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1 - Latin Song and Refrain in the Medieval Year

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2022

Mary Channen Caldwell
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania

Summary

Chapter 1 contextualizes the performance of the refrain song within the feasts and seasons of the church and calendar year, situating the repertoire within in a pluralistic temporal framework. The Latin refrain and refrain song are identified as inherently seasonal and calendrical forms of musical expression, emerging out of broader clerical and monastic interest in musically amplifying specific periods of the year. In addition to examining the calendrical ordering of refrain songs across manuscript sources, this chapter considers how festive calendrical time was disciplined and reframed through song and refrain. This analysis is informed by the textual witnesses of Eudes Rigaud’s thirteenth-century Regestrum, and song collection prefaces attributed to Johannes de Perchausen and Bishop Richard Ledrede in the Moosburger Graduale and Red Book of Ossory, respectively. The chapter closes with a case study of refrains and refrains songs for the New Year (January 1), a highly contested day in the medieval year that fused popular and devotional rituals and, consequently, invited condemnation as well as musical and poetic accretions. Musico-poetic celebration of the New Year involved one refrain in particular, “annus novus,” leading to a dense network of associations between theological texts, devotional songs, and festive rituals.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Thus, there were two dancing seasons, that of Christmas for the winter, that of Easter for the springtime. The first often began on the Feast of St. Nicholas and did not conclude until Epiphany, and the second extended until the Feast of St. John the Baptist, feast of superstitious observance par excellence. Now these two seasons, based on the ecclesiastical calendar, corresponded precisely to two periods of pagan revelry, the first having as its culminating point the Kalends of January, the second the Kalends of May.

–Gougaud, “La Danse dans les églises”

Writing in the early part of the twentieth century, Louis Gougaud provides the epigraph to this chapter by concluding his study of medieval church dance with the observation that there were two seasons in the year appropriate for dancing and rejoicing in song: Christmas and Easter.Footnote 1 The former began in early winter on the Feast of St. Nicholas (December 6), and the latter ended in midsummer on the Feast of St. John the Baptist (June 24).Footnote 2 Although Gougaud was concerned primarily with the role of dance and its accompanying music in religious contexts, abundant evidence throughout medieval Europe attests to the fact that certain times and seasons were marked by an efflorescence of song. Perhaps the most familiar of these seasons of song in Latin and vernacular contexts is springtime, as evoked in the exordium of a rondellus in thirteenth-century Parisian manuscript F: “The beginning of spring … gives us joy, [so] let us sing, eia!”Footnote 3 Medieval song across genre and language offers countless examples in this vein, interlacing song and season in ways that reflect not only the natural world and its seasons, but an awareness and marking of the pluralistic medieval calendar and the communities who lived according to its rhythms.Footnote 4

Calendar and seasonal time represent a key to interpreting the performance contexts and cultural functions of the Latin refrain song. With chiefly devotional texts and frequent links to the liturgy through troping, it is no surprise that Latin song plays a role in the musical landscape of the liturgical year as well as in extraliturgical devotional and festive rituals; indeed, medieval Latin song has long been envisioned as a form of religious and festive recreation.Footnote 5 In this chapter I suggest that the refrain song reflects a unique and heightened relationship with the medieval year in ways that are constructed and expressed through poetry and rhetoric, patterns of creation and transmission, and implicit as well as explicit performance contexts. Throughout this chapter the refrain song emerges as a nexus for the musical and poetic expression of time and temporality, rooted in its harmonization with the calendar year; the thematic, topical, and material contours of the refrain song are shaped around calendar and seasonal time in remarkably consistent ways over several centuries of cultivation and transmission.

In addition to aligning with the calendar year, the poetry of the refrain song repeatedly dictates how time, and especially festive time, should be experienced. Rather than passively reflecting notions of time, the refrain song could influence or change the way time was experienced. This develops out of a poetic vocabulary of sobriety and moderation that signals the inherent temporal plurality of the medieval calendar as both a record of solemn and devout feasts and a framework for seasonal and festive celebration. As Gougaud’s description of two dancing seasons suggests, the medieval year could be defined according to season (spring and winter), feast days (Christmas and Easter, the feasts of Sts. Nicholas and John the Baptist), or dates associated with so-called “pagan revelries” (New Year’s and May Day).Footnote 6 Within the medieval calendar, certain moments occasioned greater temporal plurality than others; these were moments when song, as Gougaud observed, became a preferred, if occasionally contested, mode of expression. The Latin refrain song closely traced these periods of heightened temporal plurality, its music, poetry, and performance fostering a figurative and literal reframing of how time was experienced.

Calendrical Song: Thematic Distribution and Manuscript Ordering

Patterns of manuscript transmission and the ordering of the refrain song beginning in the thirteenth century, along with the framing of refrain songs by means of rubrics and prefaces in the fourteenth century, signal an awareness of the refrain song as ritually and poetically tethered to the liturgical year. The poetry of the devotional refrain song is highly calendrical, coalescing chiefly around the liturgical seasons of Christmas and Easter, with songs also dedicated to the Virgin Mary and Christ.Footnote 7 The seasonal year is also emphasized with songs celebrating springtime or the transition from winter to spring; in many cases these are not secular songs, but instead, as discussed later in this chapter, allegorically frame the seasons. Figure 1.1 offers a synoptic view of the major liturgical and festive themes and topics explored in the poetry of the refrain song, with liturgical period or feast paired with season.Footnote 8 The thematic grouping of refrain songs aligns with liturgical and seasonal periods spanning from early winter, signaled by the Feast of St. Nicholas (December 6), to the New Year (January 1) and its octave, and then springtime, from Easter to Pentecost and its octave – a reflection, in other words, of Gougaud’s “dancing seasons.”

Figure 1.1 Calendrical and seasonal distribution of refrain songs

The thematic distribution of the refrain song is compelling since it does not mirror that of Latin song more broadly. Although Latin songs survive in all poetic forms and musical structures for the feasts and seasons listed in Figure 1.1, refrain songs survive more often, in greater quantity, and across more sources, for these specific feasts and temporal periods. St. Nicholas, for instance, appears in medieval Latin song more frequently than any other saint, and more than two thirds of these songs have refrains.Footnote 9 Similar ratios obtain for the other temporal periods indicated in Figure 1.1, with noteworthy numbers of refrain songs for Easter and springtime in particular. Easter is generally not well represented in the versus of the twelfth century, and although it appears as a topical focus in later conducti and cantilenae, Christ’s Resurrection is most numerously and explicitly celebrated in refrain songs, and especially rondelli. I examine this link later in this chapter in relation to the springtime topos; here, however, it reflects a correspondence between form and poetic content. Finally, although the feasts of the Nativity and the Circumcision are amply represented in Latin song, refrain songs for the latter are unusually well represented and, as detailed later in this chapter, present a special case study within the history of medieval Latin song.

Individual manuscripts reveal further how the transmission of the refrain song shapes and underscores its calendrical orientation. Form provides a primary organizing principle in sources for the refrain song, evidenced best by F, in which monophonic songs are copied in Fascicles X and XI, yet the majority of refrain songs, and all rondelli, are found in Fascicle XI. In manuscripts where refrain forms are deliberately clustered, another layer of internal organization is also typically employed. For smaller collections of songs, thematic homogeneity tends to be the convention. This is the case for the three Easter rondelli copied in the final folios of OBod 937, fol. 446v–447r, a manuscript otherwise transmitting texts pertaining to Thomas Becket; a series of Christmastide refrain songs, with rubrics indicating performance in relation to the Office Hours in the Austrian St. Pölten Processional; and a collection of Christmas and Marian refrain songs copied in the fourteenth-century Italian antiphoner, Bobbio.Footnote 10

In larger manuscript collections of refrain songs, calendrical ordering is used as an organizational tool. F is once again a central example, its sixty songs beginning with Easter (the first half of the collection), then moving to a mixture of Christmas songs, including groups of songs for Easter, the Virgin Mary, and St. Nicholas, as well as Christological songs and a single secular song (see Table 1.1). By contrast, the monophonic conducti in Fascicle X of F are not arranged calendrically or by any apparent logic beyond texture.Footnote 11

Table 1.1 The contents and thematic organization of F, fol. 463r–476v (Fascicle XI) (for folio numbers see the Appendix)

No.IncipitFormOccasion
1De patre principiorondellusEaster
2Felix dies et grata
3Decet vox letitie
4In hac die Dei
5Filii calvarie
6Luto carens et latere
7Vivere que tribuit
8A solis ortus cardine
9Mors vite propitia
10In domino confidite
11Rex omnipotentie
12Mundi princeps ejicitur
13Exultet plebs fidelium
14Christo psallat eccelsia
15Vetus purgans facinus
16Omnes gentes plaudite
17Fidelium sonet vox sobria
18Christus patris gratie
19A sinu patris mittitur
20Vocis tripudio
21Processit in capite
22Culpe purgator veteris
23Dies salutis oritur
24Vineam meam plantavi
25Passionis emulistrophic+refrain
26Gaudeat hec conciorondellus
27Transite Sion filie
28Qui pro nobis mori non respuit
29Pater creator omniumChristmastide
30Offerat ecclesiaEaster
31Descende celitusPentecost
32Procedenti pueroChristmas/New Year
33Ut iam cesset calamitasChristmas
34Annus renasciturChristmas/New Year
35Illuxit lux celestis gratieEaster
36Exultemus sobrie
37Veris principium
38Christo sit laus in celestibus
39Veterum memorem pellite
40Ecce tempus gaudii
41Novum ver oritur
42Iam ver aperit terre gremium
43Psallite regi glorie
44Breves dies hominissecular
45In rerum principiostrophicDedication
46Gaude Syon, devoto gaudiorondellusChristmas
47Salve virgo virginumrondellusMarian
48Ave Maria virgo virginumrondellusMarian
49Ecce mundi gaudiumstrophic+refrainChristmas
50In hoc statu gratiestrophicChristmas
51Tempus adest gratierondellusChristological
52Salva nos stella marisrondellusMarian
53Leto leta conciothrough-composedChristmas
54O quanto consiliothrough-composedChristological
55Iam lucis orto sideretroped hymnPrime hymn
56O summi regis mater inclitastrophicMarian
57Nicholae presulumstrophic+refrainSt. Nicholas
58Gaudeat ecclesia
59Nicholaus pontifex
60Exultet hec conciorondellus

Ordering according to form and subject matter is taken further internally; namely, the initial twenty-eight Easter songs in Fascicle XI are all rondelli, except for Passionis emuli. Following the main gathering of chiefly Easter and Christmastide rondelli up to folio 469r, the scribe then copied a greater assortment of works and forms, including strophic and through-composed songs and one troped hymn.Footnote 12 The ruled but empty folios following a tetrad of Nicholas songs also suggest the possibility that further songs for saints may have been planned. This is especially intriguing considering the position of St. Nicholas’s feast day at the beginning of the liturgical year in Advent; if further songs were planned for saints, their calendrical ordering in the Sanctorale may have mirrored the calendrical organization of the Temporale portion (Easter to Christmas) of the fascicle.

