The principal aim of the Project is
to construct a history of the texts and chants of the liturgical office to
St Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, clarifying the transmission of
the office and illuminating the relationships between individual sources.
This is the final stage of a research endeavour, originated and led by Professor
Andrew Hughes of the University of Toronto, that has spanned forty years
and encompassed the collection, cataloguing, and analysis of hundreds of
medieval liturgical books.
This website provides some information about the past, current, and upcoming
activities of the Project, and hosts a number of electronic resources for
use by those engaged in liturgical and musicological research.
Why Becket, and how:
The broad range of the extant material on St Thomas Becket is a testament
to his significance in history. The liturgical office in particular, which
commemorates Becket's life and death, offers a surprisingly revealing witness
to the intellectual activity of the Middle Ages; not only does it expose liturgical
practices, but it also allows one to gain insight into the medieval literary
and musical mind. The Project is working to identifying the unexplored repertory
of versified offices in general, in which the Becket office belongs; assembling
the locations of the manuscripts, which are to be found across the whole
of Europe; travelling to see and photograph as many of the sources as possible;
doing bibliographical and codicological work; designing databases; writing
specialised software to analyse the data; and keyboarding the data. It is
now time to organize and write up the final results.
The Project is headquartered at the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto,
Canada, and is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada. LMLO is published under the auspices of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.
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