Felix Heinzer (Professor of Medieval Latin, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg): "Ambiguous Mediality: Chant Books of the Latin Church and their Changing Status in Medieval Tradition"

April 22, 2016

All Day

18th Avenue Library, room 070/090

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.

Bio: Felix Heinzer (born in Zurich, May 9, 1950) is an expert in codicology, liturgy and liturgical poetry, and in the history of monastic libraries (especially those in south-west Germany). His first studies were in Philosophy and Catholic Theology at the Universities of Rome (Gregoriana), Lyon, Chur, Fribourg (Switzerland) and Bonn, and he received his doctoral degree at Fribourg with a thesis on the Christology of Maximus Confessor. After six years as a cataloguer of medieval manuscripts at Karlsruhe (Badische Landesbibliothek), in 1986 he became the Head of the Manuscripts Department at Stuttgart Wurttemberg State Library. In 2005, following his Habilitation at the University of Basel on monastic book culture and ideas of monastic reform in medieval south-west Germany (2001), Felix Heinzer was appointed Professor of Medieval Latin at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität University of Freiburg (Germany). He has also served as the Wolfgang-Stammler-Gastprofessor für Germanische Philologie at the University of Fribourg/ Schweiz (2002-03) and as internal senior fellow at the Freiburg Research Institute for Advanced Studies (2012).

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).