Only with F, in the middle of the thirteenth century, do examples of calendrical ordering appear, in addition to ordering Latin song by form, voice number, or subject matter. Earlier manuscripts, including a source with many concordances in F, Tours 927, are frequently organized thematically and according to form or genre, but not calendrically.Footnote 13 In the fourteenth century and beyond, several manuscripts organize refrain songs by form as well as calendrically; among these, the Moosburger Graduale is most explicit due to rubrication.Footnote 14 The grouping of Latin songs into a discrete “cantionale” already sets the songs apart from the liturgical contents of the gradual; an introductory preface (translated and discussed later in this chapter) and rubrics, moreover, ensure that the songs are read as proper to certain feasts and rituals of the calendar year.Footnote 15 Attributed to the dean of the song school Johannes de Perchausen, the preface also specifies clericuli, young choirboys, as the intended audience, a community that makes sense given that the songs begin with the Feast of the Boy Bishop, a liminal ritual for choirboys that formed an accretion to the Advent and Christmastide liturgy (see Table 1.2).Footnote 16

Table 1.2 Liturgical organization of the cantionale in the Moosburger Graduale, fol. 231r–246r (for folio numbers see the Appendix)

RubricIncipitFeast
Cum episcopus eligitur

Castis psallamus mentibus

Boy Bishop
Cum itur extra ecclesiam ad choreamMos florentis venustatis
Item aliaGregis pastor Tytirus
Cum infulatus et vestitus presul intronisaturAnni novi novitas
In die S. Nicolai episcopi cantioIntonent hodieSt. Nicholas
De nativitate Domini cantio primaGaudeat ecclesiaNativity
De nat. DominiNove geniture
De nat. Dom.Ecce venit de Syon
De nativitate Dom.De Syon exivit tenor legis (*no refrain)
De nat. Dom.Ecce nomen domini
De nat. Dom.Fulget dies hec pre ceteris
De nat. Dom.Resultet plebs fidelis
De nat. Dom.Nunc angelorum gloria
De nat. Dom.Dies ista colitur
De nat. Dom.De supernis sedibus
De nat. Dom. cantioVerbum patris humanatur
De nat. Dom. cantioDeinceps ex nulla
Item de nat. Dom.In natali summi regis
De beata Virgine cantioMater summi dominiVirgin (with a focus on the Nativity)
De beata Virg.Nove lucis hodie
De beata Virg.Ave virgo mater Jesu Christi
Item de beata Virg.Ave virgo mater intemerata
Item de beata Virg.Flos campi profert lilium
De beata VirgineAd cultum tue laudis
De S. Stephano prothomartyreDulces laudes tympanoSt. Stephen
Johannis EvangelisteChristi sit nativitasJohn the Evangelist
In die Ss. InnocentiumEcce iam celebriaHoly Innocents
Generalis ad predictas festivitatesEvangelizo gaudiumGeneral feasts
De nativitate et beata virgineLetatur turba puerorumNativity and the Virgin Mary
In circumcisione DominiNostri festi gaudiumCircumcision
Ad novum annumEcce novus annus estNew Year
In die sancto et in octava Epiphanie cantioTribus signis deo dignisEpiphany
In Epiph. Domini et in octava eius cantioStella nova radiat

The songs begin with the choirboys’ special festivities surrounding the election of the boy bishop, evidencing an alignment with the preface, in which choirboys are specified as the audience for, and performers of, these songs. The chorister-turned-bishop was typically elected on the Feast of St. Nicholas (a proto-bishop and patron saint of choirboys) in early Advent and presided during the weeks leading up to Christmas and, on occasion, through Epiphany. Logically, a song for St. Nicholas thus directly follows those for the boy bishop’s rites. In the cantionale, two Epiphany songs close out the collection, Tribus signis deo dignis and Stella nova radiat, and signal the end of the boy bishop’s seasonal reign. Between these two moments – the election of the boy bishop and Epiphany – the entire breadth of the Advent and Christmas season, including its saints, is adumbrated in devotional song, refrain, and rubric.Footnote 17

In a parallel example from fourteenth-century Ireland, the sixty unnotated poems, including thirty-nine refrain-form poems, of the Red Book of Ossory are accompanied by an introductory preface and, for the initial four songs, rubrication. For performance contexts, the preface attributed to the Bishop of Ossory, Richard Ledrede, indicates only that the songs were to be sung on “important holidays and at celebrations” (“in magnis festis et solaciis”); the rubrics on the initial folio of the collation are more specific, singling out the Nativity.Footnote 18 The first, “Cantilena de Nativitate Domini,” is followed by three more that indicate the same feast (e.g. “Alia cantilena de eodem festo”). Despite the lack of similar rubrics indicating the occasion throughout the remaining folios, which transmit fifty-six poems, Christmas or related poems (such as ones for Epiphany) are largely grouped near the beginning, while Easter poems appear in a cluster toward the middle of the collection. Significantly, unlike the preceding works, the final thirteen poems are not unique but instead incorporate borrowed material and exploit different poetic forms and styles.Footnote 19 The majority of the poems are for Christmastide and Eastertide; the remainder are either Marian, including one appropriate for the Feast of the Annunciation, or explore a small range of devotional subjects. The “magnis festis et solaciis” presumably refers chiefly to the feasts of the Christmas and Easter seasons, in addition to Marian feasts or devotions. The scribe thus consciously tried, even if not always precisely, to organize the poems along the lines of the great feasts cited, as performance context.

Between thematic and formal homogeneity and calendrical organization, sources for the refrain song show a tendency toward grouping by several parameters. While collating songs according to the presence of a refrain suggests an interest in formal typologies, the calendrical clustering and ordering apparent in several sources point to the close alignment of the refrain song with the calendar year and church seasons. In this, the transmission of the medieval Latin refrain song has much in common with liturgical Latin songs such as hymns or sequences, as well as later collections of sacred Latin and vernacular songs.Footnote 20 Latin song, and the refrain song most of all, cannot be easily untangled from the church year and its musical expression. Although this is hinted at in the language, devotional register, and, in some cases, liturgical function of many Latin songs, the compilatio and ordinatio of sources for the refrain song underscore its calendrical embeddedness.

The Plurality of Time: Easter and Springtime

The refrain song engages in discourses around time not solely by reflecting the liturgical calendar through manuscript ordering, but also poetically by commenting on and intervening in the experience of time and its plurality of overlapping feasts and seasons. Refrain songs frequently offer implicit commentaries on the plurality of time, and specifically the calendar year; for instance, the widely transmitted song Dies ista colitur is rubricated in four sources, two referring to its performance in troped liturgies for the Feast of the Circumcision, and two others indicating Christ’s Nativity and the Virgin Mary as topics.Footnote 21 Dies ista colitur is meaningful in any of these contexts; the changing rubrics reflect theological parallels that enable the same song to praise the Virgin, while also celebrating Christ’s Nativity, and honoring his Circumcision. Rondelli in final fascicle of F offer special insight into how poetry and music participate in discourses of temporal plurality during Eastertide in particular. Specifically, within the large-scale calendrical ordering of Fascicle XI of F, the internal grouping of rondelli according to calendar and seasonal time, along with an unusually consistent poetic and thematic vocabulary, showcase an interest in promoting and tempering the celebration of feasts while symbolically fusing seasonal and liturgical cycles of time.

Latin refrain songs, and especially those in Fascicle XI of F, have frequently been described as lighthearted, ingratiating, festive, and energetic, in part due to long-standing associations with dance.Footnote 22 Certainly, the poems in Fascicle XI, along with their refrain forms and liturgical ordering, convey an entirely different mood than the conducti in earlier fascicles of F. De patre principio on the initial folio of the fascicle, with the refrain “Let us rejoice, eia” (“Gaudeamus eȳa”), sets the scene for similar invocations of praise and rejoicing.Footnote 23 Yet the fascicle also includes songs and refrains featuring a more somber tone, as in the refrain of Mundi princeps eicitur for the Resurrection: “For life dies on the Cross … The victim who suffered for us | opens the gate of salvation.”Footnote 24 Throughout the final fascicle of F, the poetry fosters festive celebration on one hand, and devotional contemplation and prayer on the other.

The vocabulary of temperance and moderation in the refrain songs of F offers a strategic framing of the liturgical feasts cued in the poetry, constructing a repertoire of festive and celebrative yet sober songs. Indicative of this duality of tone is the frequency of the adjective sobrius (literally meaning “not drunk,” or “sober”) throughout the songs, and accompanying turns of phrase that convert joyous outpourings into temperate expressions.Footnote 25 Although the adjective is not uncommon in Latin poetry, it appears with conspicuous regularity in the Easter rondelli of F (see Table 1.3).Footnote 26 These five Easter songs each employ sobrius as a way to inflect expressions of praise or to moderate the voicing of joy. This is especially noteworthy in the context of songs for major feasts and holidays of the church year; song and voice are constant themes throughout the fascicle, yet always referred to in ways that suggest these utterances are carefully controlled and never excessive.

Table 1.3 “Sober” songs in Fascicle XI of F

IncipitFol.Strophe /RefrainPhraseTranslation
Fidelium sonet vox sobria465r1Fidelium sonet vox sobriaLet the sober voice of the faithful sound
Vocis tripudio465v1Vocis tripudio | sed mente sobria.With joyful leaps of the voice, but with a sober mind.
Processit in capite466r2Regi nostro psallite | sensu tamen sobrio.Sing psalms to our king, yet with sober feeling.
Exultemus sobrie468r1/Ref.Exultemus sobrie | Christo regi glorieLet us soberly exult in Christ the King of Glory
Psallite regi glorie469r3Christo laus sonet sobrieLet praise be sung soberly to Christ

The refrain forms and musical settings are also noteworthy in light of this rhetoric of restraint. The rondelli in F present particularly careful and controlled forms; their largely syllabic, narrow-ranged, and strophic musical settings are far from excessive, as in Vocis tripudio (see Example 1.1). Lacking melismas, large leaps, and ligated pitches, the musical setting proceeds largely stepwise; the two musical phrases, moreover, are nearly identical, resulting in an economy of musical material. Not all refrain songs are as unassuming and sparse as Vocis tripudio in F; indeed, in Tours 927, the musical setting of the same poem is more adventurous melodically and formally.Footnote 27 In keeping with the rhetorical tone throughout the songs in Fascicle XI of F, however, musical settings often convey a sense of moderation and restraint by avoiding melismas and leaps. Individual songs may be lighthearted or energetic, keeping the theme of rejoicing front and center, but the fascicle on the whole advocates for the “sober” musical commemoration of liturgical time.

Example 1.1 F, fol. 465v–466r, Vocis tripudio, first strophe and refrain

Exultemus sobrie and Psallite regi glorie in Table 1.3 are, moreover, part of an internal cluster of songs that reflect a different temporal duality. In addition to balancing rejoicing with moderation, a series of nine rondelli plays with the poetic plurality around Christ’s Resurrection and springtime, while also gesturing toward Christ’s Nativity, the earthly birth preceding his divine rebirth (see Table 1.4).Footnote 28 All nine songs are steeped in vernal symbolism, referencing flowers, springtime, and, in many cases, the transition from winter to spring; each also identifies the “flower” in question as Christ, the “King of Glory” and “King of Heaven.” The word “flower” (“flos”) and its various forms alone occurs more than forty-three times over the course of these nine songs (including repetition due to refrains), unremittingly relating spring’s vernality to Jesus as the ultimate flower of Christianity.Footnote 29

Table 1.4 Easter/springtime rondelli in F

IncipitFol.
Illuxit lux celestis gratie

The light of heavenly grace shines

468r
Exultemus sobrieLet us temperately exult
Veris principiumThe beginning of spring
Christo sit laus in celestibusLet there be praise to Christ in the heavens
Veterum memorem pelliteDrive away ancient sadness468v
Ecce tempus gaudiiBehold, the time of joy
Novum ver oriturA new spring arises
Iam ver aperit terre gremiumNow spring opens the bosom of the earth469r
Psallite regi glorieSing psalms to the King of Glory

Notably, these nine songs have been linked to Christ’s Nativity in previous catalogues and inventories, with the arrival of springtime and Christ as flower understood as allegorical references to his birth.Footnote 30 The refrain of Novum ver oritur, for instance, includes the word “epȳphania,” although in this context it appears less likely to refer to the Feast of Epiphany, as has been assumed, and instead to a more general idea of manifestation or appearance. This is supported in the fifth strophe by a reference to the trope of the dragon (Satan or sin) being crushed by Christ as he steps from the tomb on Easter morning, although this strophe is solely transmitted in Tours 927:Footnote 31

1. Novum ver oritur
   Letemur igitur
Iam flos egreditur.
   Cesset tristitia
   Floralis gaudia
   Dat epȳphania.

1. A new spring begins,
   therefore, let us be glad,
for now, the flower is budding.
   Let sorrow cease,
   epiphany gives way to
   the joys of Flora.

