The responsory verses of early chant (Gregorian, Old Roman, Ambrosian, Beneventan, and Old Hispanic) were sung to recitation tones more elaborate than the tones of antiphonal psalmody. Eight standard responsory verse tones were in use in the ninth century on the Continent, but new melodies gradually replaced them. At first, these retained some characteristics of the old tones, then later abandoned them. Comparison of responsory verse melodies from offices for Irish, Anglo-Saxon, and selected Continental saints shows similar changes in the melodies over time, but also distinct stylistic characteristics in the treatment of text and in the development of melody within the prescribed tonal space. Cantors often sang responsory verses on the Continent in the earlier Middle Ages. This study reveals the musicianship of the corresponding medieval Irish and Insular singer-composers.

This chapter sets the early vitae of Cuthbert in their historical and compositional contexts, and focuses upon his eremitic construction within them. It unpicks their Irish and Gregorian sources, demonstrating the importance of Gregory’s life of St Benedict, but argues that whereas the Anonymous Vita promotes a more heroic and individualistic understanding of Cuthbert’s asceticism, Bede uses Cuthbert’s Farne years to demonstrate the close links between the solitary vocation and the coenobium, and to illustrate monastic ideals of stability, pastoral edification and labour. Turning to Cuthbert’s depiction in the Historia ecclesiastica, it argues that Cuthbert’s eremiticism is placed centre stage there, and used to negotiate Northumbria’s relation with other polities and ecclesiastical rivals, suggesting that Bede’s ambitions for Cuthbert as a saint for the gens Angli are specifically eremitic ones.

This chapter examines the most apparently troubled episode in the history of Cuthbert’s community – its intermittent perambulations around northern England in the ninth and tenth centuries – through the lenses of its earliest historical record, the anonymous Historia de Sancto Cuthberto. Noting the irrelevance of Cuthbert’s asceticism to this narrative, it argues that his life and posthumous miracles are used as vehicles to authorize the land claims of the Lindisfarne/Chester-le-Street community during this period of prolonged insecurity. In the course of consolidating and adding to these landholdings, Cuthbert demonstrates a readiness to work flexibly with the Danish elite where necessary – respect for land trumps ethnic difference. Where crossed, however, he is mercilessly retributive, a far cry from Bede’s pastoral and ecological saint. In addition to these local negotiations, the chapter explores how the Historia ambitiously sets Cuthbert to work as a kingmaker on a national level, insinuating him into the West Saxon narrative of hereditary English monarchy, while the West Saxons manifest a devotional interest towards him in turn to help strengthen their foothold in the north.

Chapter One studies how Rome figures in the murky processes by which individuals settled their relation to the world. In the process, it establishes something of the range of conditions under which medieval and early modern writers negotiated their own absorption into the matter of Rome. The chapter pursues at length medieval and early modern habits of attending not so much to the wonders of Rome, but rather to all that is most ordinary, obvious (in the word’s etymological reference to that which is encountered ‘in the way’), and ubiquitous in what Rome left in its wake when it relinquished its formal, administrative hold on the provinces of Britannia. These preoccupations open onto a wide span of time: from the middle of the sixth to the middle of the seventeenth century. The texts and problems that dominate the chapter range from Gildas andBede to Sir Thomas Browne in the late seventeenth century.