A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

198 leigh-choate, flynn, and fassler
calls him not only “bishop and confessor” but “our holy father.”7 Other
factors include the lack of a procession on Disibod’s feast and the absence
of music and lessons that reflect his story, even after Hildegard supplied
her chant texts and vita.
The contents of the manuscript suggest that Sts Mary and Martin were
the primary patrons of the monastic church, and that Sts John the Baptist,
Peter and Paul, Stephen, Benedict, and Disibod remained secondary
patrons. St Martin receives special attention throughout the manuscript:
his primary feast, octave, and translation and ordination are all well represented.
The antiphoner, for example, calls for a procession at vespers on
the eve of his feast and provides a full series of 12 neumed Gospel antiphons
for use within his octave. The rare antiphon for the vespers psalms,
Ad te clamantes, hails St Martin as patron (sancte martine patrone).8 The
litany directs that the invocations to Sts Martin and Benedict be chanted
twice; the Virgin Mary receives three distinct invocations. A petition pro
loco, following the litany, requests aid through Mary’s merits and the intercession
of Sts Martin, John, Peter and Paul, and all saints whose relics are
in the church (fol. 72v). At the end of the collectar, after being highlighted
with three and four extra prayers, respectively, Sts Martin and Mary are
further singled out by a series of versicles and prayers in their honor as
special intercessors “for any need.”9
St Martin, of course, was patron of the cathedral of the archdiocese
of Mainz, within whose boundaries the Disibodenberg and Hildegard’s
Rupertsberg convent were situated. A provenance in this region is suggested
not only by the emphasis on St Martin, but also by the other local
and regional saints listed in the table of high-ranking, 12-lesson feasts
(Alban, Justinus, Boniface, Aureus and Justina, and, of course, Disibod)
and in its litany (all of the above, plus Lullus, Ferrutius, Rupert, Wigbert,
Maximin of Trier, and Kilian). The petitions for Sts Disibod, Rupert, and
Maximin suggest more specifijically the territories of the Rheinland-Pfalz,
to the west of Mainz.
7 Bern, Bürgerbibliothek 226, fols. 21v (the primary feast: sanctus pater noster Dysibodus
Scottorum), 31r (the translation: sanctus Dysibodus episcopus et confessor), and 34r (the
dedication of the church: dedicatio ecclesiae sancti Dysibodi).
8 Engelberg 103, fol. 151r. The online CANTUS database lists the same incipit for the
octave of St Lambert in Graz, Universitätsbibliothek 30, a 14th-century antiphoner from
Sankt-Lambrecht in Steiermark, Austria (http://cantusdatabase.org/id/200106, accessed
25 August 2013).
9 Engelberg 103, fol. 196r, quando dicuntur pro aliqua necessitate.