"Tell us how you feel!" : Singing Dialogues with Nuns in Late Medieval Germany

The Clarissen house of Villingen on the edge of the Black Forest was reformed in 1480 by the mystic Ursula Heider. She established an inner pilgrimage route within the convent that replicates Jerusalem, Rome, and stages in the lives of Mary and the Passion. The route had 210 stations and these were marked by stone wall tiles 86 of which still survive. At the very time the pilgrimage was established, the nuns of Villingen also produced a massive collection of liturgically ordered sequences, those long chants sung after the Alleluia and before the Gospel of Mass. This presentation welcomes an interdisciplinary audience into the workshop of the sequence scholar, demonstrating ways of working and using a highly-favored dialogue sequence for St. Francis as an example. In this piece the choir interviews Francis about how he felt upon the reception of the stigmata.

Margot Fassler is Bennett Distinguished Professor at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies and the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, Fall, 2024; Keough Hesburgh Professor Emerita of Music History and Liturgy, University of Notre Dame; Tangeman Professor Emerita of Music History, Yale University; and Assistant Historian, Amboy Historical Society, Amboy, NY 13493. She is also the author of  Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts in the Twelfth Century: Hildegard's Illuminated Scivias (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).

Everyone is welcome to join us for this talk! The talk will last for approximately one hour and will be followed by further time for questions and discussion.