It’s dark, it’s cold, it’s January.

I’ve got some books on the subject of learning to read pre-Gregorian neums (c. 800 A.D.), which is fairly substantial material and not casually absorbed in a few days (or weeks).

But before I got into those, I thought maybe a little bit of context was order.

Specifically, the world in which these very early music manuscripts were written: the times and places in Medieval Europe where this chant was sung and initially orally transmitted before the earliest stages in the development of music notation. I started very early, with Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312 and the emergence of the Roman and Byzantine Churches in later centuries. Pope Gregory the Great (Bishop of Rome from 590 to 604) is remembered, among other contributions, for his significant support of using chant in the church at that time; however, he did not create it. Gregorian chant has a long rich history of development going back to the synagogues of Jesus’ time; see Eric Werner’s The Sacred Bridge for more on this.

The book I’ve been spending the most amount of time with this bitterly cold month is a scholarly text courtesy of Middlebury College Davis Library: The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages 350 – 950, Vol. 1, edited by Robert Fossier and translated by Janet Sondheimer, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

This is not light reading! (Anything I check out of that academic library is hardly fluff). But it does fill in a lot of gaps in my knowledge about what the social, political, economic and secular/sacred worlds were like at the time that these early music manuscripts were being written.

This month and the next I’m also taking an online course courtesy of my Vermont Episcopal Diocese: “Backstory Preaching”, a six week course providing instruction in creating an effective sermon, starting with prayer and meditations on Scripture, followed by extensive scholarly research. After completing my course project at the end of February and earning my lay license, I look forward to being able to share God’s Word at my church with Lectio Divina and the formidable resources of Middlebury College’s academic library!