Beneventan Rite

In Brief

The Beneventan rite is a lost liturgy known chiefly through its music: the chant repertory of Lombard southern Italy, formed in the duchy and principality of Benevento in the seventh and eighth centuries.¹ No complete Beneventan sacramentary or ordo survives. What survives is chant — Mass and some Office — with fragments of prayers and rubrics embedded in Gregorian books, and Kelly's third chapter reconstructs "the Beneventan liturgy" from them.¹ The repertory's content is known best where the liturgical year is densest: Holy Week and the major feasts.¹ The principal modern authority is Thomas Forrest Kelly's The Beneventan Chant (1989), and the complete critical edition of the surviving repertory is Kelly and Peattie's The Music of the Beneventan Rite (2016).¹²

Where to Experience It

The Shape of the Liturgy

The shape of Beneventan must be read backwards, from the books that outlived it. The "Beneventan Missal" — Benevento VI.33, early eleventh century — preserves Beneventan Masses, but it is a witness, not a complete sacramentary.³ The graduals carry the chant: Vatican, Vat. lat. 10673, an eleventh-century Gregorian gradual with Beneventan pieces; Benevento VI.34, a gradual with prosary and troper from the eleventh–twelfth centuries.⁶⁴ Kelly's Les témoins manuscrits du chant bénéventain (PM XXI) gives plates of every Beneventan-chant witness, including the Benevento graduals VI.38 and VI.40 and the fragments.⁵ And the repertory survived Gregorianisation precisely by hiding inside Gregorian books: Beneventan pieces lived on as doublets and supplements in eleventh- and twelfth-century manuscripts, which is why those manuscripts preserve them.¹ "Beneventan" must be used carefully: it can mean the old chant and rite, the south-Italian script, or books produced in the region — and most books in Beneventan script are Gregorian.⁷

History

The standard view places the repertory's formation in the Lombard duchy and principality of Benevento, seventh to eighth centuries, with cult centres such as Santa Sofia at Benevento and Monte Cassino.¹ The most-quoted document in the rite's history is a winter at Monte Cassino. Frederick of Lorraine was abbot of Monte Cassino and Pope Stephen IX at once, in 1057–58; Leo of Ostia's Chronicle (II.94) records that he stayed at the monastery from the feast of St Andrew to the feast of St Scholastica — 30 November 1057 to 10 February 1058 — and that, besides attacking private property among the monks, he forbade the "Ambrosian chant" to be sung in that church.⁸ Three things follow, and all three are routinely violated. The act was local to Monte Cassino, not a general papal decree. The chronicler calls the chant "Ambrosian" — its identification with what we now call Beneventan chant is a modern scholarly inference, made standard by Kelly. And "winter 1057/58" is more exact than "1058".⁸ The chant did not vanish in 1058: it survives in manuscripts copied later, as doublets in Gregorian books.¹

What ended the Beneventan rite was the slow Gregorianisation of the south: local books remade on the Roman model, the old pieces kept as supplements, the Exultet rolls carrying a Beneventan Exultet text into the Gregorian era as a south-Italian custom rather than a separate rite.¹⁷ By 1570 the rite was long extinct, and Quo primum's exemption clause is irrelevant to it.⁹

Milestones

1. 7th–8th c.The repertory's formation in the Lombard duchy/principality of Benevento (standard view)¹
2. 1057–1058Stephen IX forbids 'Ambrosian chant' in the church of Monte Cassino — a local act of winter 1057/58, not a general suppression⁸
3. 2016Kelly and Peattie's The Music of the Beneventan Rite — the complete critical edition of the surviving repertory²

Texts & Books

Start with Kelly's The Beneventan Chant (1989): the standard monograph, with the manuscript sources, the reconstructed liturgy, the musical style, and the Milanese parallels.¹ Then the complete critical edition: Kelly and Peattie, The Music of the Beneventan Rite (MMMA 9, 2016).² The facsimiles are the Paléographie musicale volumes: PM XIV for Vat. lat. 10673, with Hesbert's foundational introduction on the antiphonale missarum of the old rite; PM XV for Benevento VI.34; PM XX for the Benevento VI.33 missal; PM XXI for Kelly's survey of all the witnesses.⁶⁴³⁵ The Chronicle passage is Leo Marsicanus, Chronica monasterii Casinensis II.94, in Wattenbach's MGH edition — free, and the primary source for the 1057/58 prohibition.⁸ And read Nardini (2016) for the Gregorian aftermath: the post-Beneventan local compositions, and the standing warning not to confuse "Beneventan manuscripts" with "Beneventan chant".⁷

