Mary Channen Caldwell’s research on music in Europe ca. 1000-1600 engages with the complementary disciplines of historical musicology and medieval studies and is driven by interests in the cultural, ritual, textual, and material aspects of music and its production, reception, and transmission. Across her research and teaching, Caldwell employs methodologies that recognize the importance of notes on the page (incomplete as they are in premodern sources) while seeing these abstract reflections of music as part of complex systems of cultural meaning and history. While music is always at the core, her writing and teaching connect with a range of interrelated disciplines, including manuscript studies, gender studies, literary theory, theology and exegesis, liturgiology and hagiography, dance and movement studies, and theories of time and temporality. Published and forthcoming articles on a range of topics related to these interests appear in Early Music History, Plainsong & Medieval Music, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Musicology, Revue de musicologie, Music & Letters, and Speculum, as well as in edited volumes.
Caldwell’s first book, Devotional Refrains in Medieval Latin Song (Cambridge University Press, 2022), offers a critical approach to the Latin refrain—a repeated segment of text and music—and its conjoined songs, bringing renewed attention to an understudied corpus of over 400 Latin vocal works from the high and late Middle Ages. In this book, Caldwell explores for the first time the Latin refrain as a vibrant and multidimensional part of the varied landscape of medieval song, arguing for the importance of Latin song traditions within the devotional as well as quotidian lives of clerical, monastic, and educational communities across Europe. While previous scholarship on medieval Latin song has tended to elide the refrain in the interest of reportorial and music-theoretical approaches, Caldwell prioritizes the return of text and music as an epicenter and generator of lyrical, melodic, and cultural meaning. Her second and current book project focuses on music for and about a contested figure in medieval popular devotional, St. Nicholas. She is also working on questions of Latin song and gender; dance and sound; and is co-editing with Dr. Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne a volume titled Latin Song in the Medieval West (Liverpool University Press).