Throughout medieval Europe, male and female religious communities attached to churches, abbeys, and schools participated in devotional music making outside of the chanted liturgy. Newly collating over 400 songs from primary sources, Devotional Refrains in Medieval Latin Song reveals the role of Latin refrains and refrain songs in the musical lives of religious communities by employing novel interdisciplinary and analytical approaches to the study of medieval song. Through interpretive frameworks focused on time and temporality, performance, memory, inscription, and language, each chapter offers an original perspective on how refrains were created, transmitted, and performed. Arguing for its significance as a marker of form and meaning, this book identifies the Latin refrain as a tool that communities used to negotiate their lived experiences of liturgical and calendrical time; to confirm their communal identity and belonging to song communities; and to navigate relationships between Latin and vernacular song and dance that emerge within their multilingual contexts.

Reviews

• Journal of the American Musicological Society 76, no. 1 (2023)

• Revue de musicology 109, no. 2 (2023)

• Music & Letters 105, no. 1 (2024)

• The Medieval Review October 15, 2024

ERRATA updated December 5, 2023; please email me with any other corrections or additions

• Appendix: In a paper delivered at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI, in May 2023, Charles Brewer introduced a Latin song with a refrain that does not appear in the book’s appendix, Buccinemus in hac die, which is transmitted in Kraków, Biblioteka jagiellońska, rkp. 2192, fol. 94v. His current project involving the editing of over 200 songs that will complete Gordon A. Anderson’s Notre-Dame and Related Conductus: Opera Omnia will undoubtedly furnish many more devotional Latin refrain songs not included in the Appendix of Devotional Refrains.

• Appendix, p. 250: the entry for Scribere proposui is misleading; there are multiple version of this song, one with at least six sources (3 notated, 3 unnotated), and a second version in three notated sources, as well as the version in the sixteenth-century printed Piae cantiones. There is also a Catalan contrafact that survives in fragmentary form as a mural. My thanks to Charles Brewer whose paper at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI, in May 2023 clarified the source situation for this song (CPI does not indicate two of these sources, nor the contrafact).

• Chapter 2, pp. 74-84: Congaudeat turba fidelium is also found in F-Pn lat. 15807, fol. 85v, with five strophes, the first of which is notated in square notes; the five text strophes are fairly different than other surviving examples, with the exception of the first which reads “Congaudeat turba fidelium | virgo mater peperit filium | in Bethlehem.”

• Table 5.1, p. 199, refrain should read “Unques mes ne fu seurpris du iolif mal d’amoureites mes or le sui orandroit” (fols. 186r-v)

• Table 5.2, p. 201, the refrain “Ci aval querez amoureites” has an additional (and closer) concordance in Version A of Le roman des sept sages de Rome (13th century); see Marie-Geneviève Grossel and Anne Ibos-Augé, Le Livre d'amoretes (2022). My thanks to Flannery Jamieson for alerting me to this concordance.

• P196 Footnote 14 should read “‘Anno Christi millesimo | Et quater quinquagesimo necnon et sexagesimo octavo ac vicesimo’, fol. 182v”

• In the manuscript sigla: “Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg” should read “du Luxembourg”

• In the Appendix:

  • Besançon, Bibliothèque municipale, Chiflet 175, fol. 396r should be included as a second source for Prothomartyre Stephanus tuus

  • Tempus adest gratie (in F, 470r and LoB, 48v) should read Tempus est gratie for LoB, 48v

  • Congaudeat turba fidelium is also found in F-Pn lat. 15807, fol. 85v (see also chapter 2).

  • Nos respectu gratie survives in more than a dozen additional sources, primarily as a Benedicamus Domino trope, not listed here; see, for instance, eight additional central European sources cited in Hana Vlhová-Wörner, "Benedicamus Domino Tropes in the Monastery of Benedictine Nuns at St George’s, Prague" in Early Music (2023). See also Table 4.5 where Nos respectu gratie is listed with sources.

  • Dulces laudes [Dulcis laudis] tympano [see also Martyr fuit Stephanus] is also found in Estavayer-le-Lac, Paroisse catholique Saint-Laurent, Volume I, pp. 107-109.

  • Qui nos fecit, not included in the Appendix but transmitting a refrain in some sources, has a complicated transmission history, surviving in several souces in different versions and with related text settings; for a brief, if outdated summary, see Barbara Marian Barclay, “The Medieval Repertory of Polyphonic Untroped Benedicamus Domino Settings” (PhD diss., University of California, 1977): p. 477, and more recently, Hana Breko Kustura, “Examples of Liturgical Polyphony from Dalmatia,” In International Musicological Society Study Group Cantus Planus, Papers Read at the 16th Meeting, Vienna, Austria, 2011, edited by Robert Klugseder (Vienna: Österreichische Akadamie der Wissenschaften, 2012), pp. 69-70. See, for example, the version in F-Pn lat. 10511, fols. 326v-327r.

• In the Bibliography:

  • Barthélémy appears instead of Barthélemy for the author Barthélemy Hauréau

  • The translator Sydney M. Brown is missing in the citation for The Register of Eudes of Rouen (1964)

  • The first word of Thomas B. Payne’s article 2000 title is misspelled in all the places it appears, including the bibliography; it should read “Aurelianis civitas: Student Unrest in Medieval France and a Conductus by Philip the Chancellor.” (see also p. 3, note 3; p. 18, note 49; and p. 68, note 11).

• I only became aware of this resource when the book was in production so I was unable to take its valuable information into consideration.