5. Draco conteritur
   Letemur igitur
Pax nobis redditur.
   Cesset tristitia
   Floralis gaudia
   Dat epȳphania.

5. The dragon is crushed,
   therefore, let us be glad,
and peace is restored to us.
   Let sorrow cease,
   epiphany gives way to
   the joys of Flora.

Nowhere in any of the poems is Christ’s Nativity explicitly named (as it is in other Christmas songs in F); neither, however, is his Resurrection. Instead, the poems refer most often to the passing of winter and arrival of spring and all that the new season encompasses and signals. The beginning of spring (“veris principium”), which melts wintery ice (“glacie sepulta” and “victa glacie”) as winter departs and a new season begins (“hiemis extinguitur estas reducitur”), reverberates across the songs, resulting in a richly allegorical outpouring of springtime symbolism that links these nine rondelli and sets them apart from other Easter songs in Fascicle XI.Footnote 32

Clear parallels emerge in these songs with the springtime topos in vernacular song and the Natureingang. Three songs begin with rhetorical gestures of season and time – Veris principium, Novum ver oritur, and Iam ver aperit terre gremium – while the remainder invoke springtime throughout strophes and refrains. One of the most striking moments in the nine songs is in the third and final strophe of Veterem merorem pellite in which a bird – a sonic marker of springtime – makes an appearance, replete with direct speech:Footnote 33

3. Veterem [habitum] ponite
   Domino gratias agite
Clamitat avis exuite
Hiberna pallial.
   Domino gratias agite
   Qui fecit omnia.

3. “Put off the old mantle,”
     give thanks unto the Lord,
clamors the bird, “cast aside
winter coverings!”
   Give thanks unto the Lord,
   who has made all things.

The clamoring of the bird in this strophe reflects the broader trope of bird songs and sounds in medieval music; its message here is one of renewal, casting off the old (i.e. sin) in order to welcome the new (i.e. Christ).Footnote 34 Evoking the topos of springtime and birds employed countless times in medieval song across register and language, Veterem merorum pellite features the allegorical reframing and repurposing of nature imagery in the context of Easter. Although neither new nor unique to F, the poets and compilers of the fascicle deliberately grouped songs engaging in the same allegorical mode that links liturgical and seasonal time.

The songs in the final fascicle of F shape the experience of festive time and the medieval calendar by highlighting tensions between different ways of experiencing time. In some cases, songs focus on the balance between rejoicing and restraint, advocating for the kind of lighthearted celebration frequently associated with Latin refrain songs, yet tempered rhetorically by moderation and sobriety. The series of Easter rondelli characterized by springtime topoi, on the other hand, acknowledge the intersection of liturgical and natural time, bringing Christ’s Resurrection together with the imagery of springtime. The emphasis on moderation and sobriety, moreover, is a marked feature of the fascicle that signals the broader cultural context of the refrain song beyond F. Although Eastertide is a specific focal point in F, the calendrical distribution of the refrain song includes the other major season of the liturgical year, Christmastide, bringing different concerns into play around the regulation of how the medieval year was experienced through song.

Reforming Festivity: Disciplining Time Through Song and Refrain

As the Easter rondelli in Fascicle XI of F illustrate, the refrain song intervenes most markedly at moments of temporal plurality in the medieval calendar. While the rondelli of F are concerned with Easter, springtime, and their “sober” celebration, the late fall and early winter season from the Feast of St. Nicholas through Epiphany on January 6 presents further tensions between liturgical, calendrical, and seasonal temporalities mediated in and through song. Within the span of early winter and Christmastide feasts and festivities, the refrain song and its material contexts highlight moments singled out for regulation and reform by church authorities, motivated by musical, choreographic, and ludic activities that stemmed from competing ways of celebrating feasts, holidays, and seasons.

The refrain song’s emphasis on the Feast of St. Nicholas and rituals of the Advent season and Christmastide, including the Feast of the Circumcision (January 1), is significant since these seasons and feasts frequently coincided, like Easter and springtime rites, with extraliturgical, seasonal, and so-called “pagan” festivities. For Advent, the Feast of St. Nicholas initiated clerical and lay festivities, ushering in school holidays and secular early winter rituals and, in the church, marking the election of the boy bishop (as in the Moosburger Graduale, above). Within the liturgy of the church, the festive Christmas season also invoked significant excess and widespread celebration, including the clerical celebration of the feasts following Christmas (referred to as the Libertas Decembrica). Within and outside of the church, the Christmas season was additionally inflected by celebrations of the solstice and of the Kalends of January, reflecting ritual holdovers from antiquity as well as medieval New Year’s traditions. This varied cycle of winter festivities, which incorporated condoned and condemned, secular and liturgical, rites and rituals, has most often been termed a part of the “festive,” “merry,” or “ritual” year celebrated throughout the Middle Ages in church and town.Footnote 35

Celebration of the festive year attracted near constant criticism from the church throughout the Middle Ages, which focused on varied practices ranging from mummery, games, and drunkenness to singing and dancing. Descriptions of singing and dancing in particular follow certain patterns – vulgar, lewd, pagan, diabolical, scurrilous, bawdy, and indecent are but a sample of the negative epithets applied to music and movement accompanying secular, seasonal, and liturgical festivities. Notably, the calendrical distribution of the Latin refrain song traces similar contours to these festive seasons and their “scurrilous” songs. Latin refrain songs are not, however, the scurrilous, bawdy, or diabolical songs decried by preachers, nor are Latin songs more broadly. Instead, the refrain song appears, in several instances, to be a strategic response to secular musical practices enacted in the celebration of the festive year. Evidence from condemnatory writings, manuscript contexts and paratexts, and the poetry of songs themselves identifies portions of the Latin refrain song repertoire as musical responses to the contested celebration of the festive year. This is already hinted at in the Easter rondelli of F; a broader perspective shows the way in which the Latin refrain song balances the simultaneous festive and solemn commemoration of other feasts and seasons.

Condemnations, typically ecclesiastical, of song and dance almost have the status of clichés in medieval texts, with a focus on vernacular song and the dances of women. Condemnations exist in the hundreds, mostly concerned with the body (especially women’s bodies), inappropriate performance spaces (such as cemeteries), and poetic register (lewd, sexual, etc.).Footnote 36 Throughout legal texts, penitentials, sermons, chronicles, registers, and even exegetical writings, complaints are frequently recycled, with language and phrasing verging on the repetitive. Similarly, the occasions at the center of critique and admonishment form a relatively limited cycle of liturgical feasts, saints’ vigils and feast days, seasonal markers (equinoxes and solstices), and calendrical transitions, with the New Year featuring prominently.Footnote 37 While liturgical feasts are singled out, complaints are most often framed around associated “pagan” celebrations and the desire to rid Christian rituals of non-Christian elements.Footnote 38 Since many of these same feast days were obligatory holidays (festa ferianda), there was added incentive to maintain a degree of solemnity within and outside of the church, since communities were otherwise free from daily labors and therefore quite literally had time to fill with potentially unsavory activities.Footnote 39

The surviving register of the thirteenth-century archbishop of Rouen Eudes Rigaud exemplifies the spirit of musical and poetic reform around certain feast days, at least in Normandy.Footnote 40 Providing accounts of Rigaud’s archdiocesan travels between the years 1248 and 1269, the Regestrum offers insight into the activities of a range of institutions (male and female, secular and monastic), with a focus on recording and disciplining inappropriate behaviors. Throughout the years covered in the Regestrum, several feasts occasioned repeated musical, poetic, choreographic, and ludic offenses at a handful of female and male institutions: the Feast of the Holy Innocents receives seven mentions, and there are two for St. Nicholas, and one each for the feasts of Sts. John, Stephen, Katherine, Hildevert, and Mary Magdalene (see Table 1.5).Footnote 41 Prohibited activities in Rigaud’s entries vary from general to specific. Dance (choreas) is referenced on several occasions, and games make appearances too, while songs range from those described as “scurrilous” to the generic descriptor cantilenas. Significantly, Rigaud identifies several genres, namely virelais, conducti, and motets in the case of the entry from January 12, 1260, and also gestures toward the musical practices of women (specifically nuns) as well as men. In all cases, Rigaud attempts (and seemingly fails) to reform the celebration of certain feasts across his archdiocese and, more specifically, to abolish the nonliturgical songs, verses, and dances that detracted from otherwise sanctioned feasts.

Table 1.5 References to music, dance, and games on feast days in Rigaud’s Regestrum, ca. 1249–1265

DatePlaceReference
July 9, 1249Priory of VillarceauxItem, we forbid you to continue the farcical performances which have been your practice at the Feast of the Innocents and of the Blessed Mary Magdalene, to dress up in worldly costumes, or to lead dances with each other or with laity [cum secularibus choreas ducendo].
Sept. 12, 1253Priory of VillarceauxThey sing songs [cantilenas] on the Feast of the Innocents.
Jan. 5, 1254Abbey of St-Léger-des-PréauxWe forbade them to celebrate the Feast of the Innocents because of the customs contrary to the Rule.
Oct. 23, 1256Abbey of La-Trinité-de-CaenThe young nuns … at the Feast of the Innocents sing the Office with farses [cum farsis]; we forbade this.
Jan. 12, 1260Abbey of MontivilliersItem, at the Feasts of St. John, St. Stephen, and the Holy Innocents they conducted themselves with too much hilarity and sang scurrilous songs such as drunken farses, conducti, and motets [nimia iocositate et scurrilibus cantibus utebantur, ut pote farsis, conductis, motulis]; we ordered them to behave more decorously and with more devotion in the future.
May 22, 1262Abbey of MontivilliersThey said that they had entirely abandoned the farses [facere] which they used to act at the Feast of the Innocents; item, we ordered them to abstain from all such things entirely.
Aug. 22, 1263Church of St-Hildevert-de-GournayItem, on some of the feast days, particularly that of St. Nicholas, the clerks, vicars, and even the chaplains [clerici, vicarii, ac etiam capellani] conducted themselves in a dissolute and scurrilous manner, dancing through the town and singing virelais [ducendo choreas per vicos et faciendo le vireli].
Oct. 1, 1263Church of St-Hildevert-de-GournayItem, we issued a general prohibition against dancing [choreas ducerent] on the Feasts of St. Nicholas, St. Katherine, St. Hildevert, or any other.
May 9, 1265Abbey of MontivilliersItem, we ordered them to refrain altogether from games [ludis] on the Feast of the Innocents.

Although the precise musical works cited by Rigaud remain unknown (and the level of exaggeration and embellishment in his account is unclear), extraliturgical Latin songs survive for the feasts he singles out in compelling numbers. This is especially the case for the Feasts of Nicholas and the Holy Innocents. Specifically, Rigaud’s reference to the singing of virelais on the Feast of St. Nicholas resonates with the existence of a significant corpus of Latin refrain songs venerating the saint from across Europe between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries (see Table 1.6). Significantly, Nicholas is not only the saint most substantially represented in the poetry of nova cantica, conducti, and cantiones, outstripped in popularity only by the Virgin Mary and Christ; he is also honored most often in refrain-form songs.Footnote 42 Although these Latin refrain songs are not virelais, the French forme fixe is similarly characterized by a structural refrain; the songs in Table 1.6 are, however, far from “dissolute” or “scurrilous.” Each poem comprises a doctrinally sound prayer to Nicholas, drawing in most cases on his vita and miracles and directing attention toward the theme of pious song, as in Laudibus Nicholai from the St-Victor Miscellany: “Let us devote ourselves to sweet songs and praises of Nicholas.”Footnote 43

Table 1.6 Refrain songs for St. Nicholas

IncipitSourceProvenanceDate
Incomparabiliter cum iucunditateSt-M A, 46vAquitaine12th c.
Exultemus et letemurLater Cambridge Songbook, 4rEnglandlate 12th c.
Nicholaus inclitusTours 927, 11vnorthern Franceca. 1225
Gaudeat ecclesiaF, 471rParis, Franceca. 1240s–1250s
Nicholae presulumF, 471r
Nicholaus pontifexF, 471r
Exultet hec concioF, 471v
Sancti NicholaiSt-Victor Miscellany, 178vnorthern Francelate 13th c.
Nicolai laudibusSt-Victor Miscellany, 182r
Nicolai sollempnioSt-Victor Miscellany, 186v
Laudibus NicholaiSt-Victor Miscellany, 189r
Intonent hodieMoosburger Graduale, 232vMoosburg, Germanylate 14th c.

