International conference co-organized by MIA CAS
The influence of French repertoires on liturgical music in Bohemia in the 13th century is a characteristic but hitherto not systematically researched aspect of Central European music history. Traces of French repertoires can be found in tropes for the Mass and the Benedicamus Domino, in Office chants, as well as in troped lessons and sequences, with evidence mainly coming from St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague and St. George’s Monastery at Prague Castle.
In some cases, the constellations of transmission suggest direct connections between Bohemia and France, in other cases they fit into the larger picture of the spread and adaptation of 12th-century French culture east of the Rhine, so that ultimately both Bohemia’s relations with its Central European and South German neighbours and the political and ecclesiastical networks in which agents of transfers are likely to have moved need to be examined. Recent studies on medieval church history point, for example, to the Bishop of Olomouc, Robert (1202–1240), whose possible English origin and studies in Paris could explain contacts between contemporary Western liturgical and Bohemia.
Since relationships in the field of liturgical culture do not concern music alone, but also architecture, book decoration and other crafts, and since transfers of liturgical repertoires are usually linked to political and institutional power, the conference aims to evaluate the relationships between France, Bohemia and its Central European neighbours in an interdisciplinary context. This broader panorama promises differentiations to models of historiography, which evaluate centres and peripheries by their participation in abstract global innovation, rather than asking about the overall specifics of local cultures and institutions in which transfer and acculturation took place.
