Join the Catholic Institute of Sacred Music for our Fall 2024 Public Lecture and Concert Series.

How Ritual Changes Space: From Pantheon to Sancta Maria ad Martyres
Lecture by Professor Susan Rankin (University of Cambridge)

Saturday, November 16, 2024
10 a.m. PST
Free Admission

RSVP here.

This lecture is offered online via Zoom. Space is limited. Registration is required. No archival access will be made available.

About the Lecture

Built under the rule of Hadrian circa 120 CE, the Pantheon is one of the most iconic buildings of imperial Rome. Then dedicated to all the Gods, it had a gigantic hemispherical dome—as tall again as the perpendicular walls below—and was lit through an oculus cut into the dome. Cassius Dio described the Pantheon as resembling the heavens: a sense of the building as stretching from earth to heaven seems always to have marked the experience of those who came through its enormous doors.

By the end of the sixth century, following long periods of epidemic, flood, and lack of civic care, Rome had been transformed through a new social order, established through its Christianization. One significant way in which the Church acted in the lives of Romans was through its development of a “Christian topography,” mapped over the old imperial city. In this newly-revived Rome, it was considered necessary to integrate the imposing but long-neglected Pantheon into Christianized urban space. Its re-dedication took place on 13 May 609, using a set of chant propers which survive in later chant books for the consecration of churches. This ritual acted to change the place of the Pantheon in the cognitive map of the Romans, from a memorial of imperial Rome dedicated to pagan Gods to a house of the Christian God.

About the Speaker

Susan Rankin is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Music at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. Her research interests lie in two directions: on the one hand, the manuscript transmission and forms of writing of music in the early middle ages, and, on the other hand, ritual expressed in music throughout the middle ages. Her most recent publication is a monograph on the music scripts and notations invented by the Carolingians (Writing Sound in Carolingian Europe, CUP 2018), and she has recently finished a second "Carolingian" book (Sounding the Word of God: Carolingian Books for Singers) based on the Conway lectures delivered at the University of Notre Dame Indiana in 2017. In 2019–2020 she was a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, working with Margot Fassler towards a book in which dramatic modes of action in and alongside the medieval liturgy—from dramatic liturgy of the ninth century to sequences composed in the fifteenth—will be examined. She was awarded the Dent Medal in 1995 and is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academia Europaea, Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and Corresponding Member of the American Musicological Society.

About the Series

The Public Lecture & Concert Series of the Catholic Institute of Sacred Music welcomes the general public to St. Patrick's Seminary to hear from preeminent scholars about topics that have a profound impact on the Church and humanity, inviting them especially to consider the Church's wisdom on matters related to the worship of God, the spiritual life, beauty, and works of art.

We invite you to join us for these important and inspiring events.

About the Catholic Institute of Sacred Music

Founded in 2022, the mission of the Catholic Institute of Sacred Music is to draw souls to Jesus Christ through the beauty of sacred music and the liturgy.

The Institute offers a series of graduate-level coursework for credit, designed to help church musicians and clergy better to know and love the Church’s treasury of sacred music and her teachings on sacred music. Our goal is to equip students with the theological, philosophical, and historical knowledge, as well as the practical skills (singing, playing, conducting, composing, organizing, fundraising) necessary to build excellent sacred music programs in parishes and schools. We aim to help others revitalize the faith of Catholics and instill vitality in parish and school life through a vibrant sacred music program.

We are committed to a faithful and generous service of the Church. We cultivate fidelity, resiliency, a healthy sense of creativity, and selflessness within our student body and faculty as characteristics of our service as we labor together in the vineyard of the Lord to bring in a rich harvest.