Family & Relations

The Beneventan rite belongs to the non-Roman West, at the edge of the map: southern Italy's answer to the Gallican family's Gaul.¹ Its nearest surviving relative is the Ambrosian tradition of Milan — Kelly's fifth chapter addresses the Milanese parallels — and the chronicler's "Ambrosian" has fed a debate about shared descent that the Index reports without settling.¹⁸ The rite's modern afterlife is scholarly rather than liturgical: where the Gallican books left a family of witnesses and the Celtic usages left a handful of Irish books, the Beneventan rite left a chant repertory, and its complete edition is a work of musicology.² The Exultet rolls are a Gregorian-era south-Italian custom, some carrying a Beneventan Exultet text — not a separate rite, and not evidence of one.¹

Compare with

• Ambrosian Rite: the other non-Roman Western chant-and-rite tradition — and the chronicler's word for what Stephen IX forbade⁸
• Gallican Rite: the other lost Western liturgy known through its books — Gaul's where Benevento's was Italy's¹

The Rite Today

There is no living Beneventan practice. The rite survives as scholarship and as sound recovered from scholarship: Kelly's monograph, the 2016 complete edition, the Solesmes facsimiles, and the manuscripts themselves — Vat. lat. 10673 freely viewable at the Vatican Library.¹²⁶ What the modern work has settled is negative, and the negative is valuable: no general suppression in 1058, no vanishing, no equation of script with liturgy.⁸⁷ The Beneventan rite is the Index's standing example of a liturgy that survives as music — and of how much music can preserve.

Disputed Questions

Go Deeper

The Beneventan entry is a lesson in what "extinct" means. The rite was never abolished: it was absorbed, piece by piece, into the Gregorian books of its own region, and the absorption is the reason anything survives.¹ The one papal act anyone quotes turns out, on reading, to be a local prohibition of "Ambrosian" chant in one church in one winter — and the identification of that chant with the Beneventan repertory is itself a modern inference.⁸ Strip away the inferences and what remains is a chant repertory of extraordinary beauty, a handful of graduals, one missal, and the most careful musicology the twentieth century produced.² That is not nothing. It is, for a lost liturgy, nearly everything.

## Sources

• Kelly, Thomas Forrest, The Beneventan Chant (Cambridge: CUP, 1989) — the standard monograph; start here.
• Kelly, Thomas Forrest, & Matthew Peattie (eds), The Music of the Beneventan Rite, MMMA 9 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2016) — the complete critical edition of the surviving repertory.
• Solesmes, Le Codex 10673 de la Bibliothèque Vaticane, PM XIV (Tournai: Desclée, 1931[–36]) — the facsimile, with Hesbert's foundational introduction.
• Solesmes, Le Codex VI.34 de la Bibliothèque capitulaire de Bénévent, PM XV (1937–53) — the Benevento gradual.
• Solesmes, Le Missel de Bénévent VI-33 (début du XIe siècle), PM XX (Bern: P. Lang, 1983) — the "Beneventan Missal".
• Kelly, Thomas Forrest, Les témoins manuscrits du chant bénéventain, PM XXI (Solesmes, 1992) — plates of every witness.
• Leo Marsicanus, Chronica monasterii Casinensis II.94, in Wattenbach (ed.), MGH SS 7 (1846) — the winter-1057/58 prohibition at Monte Cassino.
• Nardini, Luisa, Interlacing Traditions: Neo-Gregorian Chant Propers in Beneventan Manuscripts (Toronto: PIMS, 2016) — the Gregorian aftermath.
• Quo primum (1570) — irrelevant to Benevento: the rite was long extinct.

On Domus Dei

• The Ambrosian Rite
• The Gallican Rite
• The Roman Rite

Official resources

• Vat. lat. 10673 — the manuscript (DigiVatLib)

Recommended reading

• Kelly, Thomas Forrest, The Beneventan Chant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.The standard monograph; start here.
• Kelly, Thomas Forrest, and Matthew Peattie (eds), The Music of the Beneventan Rite, Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2016.The complete critical edition.
• Leo Marsicanus (Leo of Ostia), “Chronica monasterii Casinensis, book II, c. 94”, ed. W. Wattenbach, MGH SS 7 (1846), 1846.The winter-1057/58 prohibition, free.
• Solesmes (J. Gajard dir.), Le Codex 10673 de la Bibliothèque Vaticane, fonds latin (XIe siècle): graduel bénéventain, Tournai: Desclée, 1931.The facsimile, with Hesbert's foundational introduction.
• Nardini, Luisa, Interlacing Traditions: Neo-Gregorian Chant Propers in Beneventan Manuscripts, Toronto: PIMS, 2016.For not confusing Beneventan manuscripts with Beneventan chant.

