis of Assisi by D. Merezhkovsky and N. Berdyaev, the prominent representatives of the “new religious consciousness”. The analysis is contextualized by the overview of the conception of Francis’ importance in Russian theological and philosophical literature at the turn of the 20th century. In the Orthodox literature was the evaluation of St. Francis directly derived from the evaluation of Catholicism. The concept of Francis as the “embodiment” of the ideal of the Catholic sacrament prevailed. Merezhkovsky and Berdyaev did not consider the differences between Orthodoxy and Catholicism to be essential. In their view, Francis was to rise above historical Christianity and marked the tendency to transform both churches (Catholic and Orthodox) into a new final state. According to Russian thinkers, the Church must go this way in the name of overcoming the religious crisis that all humanity is experiencing.
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