While it would be misleading to see these songs for St. Nicholas as pious substitutes for the virelais disdained by Rigaud, the existence of this complex of hagiographical songs speaks to an impulse to reframe festivities that expanded beyond boundaries set by the church.Footnote 44 It is striking to note the resonance of Rigaud’s “clerks, vicars, and chaplains” with the communities and contexts of the sources in Table 1.6. For the most part, the manuscripts in this table reflect clerical milieus, although St-M A is closely linked with the Abbey of St-Martial in Limoges, and the origins of the Later Cambridge Songbook remain elusive.Footnote 45 For Tours 927, F, the St-Victor Miscellany, and the Moosburger Graduale, clerical, pedagogical, or scholastic origins are likely. The St-Victor Miscellany emanates from the environs of a northern French university (see Chapter 5) and the songs of the Moosburger Graduale were compiled and in some cases composed by the dean of the song school in Moosburg, Johannes de Perchausen; while F and Tours 927 betray clerical origins, the former connected to the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the latter showing several signs of clerical compilation and use.Footnote 46

These sources and songs, in other words, transmit repertoires composed by, or accessible to, a wide range of clerical ranks and students. Moreover, although Rigaud’s Regestrum only accounts for the archdiocese of Rouen, the northern French emphasis in the refrain songs for St. Nicholas is notable. Nicholas’s feast day was highly ranked across France by the twelfth century, and pockets of heightened devotion developed in Paris and northern France around his cult, including among clerics and students, as well as vernacular poets and playwrights.Footnote 47 In Paris, for instance, Nicholas’s feast day at both the University of Paris and Notre Dame Cathedral was a day marked for festivity, yet was also frequently an occasion for excess and wrongdoing – like Rigaud, authorities in Paris lamented the way clerics and students celebrated a favored saint’s feast day (Nicholas was a patron saint of clerics and students, as well as the University of Paris).Footnote 48 Across northern France, consequently, Nicholas’s feast day was an occasion for musical, ludic, and ritual excess. The survival of Latin songs, many with refrains, in honor of the saint attests to a desire to magnify the feast day with nonliturgical music at a far remove from the bawdy and scurrilous ditties sung and danced in village streets in Normandy and elsewhere. The refrain is a key pivot between secular excess and devotional exuberance; Rigaud’s virelais for Nicholas have their counterpart, albeit unstated, in the Latin refrain song.

While parallels between the Latin refrain song and Rigaud’s records are difficult to establish, his register offers an important perspective on the musical disciplining of feast days. Texts like Rigaud’s witness how song, accretion, and festivity were linked in the context of the calendar year, highlighting the “noisiest” moments and, consequently, the ones most in need of reform and regulation. Feasts and holidays had a particular soundscape throughout medieval Europe, with quotidian labors ceasing and the devotional labors of the daily Mass and Office increasing by means of tropes and polyphony, along with the bells that pealed according to the rank of the feast and mood of the season.Footnote 49 Song played a role in this soundscape too, at times adjacent to the liturgy (as in tropes or in the context of dramas and plays) and other times at ambiguous moments involving both devotional and secular forms of recreation.

Pious Substitutes in the Moosburger Graduale and Red Book of Ossory

Manuscript sources for the refrain song provide further textual and repertorial insights into how composers, poets, and scribes conceived of the relationship between song and the festive year. The inclusion of Latin song in troped liturgies and the existence of unique paratexts such as prefaces or descriptive rubrics allow for a cautious understanding of Latin song, and especially the refrain song, as reflecting the church’s attempts to control the experience of the festive year within local communities and song cultures. In addition to troped liturgies of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, two main witnesses are fourteenth-century manuscripts in which textual prefaces contextualize collections of songs and poems: the Moosburger Graduale and Red Book of Ossory together frame calendrically ordered song collections as repertoires intended as festive yet pious substitutes for the lewd songs frequently embraced by named communities of choirboys and clerics.

The preface in the fourteenth-century Moosburger Graduale, self-consciously written by the former dean of the song school Johannes de Perchausen, is the longer of the two and rehearses many of the age-old complaints of church authorities around the song and singing:

O gracious mother church! “For holiness befits the house of the Lord; and it is fitting that He whose abode has been established in peace should be worshipped in peace and with due reverence.”Footnote 50 In the council of Lyon, as is found in the Sixth Book of the Decretals concerning the immunities of churches and cemeteries, it forbids songs and public colloquies to be performed in churches. Therefore let not worldly colloquies nor the din and clamor and cackling of worldly songs prevail in our choir on account of the schoolboys’ bishop, with whom there is customarily dancing in many churches by the younger clergy, for the particular praise and adornment of the birth of the Lord. On account of which [colloquies and songs] the priest celebrating the divine services at the altar is quite frequently distracted, the discipline of the choir is disturbed, and the devotion of the people stirred into laughter and lasciviousness … . I have collected into one document and annexed to the present book the following songs, formerly from antiquity and often sung with the schoolboys’ bishop even in major churches, along with a few modern [songs] and also a few of my own that I composed in praise of the Nativity of the Lord and of the Blessed Virgin when I was formerly rector of the schoolboys, for the special reverence of the Savior’s infancy, so that at the time of His Nativity, with these songs by the new little clerks, as if from the mouth of infants and suckling children, praise and hymnic devotion might be displayed both decently and reverently, neglecting the lasciviousness of the common people.Footnote 51

Citing a conciliar decretal, Johannes denounces the singing of “worldly” songs and colloquies in the church, since they disrupt the priest at the altar and promote “laughter and lasciviousness.” He offers as a replacement a collection of songs, all but one with refrains, to be sung by pueri, choirboys, at the time of the Nativity and the ritual of the boy bishop, whose election occurred on the Feast of St. Nicholas.

Unfortunately, Johannes never clarifies whether the songs were to be sung during a church service or at some other moment, although one clue survives in the rubrication of the songs that accompany the boy bishop’s rituals (see Table 1.2). The first rubric (“cum episcopus eligitur”) refers to the election of the boy bishop, while the second and third (“cum itur extra ecclesiam ad choream” followed by “item alia”) pointedly invite the boy bishop, and his choirboy entourage, “to the dance” outside of the church. The installation of the boy bishop then follows (“cum infulatus et vestitus presul intronisatur”), presumably now back in the church.Footnote 52 The remaining rubrics solely refer to the feast days and do not offer further glimpses into the choreography or performance of the songs. Yet Johannes’s framing of these works as a response to “lascivious” and “worldly” songs, along with the clear festal orientation, first around the boy bishop’s feast and then subsequently the major feasts of Christmastide, offers a strong statement on the refrain song as a musical pivot from secular excess to devotional recreation.

The brief preface attributed to the Bishop of Ossory, Richard Ledrede, in the Red Book of Ossory resonates rhetorically with Johannes’s in the Moosburger Graduale. In what is described by Ardis Butterfield as a “belligerent instruction” by a “thin-lipped bishop,” the preface notes that the Bishop made the songs for the vicars, priests, and clerks of the cathedral for important holidays and celebrations so that “their throats and mouths, consecrated to God, may not be polluted by songs which are lewd, secular, and associated with revelry.”Footnote 53 In the broader context of condemnations against song, Ledrede’s introductory remarks seem less belligerent than part of a longer history of crackdowns on musical outpourings of festivity. Although the rubrication that follows is less informative than that in the Moosburger Graduale, the context of the songs within the festive calendar of “great feasts” is readily apparent, and their performance by clergy made explicit by Ledrede. Latin songs for liturgical feasts are once again framed as pious substitutes, although I examine further in Chapter 5 how music as opposed to poetry fits into Ledrede’s conception of “lewd” versus devotional.

The picture emerging from these prefaces is one of church authorities reframing the sonic experience of time. By determining the sounds by which the highest feasts were commemorated outside of or adjacent to the liturgy, authority figures in religious communities refocused attention on the year as defined by the church in devotional song, rather than as expressed through secular music making.

A spirit of reform similarly emerges in the context of elaborately troped liturgies for the Feast of the Circumcision on January 1.Footnote 54 The troped Circumcision liturgy is especially notable for its connection with the clerical Feast of Fools, also known as the Feast of the Staff, a special yet often raucous feast day celebrated by subdeacons during the Libertas Decembrica, a cycle of feast days following Christmas particularly celebrated by different clerical ranks.Footnote 55 Max Harris has most recently argued that the orthodoxy of the often-critiqued “Feast of Fools” was reinscribed within the context of the troped liturgy of the Feast of the Circumcision, sources for which include significant numbers of Latin songs.Footnote 56 Harris’s arguments align with views outlined by Susan Boynton and Margot Fassler concerning clerical festivities around Christmas and the Daniel Play, respectively, identified in each case as resulting from a desire for greater order and reform.Footnote 57 Within the context of troped Circumcision liturgies, Latin song thus plays a role in this process of reform; even the well-known conductus Orientis partibus, often interpreted as bawdy and earthy due to its “braying” vernacular refrain, “Hez hez sire asnes hez,” ultimately participates in affirming the theology of the Feast of the Circumcision.Footnote 58 Beyond the Feast of Fools, the Feast of the Circumcision overlaps calendrically with the New Year – the tensions and reconciliations that occur musically and poetically between the feast and popular holiday are found not only in troped liturgies but throughout Latin song.

To close this chapter, I offer a case study on how the Latin refrain and refrain song – at times transmitted in sources for the troped Circumcision liturgy – navigate between the calendrical and popular celebration of January 1 as the Feast of the Circumcision and the medieval New Year. Significantly, examination of songs for the New Year enables a new perspective on how the Latin song and refrain mediates between competing and complementary temporalities beyond the witness of individual manuscripts. In the examples and manuscripts discussed so far, the contexts have been, for the most part, highly localized and attached to particular communities; considering songs from across time and place better demonstrates the cultural function of the Latin refrain song within discourses around the medieval year and its sounding.

New Songs and Refrains for the New Year

The first of January was one of the most pluralistic and noisiest days in the medieval calendar, celebrated simultaneously as the Feast of the Circumcision, Octave of Nativity, and the New Year, as well as being linked to clerical festivities such as the Feast of Fools or Feast of the Staff, and Feast of the Ass. It was a temporally unruly day, whose identification as the beginning of the New Year was, in fact, contested, with the church making attempts throughout the Middle Ages to shift the celebration of January 1 away from unsanctioned customs and rituals by refocusing attention on the Feast of the Circumcision.Footnote 59 Frequently linked to illicit New Year’s rituals, song provided one way in which a process of festal reform could be enacted within religious communities. Beginning in the twelfth century, the New Year began receiving increased musical and poetic treatment in the context of devotional Latin song as well as in troped liturgies for the Feast of the Circumcision.Footnote 60 These songs did not ignore the popularized identity of January 1 as the New Year, but instead strategically fused nonliturgical commemorations of the New Year with theological themes drawn from the liturgical feast in the church calendar in an effort to reform and control the celebrations of this pluralistic day. Within and across songs, the New Year and its associated novelties instead became “virtual” refrains, opening a window into the associations formed between calendrical customs, theological ideas, and liturgical practices.Footnote 61 Latin song and refrain serve as pivots between temporalities beyond the witness of individual manuscripts, emerging as expressive linchpins in the pluralistic celebration of the New Year across medieval Europe.