Sources

1. ScholarshipKelly, Thomas Forrest, The Beneventan Chant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.Verified 2026-09-14 · Catalogued (citation): archive.org metadata with the chapter list. The standard monograph; ch. 3 reconstructs 'the Beneventan liturgy', ch. 5 addresses the Milanese parallels. The standard view places the repertory's formation in the Lombard duchy/principality of Benevento, 7th-8th c. Not opened
2. Primary textKelly, Thomas Forrest, and Matthew Peattie (eds), The Music of the Beneventan Rite, Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2016.Verified 2026-09-14 · Catalogued (citation): BnF cb452022743 (MMMA 9). The complete critical edition of the surviving repertory, with an introduction on style, notation and sources. Not opened
3. Primary textSolesmes (J. Hourlier and J. Froger), Le Missel de Bénévent VI-33 (début du XIe siècle), Bern: P. Lang, 1983.Verified 2026-09-14 · Catalogued (citation): BnF cb43358875g (Paléographie musicale XX). The 'Beneventan Missal' (early 11th c.), with Beneventan Masses. State the shelfmark as 'Benevento VI.33'; the current custodian is not confirmed
4. Primary textSolesmes, Le Codex VI.34 de la Bibliothèque capitulaire de Bénévent, Tournai: Desclée, 1937.Verified 2026-09-14 · Catalogued (citation): BnF cb43358870r (Paléographie musicale XV, 1937-1953). Benevento VI.34: a gradual with prosary and troper, 11th-12th c. Not opened
5. ScholarshipKelly, Thomas Forrest, Les témoins manuscrits du chant bénéventain, Solesmes: Abbaye Saint-Pierre, 1992.Verified 2026-09-14 · Catalogued (citation): BnF cb39585515r (Paléographie musicale XXI; usually cited as 1992). Plates of every Beneventan-chant witness, including the Benevento graduals VI.38 and VI.40 and fragments. Not opened
6. Primary textSolesmes (J. Gajard dir.), Le Codex 10673 de la Bibliothèque Vaticane, fonds latin (XIe siècle): graduel bénéventain, Tournai: Desclée, 1931.Verified 2026-09-14 · Catalogued (citation): BnF cb43358869j (Paléographie musicale XIV). The facsimile of Vatican, Vat. lat. 10673 (an 11th-c. Gregorian gradual with Beneventan pieces); Hesbert's introduction is the foundational study of the antiphonale missarum of the old Beneventan rite. Not opened
7. ScholarshipNardini, Luisa, Interlacing Traditions: Neo-Gregorian Chant Propers in Beneventan Manuscripts, Toronto: PIMS, 2016.Verified 2026-09-14 · Catalogued (citation): Open Library OL27445989M. The post-Beneventan local Gregorian compositions; essential for not confusing 'Beneventan manuscripts' with 'Beneventan chant'. Not opened
8. Primary textLeo Marsicanus (Leo of Ostia), “Chronica monasterii Casinensis, book II, c. 94”, ed. W. Wattenbach, MGH SS 7 (1846), 1846.Verified 2026-09-14 · Seen (review): 'ad hoc tandem monasterium in festivitate sancti Andreae … reversus est, et usque ad festivitatem sanctae Scolasticae commoratus … Tunc etiam et Ambrosianum cantum in ecclesia ista cantari penitus interdixit'. Stephen IX — abbot of Monte Cassino and pope at once — stayed from the feast of St Andrew to the feast of St Scholastica (30 Nov 1057 – 10 Feb 1058) and forbade the 'Ambrosian chant' in that church. Local to Monte Cassino; the identification with Beneventan chant is a modern scholarly inference
9. Magisterial / canonicalPius V, Quo primum (bull promulgating the Roman Missal), 1570. LinkVerified 2026-09-15 · Latin read in the front matter of the 1962 editio typica (archive.org sp07mr62-editio-typica, page images pp. [V]-VI) and of an 1862 Missal: 'nisi ab ipsa prima institutione a Sede Apostolica approbata, vel consuetudine, quae, vel ipsa institutio super ducentos annos … assidue observata sit'; dated 'pridie idus iulii' 1570; the Council of Trent's decrees had left the Missal to the pope: 'inter alia Sacri Tridentini Concilii decreta, nobis statuendum esset de sacris libris, Catechismo, Missali, et Breviario edendis, atque emendandis' (1862 front matter)