I began this book with a question: What does the refrain do in Latin song? What meanings and discourses does the repeated refrain generate within the broader repertoire of devotional Latin song in the Middle Ages? I have made the case for the significance of the Latin refrain within discourses of devotional song, time and temporality, inscription, performance, community, memory, intertextuality, and language, among other interwoven threads. Without claiming a monolithic interpretation for the Latin refrain, I have identified many points of connections and shared meanings among songs and sources for a repertoire widely distributed over time and place.

A thread running throughout the book is the amorphous concept of community. The devotional Latin refrain song was a tool of devotional sociability for medieval communities of clerics, female and male monastics, and students, closely aligning with the ritual sociability engendered by the liturgy. The communities within which the Latin song was cultivated were varied, and the names of only a few individuals emerge from a sea of anonymity. Johannes de Perchausen and Bishop Richard Ledrede are two authority figures who feature prominently in the compiling and copying of localized repertoires of refrain songs, bearing witness to the power hierarchies underlying the creation and transmission of the refrain song. Latin refrains at times may have bubbled up within religious communities as part of a shared culture of devotional singing, but they were also part of disciplinary agendas in which communities of singers were defined by rank and age, their voices carefully controlled by means of devotional song. The refrain in particular functions as a meaningful instrument of community formation and maintenance, whether by mediating the experience of time, creating a sense of unity and togetherness through song, or sketching the linguistic parameters of one’s community.

By virtue of its repeatability and memorability, the refrain also resides in the collective memories of religious communities, becoming a site of intertextual and linguistic play through composition, inscription, and performance. The circulation of refrains across song and language testifies to the mobility, or mouvance, as well as the generic flexibility of medieval Latin song. While the refrain structurally fixes the form of a text, bounding its strophic movement and controlling its temporal pacing, it is also a formal locus for movement and mobility. The refrain and its surrounding strophic material could be recreated, reworked, reinterpreted, and retexted to fit different contexts and serve different functions, always with an awareness of the devotional underpinning of the repertoire. Latin song and refrain were part of an active practice of devotional song, a form of medieval musicking shaped by the participation of scribes, singers, compilers, poets, and composers.

In this active process of music making, place matters. Medieval song constantly navigates the tension between local practices and transregional transmission, unique styles and conventional forms. Concordances allow for the tracing of long histories for certain songs and refrains across time and place, while the significant number of unica suggests equally an ongoing interest in creating new works in the same form alongside the transmission of established ones. Certain manuscripts have figured more prominently, most often sources reflecting richly textured, local approaches to the creation, compilation, and performance of the refrain song. In many cases, manuscript sources suggest shared performance contexts and practices that connect with the festive calendar of the European Middle Ages, even when demonstrating no other connections beyond preserving refrain-form Latin songs. The three disparate manuscripts examined in Chapter 5, for instance, underscore how different communities – pedagogical, monastic, clerical – distributed across thirteenth- to fourteenth-century Europe might nevertheless approach the Latin retexting of vernacular refrains in similar ways. Conversely, the locality of the refrain song is signaled by the variable, even modular, reorganization of its strophic texts, the addition and subtraction of liturgical formulas indicating its use within the liturgy, reworkings of texts, and the sheer number of unica recorded in the Appendix.

The locality of the Latin refrain song can be seen in scribal approaches to its inscription. I have repeatedly returned to the manuscript page in order to locate indirect traces of how scribes, and by association the communities within which they were working, understood the performance, function, and meaning of the refrain song. Although the inscription of the refrain song was inflected by performative orality and processes of oral transmission, scribal practices nevertheless reveal certain attitudes toward refrains. Scribes tell us that the refrain is an important formal feature of some Latin songs by setting songs with refrains apart from those without; providing a logic for the gathering and compilation of song; offering a link between vernacular and Latin song; and serving as a performance cue. Each chapter explores insights offered by scribal practices through the material witnesses of compilation, rubrication, and paratexts. Yet the interplay of orality and inscription also plays out in Latin song in ways that resonate with the patterns of transmission similarly witnessed in vernacular song repertoires. The refrain and refrain song were not fixed, nor can an “original” version be readily identified; traces of change, adaptation, and variation – whether introduced by singers or scribes – repeatedly signal the generic and performative fluidity, or mouvance, of the Latin refrain song within medieval communities.