The festal and calendrical pluralism of January 1 and its ensuing popular and clerical rituals presented a long-standing problem for the medieval church. Vitriolic language around the New Year includes New Year’s sermons by Augustine in which he laments the abuses occurring on the “Kalends of January.”Footnote 62 Included on his list of abuses are elements familiar from condemnations of other seasonal and calendrical celebrations, such as dancing, singing, masks, and gift giving.Footnote 63 A few centuries later, Isidore of Seville echoed Augustine by noting raucous activity at the New Year, citing people who make “a lot of noise in everything they do, leaping around and clapping their hands in dancing.”Footnote 64 Complaints continued into the eighth century; St. Boniface wrote to Pope Zachary in 741 that “when the Kalends of January begin, people lead ring-dances, shouting after the pagan manner through the streets, singing sacrilegious songs of pagan custom and gorging themselves with festive meals day and night.”Footnote 65

Condemnations proliferated in the twelfth century, many resonating with and borrowing from earlier tirades against New Year’s abuses and paralleling the flourishing of songs for the New Year. Two well-known texts attributed to Parisian Bishops Maurice and Odo of Sully are particularly significant. A vernacular sermon by Maurice of Sully (ca. 1168–1175) is not only one of the first medieval references to the Feast of Circumcision as the New Year, or, as he phrases it the an renues, the renewed year, but also one of the first high medieval condemnations of the pagan practices of New Year’s gift giving and magic.Footnote 66 In 1198, Odo of Sully issued a decree that outlined the reform of the liturgy, promoting the singing of polyphony while forbidding “rimos, personas, luminaria herciarum” (“rithmi, masks, and hearse lights”).Footnote 67 As late as the fifteenth century, irreverent songs were still being performed. The behavior of priests and clerics in particular is described in a 1445 letter from the theology faculty at the University of Paris in which song is referenced as “cantilenas inhonestas” (“wanton songs”) and “verba impudicissima ac scurrilia” (“scurrilous and unchaste verses”).Footnote 68 The complaints of theologians and church authorities are strikingly consistent, with song repeatedly underscored as central to, yet problematic within, New Year’s commemorations.

Not all references to the sonic festivities of the New Year were disciplinary in tone. A fourteenth-century Rituale from the Church of Saint-Martin of Tours records traditions around the festum anni novi along with what appears to be an abbreviated ordo prophetarum and descriptions of song and dance:Footnote 69

After the ninth reading, they lead the prophets from the chapter to the gate of the treasury, singing songs [cantilenas], and then into the choir, where they recite the prophecies to the cantor, and two clericuli singing in the pulpit call to them … . In the afternoon, they should lead dances [choros ducere] in the cloister in surplices until the church is opened and all the lights are kindled.Footnote 70

The description of Saint-Martin of Tours is not dissimilar in spirit to the troped liturgies for the Feast of the Circumcision across France, within which song was regularly interpolated. Referring precisely to these festive liturgies, a 1327 endowment at Notre Dame du Puy prescribes “all-night” celebration of the New Year and the Feast of the Circumcision by means of sacred song, termed lo Bosolari, which is manifested in the troped Circumcision liturgies preserved in Le Puy A and B, two sixteenth-century manuscripts with contents and structure shared with earlier thirteenth-century sources such as Sens 46 and LoA.Footnote 71 While music making for the New Year frequently met with hostility, alternatives to scurrilous songs and dances made their way into the rites of medieval churches through troped liturgies.

The festive complex of January 1 also forms the central poetic discourse of dozens of Latin songs beginning in the twelfth century, some integrated into troped liturgies for the Feast of the Circumcision and others disseminated in songbooks and tropers.Footnote 72 All the songs highlight the plurality of the date and its ritual associations in one way or another. Since January 1 was also the Octave of Christmas, many of the songs were equally appropriate for the Nativity, linking the New Year with Christ’s birth as well as his Circumcision. This is the case for Procedenti puero, whose strophes detail the Virgin Mary’s giving birth to Christ while the refrain repeatedly exhorts joy in the New Year: “Eia, this is the new year! Give the glory of praise; God is made both man and immortal.”Footnote 73 The New Year is invoked in calendrical terms too, as in a conductus sung at Lauds on the Feast of the Circumcision at Beauvais and Sens, Kalendas ianuarias. The conductus begins by calling on Christ to make the first day of the year a sober occasion – probably an implied commentary on the proclivity of clerics to celebrate the Kalends in a less than solemn fashion.Footnote 74

The symbolic staff or baculus associated with the boy bishop and featuring in clerical festivities, variously termed the Feast of Fools or Feast of the Staff, likewise finds ample expression in songs for the New Year, always carefully framed within the theology of the occasion. In the Latin refrain song Annus renascitur, for example, the “renewed year” is the occasion for worship of the staff (“baculus colitur”), couched within a series of familiar seasonal typologies involving the casting off of the old and welcoming of the new.Footnote 75 The theme of novelty serves as a key strategy for linking the popular celebrations of January 1, with the theology of the church year and its feasts, in particular the Feast of the Circumcision and the Octave of the Nativity. Repetitively focusing on newness, New Year’s songs and texts meditate on the theological resonance of calendrical novelty with Christ’s Birth and Circumcision. The newness of the New Song effortlessly functioned as a typology for the temporal confluence of birth of Christ, his Circumcision, and the New Year.

This relationship is made explicit in two sermons by Richard of St-Victor written around the middle of the twelfth century.Footnote 76 Not only does Richard explicate the relationship between the metaphorical New Song and the New Year, but he brings to the fore a plethora of related novelties and renewals in an effort to recontextualize the New Year within a theological framework. In a brief and little-discussed sermon designated “in novo anno,” Richard employs a line from the Psalms on the New Song as his theme: “Sing ye to the Lord a new canticle: because he hath done wonderful things” (“Cantate Domino canticum novum, quia mirabilia fecit”) (Psalm 97:1). Throughout the sermon, Richard elaborates on the significance of the “New Song” with simple, repetitive language, emphasizing the typological replacement of the Old with the New, frequently in terms of song: “Song is life. New song, new life. Old song, old life. New life of justice, old life of sin” (“Canticum est vita. Canticum novum, vita nova. Canticum vetus, vita vetus. Nova vita justitia, vetus vita culpa”).Footnote 77 Even more remarkable is another sermon by Richard, this time for the Feast of the Circumcision. His awareness of the duality of January 1 as the Feast of the Circumcision and the New Year is made abundantly clear in a litanic and rhetorical rumination on novelty:

Let us, dear ones, seek both [goodness and truth], in order that we may have the strength to find Christ through both and to be renewed in him, just as the Apostle urged us, saying: “Be renewed in the spirit of your mind” (Eph. 4:23), that is, in your mind, which is a spirit or a spiritual thing. For it is fitting for us to be renewed, because the old is past, and “behold, all things have been made new” (2 Cor. 5:17, Rev. 21:5). New Mother, New Son, New Joy, New Song, New Boy, New Cradle, New Circumcision, New Name, New Sign, New Worshippers, New Gifts, New Marriage Bed, New Bridegroom, New Bride, New Nuptials, New Miracle, New Bridal Attendants, New Guests, New Citharists, New Progeny, New Chief, New Republic, New Battle, New Victory, New Peace, New Justice, New Sacrifice, New Testament, New Inheritance, New People, New Rite, New Year.Footnote 78

With each new pairing, newness infuses the sermon text, ending with a statement of renewal based on Christ and his Circumcision and the renewal of the world with the arrival of the New Year: “We are renewed in the new man through the new circumcision, in this new year, in this world, so that in it [the New Year] we may win the right to be renewed in heaven.”Footnote 79

Richard’s sermon is made more intriguing by a passage detailing descriptions of secular New Year’s activities familiar from the earlier critiques. While his emphasis on novelty in the sermon has largely escaped notice, his condemnatory remarks in the same sermon have been widely cited in scholarship on New Year’s abuses, in which priests and clerics are singled out, as is the performance of “vain and foolish rhythmic poetry” and even clapping.Footnote 80 Rarely mentioned in scholarship citing this condemnation is its larger textual context in a New Year’s sermon. This passage lies in the midst of a longer address, which, while decrying certain types of excessive behavior, emphasizes themes and vocabulary repeatedly foregrounded in medieval Latin New Year’s songs. Even while condemning foolish, unchaste, or wanton song, Richard nevertheless hints at an appreciation of “New Songs” celebrating the “New Year” – as long as the latter is understood as an allegory for Christ’s Circumcision and the former are far from “vain and foolish.”

Among extant “New Songs” for the New Year, some prominently feature the seasonal refrain “annus novus,” which repeatedly emphasizes the New Year in a rhetorical parallel to Richard’s sermon (see Table 1.7). “Annus novus” repeats both within songs in refrains and as a repeated strophic incipit, as well as among songs, forming a broad discursive and intertextual network of poems distinguished by the temporal marker. Mirroring springtime exordia or Natureingangen, the poetic topos of the “new year” functions as a signal of time, situating each song within a particular calendrical moment.Footnote 81 Within the larger corpus of songs for the New Year, this collection of annus novus songs more acutely refracts, navigates, and resolves tensions inherent in January 1 as a day of temporal and festive plurality. The “annus novus” refrain and exordium in Latin song specifically frame the New Year by acknowledging the plurality of January 1 – and, indeed, its popularized rather than official identity as the New Year – while emphasizing its liturgical identity. The repetition of the “new year” in the Latin song enables, akin to Richard’s sermon, a rhetorical reclaiming of the feast day and its novelty for the church and its calendar.

Table 1.7 New Year’s songs

IncipitRefrainSourceProvenanceCentury
Anni novi circulusn/aMad 289, 143rNorman Sicily12th
Anni novi novitas
  • Gaudeamus et psallamus

  • Novo presuli

  • Ad honorem et decorum

  • Sumpti baculi

Moosburger Graduale, 232rMoosburg, Germany14th
Anni novi prima die
  • Dum, dum, dum circumcidi sustinuit,

  • In quo non fuit dignum quod abscidi*

Hortus Deliciarum, 30vAlsace, France12th
Anni novi rediit novitasn/aCarmina Burana (unnotated), 33v?Germany13th
Anni novi reditusn/aBasochis, Liber epistularum (unnotated), p. 19France12th
Annus novus in gaudio
  • Ad hec sollempnia

  • Concurrunt omnia

  • Voce sonancia

  • Cantoris gracia

  • Et vite spacia

  • Per quem leticia

  • Fit in ecclesia

  • Le Puy A, 1v

  • Le Puy B, 1r

  • St-M A, 36v

  • Le Puy, France

  • Aquitaine

  • 16th

  • 12th

Ecce novus annus est
  • Exultandi tempus dies est [Alleluya dies est in Le Puy A and B]

  • Venit rex,

  • Venit lex,

  • Venit fons gracie

  • Graz 409 (unnotated), 2v

  • Le Puy A, 53r

  • Le Puy B, 30r*

  • Moosburger Graduale, 244r

  • St. Pölten Processional, 7v

  • Austria

  • Le Puy, France

  • Moosburg, Germany

  • Austria

  • 14th

  • 16th

  • 14th

  • 15th

Novus annus dies magnus
  • Quia sit genitor

  • Paradisi Adam

  • Protoplasma suum

  • Redit ad patriam

  • Crucis sub precio

  • Reparando viam

  • Le Puy A, 34v

  • Le Puy B, 20v

  • Mad 289, 147v

  • St-M A, 40v

  • Le Puy, France

  • Norman Sicily

  • Aquitaine

  • 16th

  • 12th

  • 12th

Novus annus hodie [A]
  • Ha ha he

  • Qui vult vere psallere

  • Trino psallat munere

  • Corde ore opere

  • Debet laborare

  • Ut sic deum colere

  • Possit et placare

  • F, 218v

  • Sens 46, 54v

  • Paris, France

  • Sens, France

  • 13th

  • 13th

Novus annus hodie [B]
  • Eya rex nos adiuva,

  • Qui gubernas omnia

Munich 21053 (unnotated), 5vThierhaupten, Germany15th
Circa canit Michael
  • Eȳa eȳa

  • Anni novi

  • Nova novi

  • Gaudia

Tours 927, 13vnorthern France13th
Procedenti puero**
  • Eia, novus annus est

  • Gloria laudis

  • Deus homo factus est

  • Et immortalis

  • Codex Sangallensis, IXv

  • F, 467v

  • SG 383, p. 172

  • Sloane 2593 (unnotated), 15v

  • Tours 927 (unnotated), 19r

  • Switzerland

  • Paris, France

  • ?western Switzerland

  • ?East Anglia, England

  • northern France

  • 15th

  • 13th

  • 13th

  • 15th

  • 13th

* This refrain is variable; see p. 58.

