From the Bodleian Events Team: Thank you for booking to attend our digital event, Singing Together, Apart: drama and medieval chant on 14 June 2021.  The recording of the event is available here.

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Further reading:

You can find out more about the manuscripts used in the session through the links below:

• Manual for the provost of the Cistercian nunnery of St. Mary and St. Maurice, Medingen
• Easter prayer book for the Cisterican nunnery of St. Mary and St. Maurice, Medingen

At the session there was some interest in the illuminations within the manuscripts.  This subject was explored in more depth in our recent event Meet the Manuscripts: hidden treasures of medieval illumination which can be viewed here.

The Medingen manuscripts have been the subject of a number of blog posts from the Polonsky Digitisation project: Manuscripts from German-speaking lands:

• Hello Mr Easterday! Celebrating Easter in the Medingen prayer books
• Medingen Manuscript Production in the Age of Monastic Reform (1479) and Lutheran Reformation (1524-1544): How the project contributes to understanding the genesis of the Oxford prayerbook MS. Lat. liturg. f. 4
• The Medingen Manuscripts in Oxford, Wolfenbüttel and Hildesheim

Professor Lähnemann has written articles about the Medingen manuscripts for her blog and on other platforms and there is further information on The History of the Book site about the Medingen Easter prayer book in particular. 

The digital event shared images of the Holy Sepulchre in the Cistercian convent at Wienhäusen.   This article explores further the Holy Sepulchre and the sculpture of the Risen Christ which were central in the nuns’ celebration of the Easter liturgy.  

Professor Lähnemann gave a lecture exploring the Wienhäusen Easter playin the context of Easter plays more widely. The talk includes a sung performance of the scene where Mary Magdalen meets Christ as the gardener.

Gregorian Chant resources:

• The RCSM Guide to Plainchant offers a good introduction to plainchant
• Uwe Lieflander has a 4-part video tutorial about how to read Gregorian chant
• Neumz provides complete music and recordings for a given day from Jouques Abbey (there are also daily recordings following a similar style at https://www.barrouxchant.com)
• https://bbloomf.github.io/compline/ provides music for the office of Compline by date, following modern styles
• ’Square Note’ is a mobile app with a large selection of built-in scores
• The largest Benedictine monastery in Germany, Münsterschwarzach, has its own publishing house “Vier-Türmer-Verlag” where they publish their own editions of bilingual Gregorian chant, Latin and German. They stream their daily Vespers via their youtube channel in German and also offer choral courses: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChTuwpUOsenleoqrjbVTTRQ/videos?disable_polymer=1
• Worth Abbey is a Benedictine monastery in West Sussex that live streams the offices daily with recordings available via youtube: https://worthabbey.net/spiritual-resources/liturgy-live-streaming/
• The Medieval Music Manuscripts Online Database is an international virtual library of music sources with a searchable database of chants including manuscript images
• http://gregorian-chant-hymns.com/ features recordings, translations and scores for a number of hymns and Gregorian chants with contributions from abbeys in the UK, France and the USA