Further Contexts

With over 400 songs listed in the Appendix transmitted in dozens of sources, much more can be explored in the context of individual songs and sources. Further contexts for performance within the liturgy, for instance, and the full extent of musical and textual relationships to tropes, hymns, and sequences are only beginning to be fully worked out for Latin song, including those with refrains. Additional performance possibilities already posited for medieval Latin song might also have accommodated refrain forms, including devotional plays and representational rites, processions, monastic reading practices, or lectio publica, preaching, pedagogy, and personal or communal forms of prayer, such as litanies. The degree of participation by men and women, boys and girls, also remains a question, answers to which rest in the witness of individual manuscripts and their histories of use within particular communities. Moreover, at the risk of reinscribing an anachronistic dichotomy between the sacred and the secular, refrains in a less devotional register demand consideration apart from those examined in this book. Refrains featuring in laments, moralizing and historical poems, and love songs, to list a few topical areas, operate differently than devotional refrains in repertoires of Latin song in terms of how they were composed, where they are transmitted, and their contexts for performance.

The chronological endpoint of this book with the printing of refrain songs in the Finnish/Swedish Piae Cantiones in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries represents only a glimpse into the early modern and contemporary reception and performance of the medieval Latin refrain song. Manuscript and print collections of devotional Latin and vernacular songs from the fifteenth century onward, especially across German-speaking lands, include Latin songs, or vernacular contrafacts, whose histories can be traced to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.Footnote ¹ The cantionale of the Moosburger Graduale offers an early witness to this later devotional song tradition, yet its contents are embedded within song repertoires reaching back to the twelfth century. Most often, cantiones revolve around the Christmas season, the New Year, and the Virgin Mary, reflecting a growing interest in compiling festive collections of songs for the liturgical and seasonal year.

The Latin, vernacular, and bilingual carol repertoire of fourteenth- to sixteenth-century England also exhibits several formal and poetic links with the Latin refrain song, as well as rare concordances. Most saliently, the English carol shares with the Latin refrain song the formal attribute of the refrain, either in the form of a refrain attached to each strophe, or a burden that typically repeats between strophes.Footnote ² Occasionally, carols either rework the same liturgical texts as earlier Latin songs (including popular hymns and sequences like Ave maris stella or Veni sancte spiritus), employ similar refrains (or, in the case of the carol, burdens), or include textual formulas suggestive of the same liturgical functions fulfilled at times by the Latin refrain song (namely, as Benedicamus Domino song-tropes). The most notable connection of the Latin refrain song to the carol derives from the poems of the Red Book of Ossory, which are often cited as proto-examples in histories of the English carol. The medieval Latin refrain song, in other words, is intimately connected to later multilingual repertoires of religious song throughout Europe, its texts, form, and festive scope resonating throughout centuries of devotional music making.

Afterlives

The enduring afterlife of the Latin refrain song can be best identified in the widespread tradition of singing and recording Christmas songs, or more colloquially, Christmas carols. As I note in Chapter 2, the refrain song transmitted uniquely in F, Ecce mundi gaudium, is one example of a Christmas song whose transmission in the Middle Ages was apparently limited, yet it has entered into the modern recording repertoire of Christmas carols. Songs whose earliest occurrences are in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, like Puer nobis nascitur and Puer natus in Betlehem, both translated into an array of vernaculars, continue to be recorded on Christmas albums. Although it would be anachronistic to label medieval Latin refrain songs “Christmas carols,” this repertoire provides many of the earliest witnesses to a form of widespread, perhaps even popular, devotional singing designed to foster the communal commemoration of the major feasts of the church year, with a special focus on the feasts of Christmastide.

Finally, medieval Latin refrain songs are delightful, appealing pieces of music, featuring singable melodies and accessible poetry that draw singer and listener into the space and time of the song. The refrain plays no small part in this, becoming anchored in the ears and memory of listeners, measuring their temporal progress through the song, and offering a moment ripe for participation, whether actual or imagined. The appeal of the refrain song has not been lost on contemporary performers of early music. By contrast to a history of benign neglect in scholarship – not including its foregrounding in histories of religious dance – the Latin refrain song has become a staple in the concert and recording repertoire of several ensembles. While interpretations and realizations vary, performance practices in concert and recordings overwhelmingly highlight the festive orientation, approachable music and poetry, and participatory potential of the refrain song. Through its prominence in contemporary performances and recordings, the medieval Latin refrain song continues to belong to an active culture of devotional song, shaped in the twenty-first century by performers, editors, and scholars who are repeatedly drawn to its rich history and engaging words, melodies, and refrains.