** Versions of Procedenti puero are also related to the widely transmitted Verbum caro factum est, which is sometimes a Benedicamus Domino song-trope; see Damilano, “Fonti musicali,” 87–88 and passim.

While the repetition of “annus novus” within and across the songs functions as an intra- and intertextual “virtual” refrain, all but three songs additionally employ structural refrains (Anni novi novitas, Anni novi prima die, Annus novus in gaudio, Ecce novus annus est, Novus annus dies magnus, and both versions of Novus annus hodie) and in two songs “annus novus” appears within the refrain itself (Circa canit Michael and Procedenti puero). Two songs survive without notation: Anni novi reditus, a rithmus appended to a letter by Gui de Basoches, and Anni novi rediit novitas in the Carmina Burana, although the latter is transmitted alongside notated songs. While not widely disseminated, the songs emanate from a variety of contexts across Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Significantly, the Moosburger Graduale and manuscripts with troped liturgies for the Feast of the Circumcision are among the sources transmitting New Year’s songs, along with songbooks and tropers, including F and Tours 927, for example. Many of the songs in Table 1.7, in other words, are part of either calendrically and liturgically ordered song collections or liturgies for the January 1 feast day. Notably, five songs refer either to their position within a liturgical rite or are included in a troped Feast of the Circumcision: Anni novi circulus, Annus novus in gaudio, Ecce novus annus est, Novus annus dies magnus, and Novus annus hodie.Footnote 82 Songs like Ecce novus annus est in the Moosburger Graduale do not have a specific liturgical position, but rubrication (and the evidence of Johannes de Perchausen’s preface) supports its performance adjacent to the liturgy – the rubric in this case is “Ad novum annum.”Footnote 83

Each song explores the pluralistic identity of the medieval New Year. At the farthest remove from the thematic core of these New Year’s songs is Anni novi rediit novitas in the Carmina Burana. Although beginning with the same topos of renewal (“New year has brought renewing; winter’s gone, short daylight lengthens …”), it becomes clear that the seasonal exordium serves a similar function in Latin as it does in vernacular song – to contextualize a love song.Footnote 84 The remaining songs, by contrast, trade solely in devotional themes, focusing attention on the New Year as an anchor for different forms of calendrical, theological, and liturgical exegesis. In all cases, poets set the scene temporally through “annus novus,” while refocusing attention on the church, its members, and sanctioned festivities.

A significant intervention of the Latin New Year’s song is its explicit linking of the New Year and the Feast of Circumcision. Although frequently associated in sermons such as Richard of St-Victor’s, the earliest poetic suturing of feast and calendar day is in Anni novi prima die. Transmitted in the now-destroyed twelfth-century Hortus Deliciarum, an illuminated encyclopedia compiled by Abbess Herrad of Landsberg for novices at Hohenburg Abbey, Alsace, the neumed Anni novi prima die is preceded by the rubric “de circumcisione Domini” and its developing refrain focuses on the rite of circumcision:Footnote 85

  • 1. Anni novi prima die,

  • Filius virginis Marie

  • Morem gessit natilie.

  • Dum, dum, dum circumcidi sustinuit

  • In quo non fuit dignum quid abscidi.

  • 2. Anni novi die prima

  • Superna moderans et ima,

  • Passus est sub petre lima.

  • Dum, dum, dum circumcidi sustinuit

  • In quo non fuit dignum quid abscidi.

  • 3. Anni novi die nova,

  • Homo, cor, animaque nova,

  • Ad ipsius laudem ova.

  • Qui, qui, qui circumcidi sustinuit

  • In quo non fuit dignum quid abscidi.

  • 4. Anni novi festum cole,

  • Qui manet sub utroque sole

  • Te peccati solvit mole.

  • Qui, qui, qui circumcidi sustinuit

  • In quo non fuit dignum quid abscidi.

  • 5. Anni novi die festo

  • Pater et Spiritus adesto,

  • Et fac ut sis nobis presto.

  • Qui, qui, qui circumcidi sustinuit

  • In quo non fuit dignum quid abscidi.

  • 1. On the first day of the New Year,

  • the Son of the Virgin Mary

  • bore the custom of his birth.

  • When, when, when he endured to be circumcised

  • in whom there was nothing worthy of being cut away.

  • 2. On the first day of the New Year,

  • governing the celestial and terrestrial,

  • He suffered under the sharpened stone.

  • When, when, when he endured to be circumcised

  • in whom there was nothing worthy of being cut away.

  • 3. On the new day of the New Year,

  • person, heart, and new spirit,

  • rejoice in His praise.

  • Who, who, who endured to be circumcised

  • in whom there was nothing worthy of being cut away.

  • 4. Keep the feast of the New Year:

  • He who abides throughout the seasons

  • releases you from the heavy burden of sin.

  • Who, who, who endured to be circumcised

  • in whom there was nothing worthy of being cut away.

  • 5. On the feast day of the New Year,

  • come, Father and [Holy] Spirit,

  • and make yourself available to us.

  • Who, who, who endured to be circumcised

  • in whom there was nothing worthy of being cut away.

The refrain makes the rubric virtually unnecessary, since circumcision is the song’s primary, repeated message; strophe 4 also refers directly to circumcision with the “festum cole” (Feast of the Staff or penis). Moreover, the refrain itself features internal repetition, with thrice repeated words (“dum,” then “qui”) beginning each reiteration, first emphasizing the temporal immediacy of the ritual and then the personhood of Christ. All five strophes, by contrast to the variable refrain incipit, begin with the identical “anni novi” incipit and focus on identifying and expanding upon the “when” and “who” of the refrain. The song layers repetition in semantically meaningful ways – refrain and strophes together emphasize the temporality of the song, the ritual act of Circumcision, and themes of novelty through repetition.

The use of repetition to emphasize the New Year and novelty is a striking feature of both Richard’s Circumcision sermon and Latin New Year’s songs, as Anni novi prima die illustrates. In Anni novi novitas in the Moosburger Graduale, for example, the first strophe functions much like Richard’s sermon with its litany of newness, employing rhetorical figures of repetition, including annominatio and traductio, to extend and amplify the theme of novelty:Footnote 86

Anni novi novitas
Nova lux splendoris
Nova fit solempnitas
Novi promissoris.

The novelty of the New Year,
the new light of splendor,
becomes the new solemnity
of the new promiser.

The refrain of Circa canit Michael similarly plays with the stem “nov-,” its morphemic repetition creating a tongue-twister of a refrain that situates the joys of Christ’s birth in the strophes within the context of the New Year:

Eya, eya
Anni novi
Nova novi
Gaudia.

Eia, eia,
now we know
the new joys
of the new year.

Across New Year’s songs, the opening rhetorical gesture to time is drawn repetitively throughout strophes and refrains, constructing a meta-refrain of novelty that resonates within and between songs.Footnote 87

Indicative of this saturation, the incipital repetition of “annus novus” in Anni novi prima die finds a parallel in Annus novus in gaudio. An example of “successively notated polyphony” from the twelfth-century versus repertoire in St-M A, Annus novus in gaudio similarly includes a refrain and incipital repetition on “annus novus” in each strophe.Footnote 88 In this case, the noun–adjective pair “annus novus” is systematically declined throughout the song, each strophe grammatically distinct yet repetitive, and always beginning with a statement on the New Year.Footnote 89 An example of annominatio, a rhetorical figure whose numerous manifestations include the use of the same word in different inflections, the emphasis on the New Year is unmistakable:Footnote 90

Nominative

1. Annus novus in gaudio,
Agatur in principio,
In cantoris tripudio
Magna sit exultacio.
   Ad hec sollempnia
   Concurrent omnia
   Voce sonancia
   Cantoris gracia
   Et vite spacia,
   Per quem leticia
   Fit in ecclesia.

1. Let the New Year now begin
with rejoicing; let there be great exultation in our cantor’s solemn processional song.
   In these solemnities
   all people sounding with voice
   assemble by the grace
   of the cantor and
   through the times of life,
   through whom there is joy
   in the church.
Genitive

2. Anni novi principium
Vox resonet psallencium,
Et cantorem egregium
Hymnus extollat omnium.
   Ref.

2. May our singers’ voices resonate
at the beginning of the New Year,
and may the hymn of all extol our
most distinguished cantor.
   Ref.
Dative

3. Anno novo fit titulus
Quem laudat omnis populus.
Sint in cantoris vocibus
Laudes quas decet omnibus.
   Ref.

3. Let honor be given to the New Year, which all people praise.
Let fitting praise of the cantor
be in all voices.
   Ref.
Accusative

4. Annum novum novatio
Decet et exultacio,
In quo venit salvatio
De virginis palacio.
   Ref.

4. Renovation and jubilation
befit a New Year,
in which salvation comes
from the palace of the Virgin.
   Ref.
Vocative

5. Anne nove laudabilis
O dies ineffabilis
Et tu cantor mirabilis
Esto per sec[u]la stabilis.
   Ref.

5. O praiseworthy New Year, o ineffable day, and you,
wondrous cantor, may you
remain forever steadfast.
   Ref.
Ablative

6. In anno novo cantica
Recitentur organica
In cantoris presencia
Tota sonet ars musica.
   Ref.

6. Let us sing polyphonic songs
in the midst of the New Year;
let the entire art of music sound
in the presence of our cantor.
   Ref.Footnote 91

The incipital declension of annus novus throughout the song creates a virtual strophic refrain that mirrors the structural refrain between strophes; as with Anni novi prima die, repetition is layered on top of an already repetitive framework. However, Annus novus in gaudio avoids the topic of circumcision – the focus is on the celebration of the New Year under the cantor’s leadership.

The song plays a functional role, however, in the festive liturgy for the Circumcision at Vespers in Le Puy A. Yet rather than aligning the feast and calendar day, as in Anni novi prima die, Annus novus in gaudio centers on the manner in which an unnamed community celebrates the New Year, positioning festive song for that day under the auspices of the authoritative figure of the cantor. This is especially significant in light of the role of the cantor in religious communities – they were responsible for “keeping the time,” calculating the feasts of the liturgical year using the computus, keeping track of the liturgical calendar, its seasons, and its accompanying chant, and in some cases writing new music for feasts.Footnote 92 In Annus novus in gaudio, the cantor is further linked to the keeping of time by virtue of their identity as the celebrative figurehead of the New Year and the leader of its musical festivities. Although the Feast of the Circumcision is poetically sidelined, the song nevertheless takes up the task of moderating the sound world of January 1, calling on the singers to praise the cantor with “tota … ars musica.”Footnote 93 In other words, Annus novus in gaudio implicitly disciplines music for the New Year by positioning the cantor – the authority behind liturgical time and its musical expression – as the object of praise.

