Parkes, Henry. The Making of Liturgy in the Ottonian Church: Books, Music and Ritual in Mainz, 950–1050. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th ser., 100. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. (Google Books preview)
Reviewed: Billett, Jesse D. Journal of the American Musicological Society 69, no. 3 (Fall s2016): 831–35
Outstanding and highly readable book, destroying the hitherto universally accepted theory that the so-called Romano-German Pontifical (as reconstructed by the brilliant Michel Andrieu) was created in mid-tenth-century Mainz. The “RGP” turns out not really to have existed as a clearly defined book, and the texts found in it were circulating well before Mainz only entered the story near the end of the tenth century. Mainz already had a clearly defined “use” of its own, which was undergoing fascinating development in the tenth century, as Parkes shows in a series of illuminating manuscript case studies.
See also
Parkes, Henry. “Questioning the Authority of Vogel and Elze’s Pontifical romano-germanique.” In Understanding Medieval Liturgy: Essays in Interpretation, edited by Helen Gittos and Sarah Hamilton, 75–101. Farnham: Ashgate, 2016. (Google Books preview)
Parkes has created a website that makes it easier to see how the standard edition of the RGP makes use of the comparatively few manuscript witnesses on which it is based:
Medieval and Anglican Liturgy 