Devotional Refrains in Medieval Latin Song

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, this book 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 the Latin refrain's significance as a marker of form and meaning, this book identifies it 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.

• The first book-length study of over 400 medieval Latin songs with refrains, some newly discovered and many newly edited, analysed, and contextualised
• Applies interdisciplinary approaches to contextualize the creation, transmission, and performance of devotional Latin songs and refrains in medieval Europe
• Provides fresh insights into the relationship between Latin and vernacular songs and refrains in the Middle Ages and the larger song networks to which they belonged