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By Janet Sassi, Staff Writer, Inside Fordham News and Media Relations Bureau For years, what lay in a small convent in Kraków, Poland, behind the Iron Curtain remained a mystery. James Boyce, O.Carm., Ph.D., associate professor of music and scholar in medieval Carmelite manuscripts, had heard rumors of an unstudied set of choir books existing in a small convent known as Na Piasku, or “on the sands”—named for its original 1397 location outside the city walls of Kraków. To a scholar like Father Boyce, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on two sets of manuscripts, one from 14th-century Florence and the second from 15th-century Mainz, at the time the only known sets of Carmelite choir books, the notion of such undiscovered devotional objects within his own order was an exciting prospect. During the 1990s, he tracked the books’ existence through what he heard through other people’s visits and through a friend who took some pictures of the books. But the sources proved somewhat cursory and inconclusive. When traveling restrictions eased on the former Eastern Bloc nations, Father Boyce began planning his visit to the convent. It happened in 2000. “It was a voyage of discovery,” recalled Father Boyce. “I really had no clue what I would find. People had said the books were all 18th century. But when I saw the work, I gasped. These books—the earliest ones—were 600 years old. Now that’s old, even for our order. It was then I realized how valuable they were.” Father Boyce documented his journey and the minute details of his discovery in Carmelite Liturgy and Spiritual Identity: The Choir Books of Kraków (Brepols, 2008). The 500-page book reveals the contents of some 25 choir books spanning 600 years, and offers an intimate look into the liturgies and daily rituals of the early Carmelites. The book also places the choir books within the historical context of the Carmelite tradition, suggesting that they are “instruments of identity” for an order that was seeking to define itself, especially throughout the Middle Ages. The books would have been used several times daily to perform the Divine Office, a collection of prayers and Gregorian chants that occupied up to four hours of the friars’ daily activity. Three of the books, Father Boyce said, most likely traveled with the Carmelites from Prague, Bohemia, in 1397, when they set up just outside the city walls of Kraków in a burgeoning immigrant neighborhood. Another book, a 1644 Gradual, or book of chants for the Mass, includes some 110 “historiated” initials in brilliant hues and intricate gold leaf. The books date
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