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 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.
Mary Channen Caldwell’s research focusing on medieval song, liturgy, pedagogy, and intertextuality has been published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music & Letters, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Plainsong & Medieval Music, and Early Music History. She is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania.