Like Annus novus in gaudio, not all New Year’s songs make reference to Christ’s Circumcision as the focal point of January 1. Several songs similarly elide Circumcision in favor of other aspects of January 1 festivities, coordinating the New Year with, for instance, the Feast of the Staff, or Baculus (Anni novi novitas and Anni novi reditus), albeit always with a theological overlay. Only one of the songs in Table 1.7, Novus annus hodie, refers to gift giving, a New Year’s practice inherited from antiquity and widely decried by church authorities, although it becomes a focus in later French New Year’s songs.Footnote 94 Novus annus hodie survives in two forms with closely related texts: in Munich 21053, it is a refrain-form Benedicamus Domino song-trope; in Sens 46 it is a refrain song with a related text but entirely distinct and lengthy refrain, rubricated as “Conductus ad bacularium”; finally, in F, it is a three-voice conductus with only a single strophe and iteration of the refrain of the version in Sens 46.Footnote 95 While the poem in Munich 21053 explicitly refers to the Circumcision (“in hac circumciditur”), the version in F and Sens 46 refers only to the “novus annus” as a “festum annuale,” annual feast, involving song and celebration. Yet, the vocabulary of sobriety and moderation frequently found in the Latin refrain song appears here too in the refrain of Novus annus hodie in F and Sens 46, further linking song with the allegorical gifts of mouth, heart, and good works:

Ha, ha, he!
Qui vult vere psallere
Trino psallat munere;
Corde, ore, opere
Debet laborare,
Ut sic possit vivere
Deum et placare.

Ha, ha, he!
He who wishes truly to
sing should sing praises
with a triple gift: with
mouth, heart, and works
he should labor, that he
might so live and please God.Footnote 96

Novus annus hodie avoids describing the “horizontal” or reciprocal exchange of gifts between people, as expressed in later French chansons; instead, the refrain focuses on offering a “vertical” seasonal tribute, directed heavenward.Footnote 97 In Latin New Year’s songs, the gift of song is thus a spiritual rather than literal offering, folding a frequently censured ritual practice for the New Year into a devotional framework.

As an exordium and/or refrain, annus novus serves as a marker of time that initiates rhetorically rich meditations on novelty while also bringing into alignment varied ways in which the calendar day was celebrated by religious and lay communities throughout Europe. More than an opening gambit or formulaic marker of genre, “annus novus” and its related expressions of novelty saturate the poetic sound world of the New Year’s songs in ways that signal underlying cultural and theological discourses. What the New Year’s song does particularly well is straddle the line between the festivities for 1 January often decried by church authorities and sanctioned forms of music making and entertainment that revolve around the liturgy for Circumcision. The New Year’s song also survives within manuscript sources that frame and reform the musical experience of seasonal and liturgical time, including troped liturgies for the liturgical feast day and song collections of choirboys such as in the Moosburger Graduale. In the hands of poets and composers, song and refrain become expressive pivots in discourses around the New Year and its varied customs, bringing into the musical realm Richard of St-Victor’s meditation on theological novelty and new songs at the turn of the year.

Conclusion: Contexts for the Latin Refrain Song

Although not all refrain songs engage in poetic and performative discourses around time, the majority of songs and sources beginning in the thirteenth century are attuned to, and aligned with, the medieval year. Attending to how the Latin refrain song was framed in relation to time poetically, and within manuscript sources by poets, composers, scribes, and compilers, permits new insights into questions of transmission, performance, and cultural function. Manuscript sources bear witness to the explicit regulation of festive time by means of the refrain song, underlining the intervention of Latin song at the calendrical moments most in need of musical disciplining. The performance of the Latin refrain and refrain song is positioned in medieval sources and in the poetry itself precisely at times of heightened tension in the ritual and musical commemoration of the calendar year. This is most acute in New Year’s refrains and refrain songs, the thematically and textually linked group of works playing with the structural and inter/intratextual identity of the refrain while also poetically navigating the contested identities of January 1.

Situating the creation, transmission, and performance of the Latin refrain and refrain song within the calendar year confirms the embeddedness of the repertoire within clerical, monastic, and pedagogical institutions. The individuals and communities identifiable in sources and songs, including named figures and ranks such as Johannes de Perchausen, Bishop Richard Ledrede, anonymous cantors, and the clergy in Paris at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, are precisely those for whom the pluralistic medieval year had the greatest valency. Religious communities were tasked with not only computing time, but also navigating the year by means of chant and ritual. Rather than solely reflecting the “sacralization of time” enacted by chant and tropes, however, the refrain song enabled religious communities to reconcile calendrical, seasonal, and festive time in music, bolstering the calendar of the church while offering a way to experience and reframe time in song.Footnote 98

Footnotes

1 Gougaud, “La Danse dans les églises,” 19: “Il y avait ainsi comme deux saisons dansantes, celle de Noël pour l’hiver, celle de Pâques au printemps. La première commençait souvent dès la Saint-Nicolas pour ne se clore qu’à l’Épiphanie, et la seconde se prolongeait jusqu’à la Saint-Jean-Baptiste, fête à observances superstitieuses par excellence. Or ces deux saisons, basées sur le calendrier ecclésiastique, correspondaient précisément à deux périodes de réjouissances païennes, la première ayant pour point culminant les calendes de janvier, la seconde les calendes de mai.”

2 Ecclesiastes 3:1–4 provides biblical grounding for Gougaud’s observation that “all things have their season,” including dance: “omnia tempus habent.”

3 F, fol. 468r: “Veris principium … dat nobis gaudium | cantemus eia.”

4 For the standard overview of nature exordia and the locus amoenus in Latin poetry, see Curtius, European Literature, 183–202. See also Diehl, The Medieval European Religious Lyric, 152–156 on references to time and seasons in religious poetry. The ubiquity of opening gestures, or exordia, in medieval song to seasons and calendar feasts or days has only recently been examined as more than a literary motif or genre characteristic; see Rothenberg, “Marian Symbolism of Spring” and Flower of Paradise; Anderson, “Fire, Foliage and Fury”; Plumley, “French Lyrics”; and Saltzstein, “Songs of Nature.”

5 See, for example, Gröninger’s statement that the conductus should be understood as a repertoire created for a “living circle of clergy” (“Lebenskreis des Klerus”) principally for feasts of the liturgical year. Repertoire, 13. See also Spanke, “Tanzmusik,” 110, and Haines, Medieval Song, 68–72.

6 Medieval dating practices attest to the deeply plural nature of the early calendar; see, for instance, the example cited in Mondschein and Casey, “Time and Timekeeping,” 1665.

7 On the typology of poetry in the conductus specifically and its devotional orientation, see Everist, Discovering Medieval Song, 62–74. Versus, and nova cantica more broadly, are similarly devotional in scope, with an emphasis on Christmas; for observations on the topical distribution of songs in versaria, see Grier, “Some Codicological Observations.” On Marian refrain songs, see Caldwell, “Litanic Songs.”

8 The use of visuals rather than numbers acknowledges the difficulty of assigning exact numbers to the repertoire. This graph reflects the songs in the Appendix while excluding Marian songs unconnected with Christ’s Nativity or Resurrection, and secular or moralizing poems, which comprise approximately 11 percent of the total number of Latin refrain songs; the majority of these are transmitted in the Carmina Burana.

9 On hagiographical conducti, see Everist, Discovering Medieval Song, 65. Aside from St. Nicholas, most saints are represented by only one or a small handful of songs, tending to reflect the motivations of local cults. On hagiographical versus, see Grier, “Some Codicological Observations,” 53–56.

10 The rondelli in OBod 937 are edited in Deeming, Songs, 141–143. For inventories of the St. Pölten Processional and Bobbio, see Huglo, Les Manuscrits, 2:30–31 and Damilano, “Laudi latine,” respectively.

11 Caldwell, “Singing, Dancing, and Rejoicing,” 18–19; and Haines, Medieval Song, 68–72. The organization in the eleventh fascicle echoes that of both organum and motet fascicles earlier in F, which tend to follow a liturgical order; see Bradley, “Ordering.”

12 Of these sixty songs, In rerum principio, In hoc statu gratie, Leto leta concio, O quanto consilio, and O summi regis mater inclita are not refrain forms; Iam lucis orto sidere is a hymn troped with a refrain (see Caldwell, “Troping Time”).

13 On the compilation of refrain songs in Tours 927 and their internal logic, see Caldwell, “Pax Gallie.”

14 This becomes the norm for later cantionales, or song collections; see Strohm, “Sacred Song.”

15 For internal divisions of the song repertoire in the Moosburger Graduale, see Brewer, “Songs,” 36–37. On the role of the song school dean Johannes de Perchausen in the creation and compilation of the cantionale, see Footnote ibid. and discussion later in this chapter.

16 On the boy bishop, see Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 1:336–371; Shahar, “Boy Bishop’s Feast”; Davidson, Festivals and Plays, 5–12; Dahhaoui, “Enfant–évêque,” “Voyages,” and “Le Pape de Saint-Étienne”; Milway, “Boy Bishops”; and Harris, Sacred Folly, passim.

17 The ordering of the Benedicamus Domino song-tropes that follow on fol. 246r–250v repeats the liturgical cycle, with Easter figuring more prominently. With respect to the integration of feasts of the Temporale and Sanctorale in the ordering, this is the norm in early chant books for the saints’ days between Christmas and Epiphany; see Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts, 8–9.

18 Red Book of Ossory, fol. 70r. See Chapter 5 for the complete text and translation of the preface.

19 On the poems and their topical distribution, see Colledge, Latin Poems, xli; Greene, Lyrics, v–vi; and Stemmler, Latin Hymns, xxii.

20 Strohm, “Late-Medieval Sacred Songs.” On later Christmas songs and motets in particular, many with ties to earlier repertoires, see Schmidt-Beste, “Psallite noe!”

21 These latter two rubrics read, respectively, “de nativitate domini” in the Moosburger Graduale and “de sancta maria” in Stuttg.

22 Haines has most recently noted the “energetic, sensuous joy of the ring dance” of the songs in Fascicle XI of F; see Haines, Medieval Song, 70–71; see also Chapter 3.

23 F, fol. 463r.

24 F, fol. 464v, “In ligno vita moritur … Salutis pandit ostia | Passa pro nobis hostia.”

25 See “sobrius” in Glossarium.

26 The first three have concordances, while the final two (Exultemus sobrie and Psallite glorie) are unique to F; see the Appendix.

27 For a comparison of the two versions, see Caldwell, “Pax Gallie,” 116–117. Melismatic rondelli in the Engelberg Codex are discussed in Chapter 5.

28 Songs edited and translated in Anderson, Notre-Dame and Related Conductus, 8:xxviii–xxx.

29 Compared to the continual repetition of “flos” and its various forms in these songs, the “flower” only appears a handful of times elsewhere in Fascicle XI of F.

30 See, for example, Haines, Medieval Song, 69–70.

31 On the symbolism of the dragon, or the caput draconis theology, see Robertson, “The Savior, the Woman, and the Head of the Dragon.”

32 Quotations from, respectively, Veris principium, Exultemus sobrie, Psallite regi glorie, and Novum ver oritur. See also the similar themes in vernacular song discussed most recently in Saltzstein, “Songs of Nature.”

33 On birdsong in the Middle Ages, see Leach, Sung Birds, and for the connection with the springtime topos, Saltzstein, “Songs of Nature.”

34 A well-known example of the avian symbolism of springtime and the Resurrection is the contrafact pair in Harley 978, fol. 11v, Sumer is icumen in and Perspice christicola. See the recent discussion of this song, and Harley 978, in Deeming, “English Monastic Miscellany”; see also Colton, Angel Song, 13–38.

35 On festive years and calendars, see Hutton, Rise and Fall, 5–48 and Stations of the Sun; Delale and Delle Luche, “Le temps,” 11–23; Davidson, Festivals and Plays, 3–47; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 11–52; Humphrey, Politics of Carnival, passim; Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 62–88; Phythian-Adams, “Ceremony and the Citizen”; Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, passim; and Davis, Society and Culture, 97–123. The word “festivity” has no medieval equivalent, although its origins in the noun “feast” predate the Middle Ages. See also Footnote n. 39 below.

36 See, for instance, the condemnations cited in Dronke, The Medieval Lyric, 15–16; Page, Owl and the Nightingale, 110–133; and Haines, Medieval Song, 55–67 and 162–171.

