Re-membering the Wilton Processional: a Manuscript Lost and Found
Re-membering the Wilton Processional: a Manuscript Lost and Found

Re-membering the Wilton Processional: a Manuscript Lost and Found

Professor Alison Altstatt (University of Northern Iowa) spoke to a gathering of musicologists, medievalists, and archivists at University of Iowa Special Collections on September 4. This paper concerned a notated leaf of an English medieval manuscript held in the Special Collections here.

Musical, textual and codicological evidence supports the identification of the leaf as a fragment of a processional from Wilton Abbey, an important centre for women’s Latin learning from its tenth-century foundation to its sixteenth-century dissolution. Wilton Abbey, likely founded in the ninth century, was a Benedictine nunnery and one of the most important religious communities for women in medieval England. The community was dissolved during the Reformation in 1539 and its buildings demolished.

The manuscript of the Wilton Processional was removed from its original binding, likely sometime in the 1940s, and sold off as individual leaves which made their way into private, library, and university collections in the US and around the world. The recovery of the University of Iowa leaf, along with more than thirty others, provides a window into the abbey’s musico-poetic tradition, its processional liturgies, and its dramatic rituals.

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