Abstract: If the textual closeness of medieval chant books to the Bible and the context of rituality in which they are used provided them with an outstanding dignity, in the context of liturgical practice they had but a referential status with regard to voice and ritual performance. Moreover, an increasing desire for religious internalization and immediate experience of the Divine seem to foster increasing dynamics of relativization and even devaluation of the written text. The paper wants to map this status of ambiguous mediality of premodern liturgical books.
Heinzer, after his retirement in September 2015, is currently the W. John Bennett Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Toronto and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and has been invited as Visiting Professor in residence with the University of California's Program in Medieval Studies for fall 2016.
Felix Heinzer has been a member of the Unterausschuss für Handschriftenkatalogisierung der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (1990-2000), of the committee of the Mediävistischer Arbeitskreis der Herzog-August-Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel (2003-2013) as well as of the Kommission für Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters der Phil.-hist. Klasse der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften München (2005-2105). He is also part of the Wissenschaftlicher Beirat of the project “Corpus monodicum. Die einstimmige Musik des lateinischen Mittelalters” (since 2012).