JOHN ARCHICANTOR. - Abbot of the small monastery of St. Martin, adjacent to the basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican and primicerius of the Schola cantorum of St. Peter, when, in 678, with the consent of Pope Agatho, he was brought to England by Benedict Biscop (v.) to teach Roman chant and liturgy in the new great abbey of Wearmouth.
His teaching covered both the Divine Office and the ceremonies of the Mass: ordinem cantandi, psallendi, atque in Ecclesia ministrandi (Vita abb., ch. 6), and extended to the whole ecclesiastical year: cursum canendi annuum, sicut ad S. Petrum agebatur... et quae totius anni circulus in celebratione dierum festorum poscebat (Hist. eccl., IV, 18). G. thus gave a truly complete course of liturgy, of which non pauca etiam litteris mandata reliquit (Vita Abb., ch. 6). And the Venerable Bede further informs us that these writings were preserved in the library of his monastery, while copies circulated everywhere, a multis circumsquique transcripta.
The fact is of the greatest importance for the history of the Roman liturgy. At the end of the 7th century and in the 8th century the liturgy in the Anglo-Saxon regions had to be adapted in a certain way to that of St. Peter; and through the continuous influx of English monks into northern France, the Rhineland and other places on the continent, it exercised a notable influence also outside England, in many centers of the European West.
Fr. Carlo Silva-Tarouca has identified in the Anonymous of St. Gall (cod. 349) the surviving writings of G., especially his precious Ordo Romanus, which is the oldest now known bearing the author's name.
These writings are: 1) Ordo ecclesiasticus anni circuli, divided into two parts, the Capitulare and the Instructio. A more or less faithful copy of this Ordo is the Breviarium ecclesiastici ordinis contained in the two codices of Lorsch (today in the Vatican, Pal. 574) and of Murbach (today at Gotha, memb. I, n. 85), both from the end of the 8th century. 2) De Cursu diurno vel nocturno, an instruction for monks concerning the distribution of the canonical Hours for the various times of the day. 3) De Convicio, that is, the ritual customs of a Roman monastic refectory. 4) An Apologia of the Roman rite, appended to the opuscule De Convicio (both these writings in PL 138, 1345-50, according to the edition of Gerbertus). Cod. 349 of St. Gall, in the part that has preserved these liturgical documents (ff. [39] 54-118), is in a minuscule script already approaching the so-called Carolingian, with archaic elements that allow it to be assigned to the last decades of the 700s rather than to the first of the 800s; but it is a copy of another, older codex, scattice scriptus, that is, coming from England.
Furthermore G., according to Bede (who perhaps had him as a teacher), went to England not only as teacher of the monks of Wearmouth, but also as legate of the Pope, charged with inquiring into the orthodoxy of the English: ut cuius esset fidei Anglorum Ecclesia, diligenter edisceret, Romanque rediens referret. To this end he took part in the Synod of Hatfield, convoked by Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury in 680, and, together with the bishops, subscribed its decrees (cf. Hist. eccl., IV, 17 ff.). Returning to Rome in that same year, as soon as he reached France he was struck by illness "ac defunctus est".
His body was carried to Tours and buried in that famous monastery of St. Martin, where he had already stayed while journeying to England. In a catalogue of the saints depicted on an altar of the cathedral of Durham, a catalogue composed in the first half of the 15th century by prior Wessington, there also appears this name: Sanctus Johannes, archicantor Ecclesiae Sancti Petri Roman, tabus (Rites of Durham, ed. Fowler, in Publications of the Surtees Society, 107 [1902], p. 134).
Bibliography9 works
Per le varie edizioni (parziali) e i vari codici degli scritti di G. cf. M. Andrieu, Les Ordines Romanes du haut moyen âge, I, Lovanio 1931, pp. 10-13 (Ord. XIV-XIX), 330-33, 491-92.
Igino Cecchetti