Here is the official stuff:
Early Music History (2010) Volume 29. Cambridge University Press
S A C R E D P O L Y P H O N Y
‘ N O T U N D E R S T A N D I D ’ : M E D I E V A L
E X E G E S I S , R I T U A L T R A D I T I O N A N D
H E N R Y V I I I ’ S R E F O R M A T I O N
For John Caldwell
This study focuses on the ritual ‘conservatism’ of Henry VIII’s Reformation through a new look at
biblical exegeses of the period dealing with sacred music. Accordingly, it reconsiders the one extant
passage of rhetoric to come from the Henrician regime in support of traditional church polyphony, as
found in A Book of Ceremonies to be Used in the Church of England, c.1540. Examining
the document’s genesis, editorial history and ultimate suppression by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, it
is shown that Bishop Richard Sampson, Dean of the Chapel Royal (1522–40), was responsible for
the original drafting of the musical paragraph. Beginning with Sampson’s printed commentaries on the
Psalms and on the Epistles of St Paul, the literary precedents and historical continuities upon which
Sampson’s topos in Ceremonies was founded are traced in detail. Identified through recurring patterns
of scriptural and patristic citation, and understood via transhistorical shifts in the meaning of certain
key words (e.g. iubilare), this new perspective clarifies important origins of the English church’s
musical ‘traditionalism’ on the eve of the Reformation. Moreover, it reveals a precise species of exegetical
method – anagogy – as the literary vehicle through which influential clergy were able to justify
expansions and elaborations of musical practice in the Western Church from the high Middle Ages to
the Reformation.
It is the term anagogy which particularly caught my eye. Meaning roughly [read the article to get the nuances explicated] a form of theology dealing with that which draws the Christian from things of this world to those of the unseen reality - principally music, which has the capacity of wordless praise, causing the iubilare - the shout of pure, wordless joy on encountering the divine. Lots to think about here!
