The Medieval Offices of Saint Thomas Aquinas

Abstract

This study focuses on the relationship between the music and the text in Saint Thomas Aquinas’s medieval offices. Singing and listening are central to sensory experience in medieval liturgy. The combination of the melodies and words is strongly emotional, having the capacity to transform the mood of a person and the environment of the church, metaphorically transporting singers and listeners to the spiritual realm of the saint. Liturgical chants had a great potential to convey devotional and even political messages: the different sensorial stimuli of the liturgy made them attainable and understandable to everyone in medieval communities, without making a sharp distinction between religious and secular audiences. In Thomas’s Dies natalis and Translatio offices, the devotional and political aspects were deliberately taken into consideration by the friars of the Order of Preachers who prepared the offices. In addition to the obvious benefit that it has preserved something of aesthetic value, such written music provides some of the best surviving evidence of the veneration of the saint. The book includes the musical notations of the chants.