37 Haines, Medieval Song, 60.

38 Filotas, Pagan Survivals, 153–192.

39 Festa ferianda required cessation of all activities, including manual labor and study, and they included major feast days like Christmas and Easter, and a flexible list of other feasts depending on place. While festa ferianda had a greater impact on the laity, since the mandatory feast days required laity to attend church (thus enforcing the regular experience of “sacred” time), labor was also lessened for clergy and others affiliated with churches and schools, including universities. See Rodgers, Discussion of Holidays; Cheney, “Rules”; Harvey, “Work and Festa Ferianda”; and Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, 133–136.

40 Edited and translated in Bonnin, Regestrum; O’Sullivan, Register. More generally, see Davis, Holy Bureaucrat.

41 Latin texts in Bonnin, Regestrum, 44, 166, 197, 261, 384, 431, 466, 471, and 517. Translations adapted from O’Sullivan, Register, 50, 182, 212, 293, 436, 490, 530–531, 536, 554, and 591.

42 See Footnote n. 9 above.

43 “Laudibus Nicholai dulcibus vacemus cum cantibus.”

44 Caldwell, “Singing, Dancing, and Rejoicing,” 451–477. Aubry likewise sees a parallel between Rigaud’s mention of virelais and the Nicholas songs in F, suggesting these could have been the songs Rigaud witnessed, which is unlikely; La Musique et les musiciens d’église, 45. See also Page, Voices and Instruments, 90.

45 On the origins of St-M A, see Grier, “Some Codicological Observations,” which builds on Fuller, “Aquitanian Polyphony.” On the Later Cambridge Song Book, which was used, if not also copied, in England, see Stevens, ed., Later Cambridge Songs, 35–39. Stevens (p. 32) describes many of the songs in the manuscript as “linked together by what may be called, in broad terms, purposes of festivity, social celebration, and entertainment,” with the church and “churchmen” the creators and intended audience, a description that fits with the framework offered in this chapter.

46 On the clerical context of Tours 927, see Chaguinian, ed., The Jeu d’Adam.

47 On St. Nicholas in Arras, see Symes, A Common Stage, 32–68. On the Norman cult of St. Nicholas, see Jones, “Norman Cult,” and Gazeau and Le Maho, “Les Origines.”

48 Caldwell, “Singing, Dancing, and Rejoicing,” 454–459.

49 See, for example, Symes, A Common Stage, 141.

50 This is a quote from a conciliar decretal, edited and translated in Tanner, ed., Decrees, 1:328–329, cited in Brewer, “Songs,” 34, Footnote n. 12.

51 “Alma mater ecclesia. ‘Nam decet domum domini sanctitudo, et decet ut cuius in pace factus est locus, eius cultus sit cum debita veneracione pacificus.’ In concilio Lugudunensi ut habetur Sexto libro decretalium, de emunitatibus ecclesiarum et cimiteriorum, prohibuit in ecclesiis fieri canciones et publica parlamenta. Ne igitur propter scolarium Episcopum cum quo in multis ecclesiis, a iuniori clero, ad specialem laudem et decorem natalis domini solet tripudiari, secularia parlamenta, nec non strepitus, clamorque, et cachitus mundanarum cancionum in nostro choro invalescant. Ex quibus sacerdos in altari divina celebrans, frequentius abstrahitur, disciplina choralis confunditur, necnon popularis devotio in risum et lasciviam provocateur … Infra scriptas canciones, olim ab antiquiis eciam in maioribus ecclesiis cum scolarium Episcopo decantatas, paucis modernis, eciam aliquibus propriis, quas olim, cum Rector fuissem Scolarium, pro laude nativitatis domini, et beate virginis composui adiunctis, cepi in unum scriptum colligere, et presenti libro annectere, pro speciali reverencia infancie salvatoris, ut sibi tempore sue nativitatis, hiis cancionibus a novellis clericulis, quasi ex ore infancium et lactencium laus et ympnizans devocio, postposita vulgarium lascivia, possit tam decenter quam reverenter exhiberi.” Moosburger Graduale, fol. 230v. Text and translation, the former emended from the manuscript and the latter by Jennifer Ottman, from Brewer, “Songs,” 33–35.

52 Moosburger Graduale, fol. 231r–232r.

53 Butterfield, “Poems without Form?,” 182–183. See the Introduction and full citation in Chapter 5: “ne guttura eorum et ora Deo santificata polluantur cantilenis teatralibus, turpibus et secularibus.”

54 For example, a quatrain in Sens 46 on the front flyleaf names the Feast of Fools while reiterating a focus on the Circumcision: “The Feast of Fools, by ancient custom celebrated every year in the noble city of Sens, delights the cantor: but all honor’s due to Christ the circumcised, now and forever kind.” (“Festum stultorum de consuetudine morum | Omnibus urbs Senonis festivat nobilis annis, | Quo gaudet precentor; sed tamen omnis honor | Sit Christo circumciso nunc semper et almo.”)

55 On the Feast of Fools, see Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 1:274–335; Prévot, “Festum baculi”; Gilhus, “Carnival”; Fassler, “Feast of Fools”; Harris, “Rough and Holy” and Sacred Folly. On the efforts of theologians to Christianize so-called pagan festivities, notably dance, around the Libertas Decembrica, see Mews, “Liturgists and Dance.”

56 Harris, Sacred Folly, 98–112. See also Ahn, “Exegetical Function.”

57 Boynton, “Work and Play” and Fassler, “Feast of Fools.”

58 Ahn, “Beastly yet Lofty Burdens.”

59 On the dating of the New Year, see the overviews in Blackburn and Holford-Strevens, Oxford Companion to the Year, 784–786, and Ware, “Medieval Chronology,” 259–260. On the contested commemoration of January 1, see, for instance, the discussion in Filotas, Pagan Survivals, 155–172.

60 The New Year’s song has a long history, with songs and verses pivotal to the celebration of January 1 reaching back to antiquity and the rituals around the saturnalia, Roman Kalends, and the cultic “birthday of the invincible sun” on December 25 (Dies Natalis solis invicti). Wright and Lones, British Calendar Customs, 2:18–21. On Kalends, see Harris, “Claiming Pagan Origins” and Sacred Folly, 11–24. On the sol invictus and its cult, see Halsberghe, Cult, especially 174–175.

61 See the Introduction and Haug, “Ritual and Repetition.”

62 The Patrologia Latina includes four sermons for the Kalends of January – two uncertain and two attributed to Augustine. On the reinterpretation of Kalends and Saturnalia in later medieval practices, see Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, vol. 1, especially 235–45 and passim, and Mews, “Liturgists and Dance.” See, however, the rejection of theories that related medieval feasts, especially those falling in December and at the New Year, to Roman feasts in Harris, “Claiming Pagan Origins.”

63 PL 38, col. 1024, and Augustine, Sermons, 55.

64 Seville, Isidore of Seville: De ecclesiasticis officiis, 63. Latin edited in CCSL, vol. 113, bk. 1, ch. 41.

65 “[Q]uando kalendae Januarii intrant, paganorum consuetudine choros ducere per plateas et acclamationes, ritu gentilium et cantationes sacrilegas celebrare, et mensas illa die vel nocte dapibus onerare.” Cited and translated in Haines, Medieval Song, 59 and Footnote n. 43.

66 Harris, Sacred Folly, 23. See also Buettner, “Past Presents,” 621, Footnote nn. 25–26. Maurice’s sermons are edited in Robson, Maurice of Sully.

67 Odo’s decree edited in Guérard, ed., Cartulaire de l’église Notre-Dame de Paris, 1:72–75, passage cited here on 74. I take rimos here to most likely refer to rhythmic song, or rithmi, as in Fassler, “Feast of Fools,” 78.

68 Cited widely; edited in Denifle, ed., Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, 4:652–656; translated in Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 1:94.

69 On the celebration of the Feast of the Circumcision in Tours, see Maurey, Medieval Music, 56–58 and 61–65.

70 “Post nonam lectionem ducunt prophetas de capitulo ad portam Thesaurarii cantilenas cantando, et post in chorum, ubi dicunt cantori prophetias, et duo clericuli in pulpito cantando eos appellant … . Post prandium debent choros ducere in claustro in supelliciis donec Ecclesia aperiatur, et totum luminare accendatur.” Edited Martène, Tractatus, 106–107. On the boy bishop in Tours, see Farmer, Communities, 253–255 and 93–94, and Maurey, Medieval Music, 62, 121–122, and 179–180.

71 Arlt, “Office,” 325.

72 Among the conductus repertoire, Everist counts thirty-four works on the New Year and the Feast of the Circumcision; expanding both earlier and later to versus and cantilenae increases the number significantly. Everist, Discovering Medieval Song, 63, and Caldwell, “Singing, Dancing, and Rejoicing,” 631–708.

73 The refrain follows F, fol. 467v: “Eia, novus annus est! | gloria laudis, | deus homo factus est, | et immortalis.” In Tours 927 the reference to the New Year is not included; in SG 383 and the Codex Sangallensis, the poem explicitly includes reference to the Circumcision as well as the New Year.

74 “May you make solemn the Kalends of January, O Christ, and may you call us to your nuptials, king.” “Kalendas ianuarias | solemnes Christe facias | et nos ad tuas nuptias | vocatus rex suscipias.” See Ahn, “Exegetical Function,” 240–268. Transmitted in Sens 46, pp. 56–57 and LoA, fol. 40v (text only).

75 “The year is renewed | the old is banished, | Adam [is] newly born” (“Annus renascitur | vetus depellitur | Adam novo nato”). F, fol. 468r.

76 Richard of St-Victor’s sermons are edited in PL 177, where they are attributed to Hugh of St-Victor; on Richard’s authorship, see Longère, La Prédication médiévale, 66–67.

77 PL 177, col. 926B.

78 “Nos, charissimi, utramque quaeramus, ut per utramque Christum invenire, et in ipso renovari valeamus, quemadmodum nos hortatur Apostolus dicens: renovamini in spiritu mentis vestrae (Ephes. IV), Footnote id est, mente vestra, quae spiritus est, vel quae res spiritualis est. Decet enim nos renovari, quia vetera transierunt, et ecce nova facta sunt omnia (II Cor. V; Apoc. XXI). nova mater, novus filius, novum gaudium, novum canticum, novus puer, nova cunabula, nova circumcisio, novum nomen, novum signum, novi adoratores, nova munera, novus thalamus, novus sponsus, nova sponsa, novae nuptiae, novum miraculum, novi paranymphi, novi convivae, novi citharoedi, nova progenies, novus princeps, nova respublica, nova pugna, nova victoria, nova pax, justitia nova, novum sacrificium, novum testamentum, nova haereditas, novus populus, novus ritus, novus annus.” PL 177, col. 1035A–B.

79 “Renovemur in novo homine per novam circumcisionem, in hoc novo anno in hoc mundo, ut in ipso renovari mereamur in coelo.” PL 177, col. 1039B–C.

80 PL 177, col. 1036C–D, and Fassler, “Feast of Fools,” 73.

81 Latin New Year’s songs represent an unstudied manifestation of the temporal or seasonal topos, a hybrid of the locus amoenus or perhaps locus temporis, that foreshadows a later medieval phenomenon of French New Year’s songs. Incipital phrases in later French song such as “ce jour de l’an” function similarly to “annus novus,” although the cultural function of vernacular songs diverges from the earlier Latin repertoire, participating more often within economic and social rituals of gift giving. See Plumley, “French Lyrics” and Ragnard, “Les chansons.”

82 Anni novi circulus, for example, includes in its final strophe a lectionary formula that asks congregants to pay attention.

83 At the same time, Anni novi novitas in the Moosburger Graduale plays rhetorically with the New Year, but is rubricated for use within the rites of the boy bishop, illustrating the high degree of poetic ambiguity in Latin song and the theological interpenetration of themes throughout the Advent and Christmas seasons.

84 Traill, ed., Carmina Burana, 1:326–329 and 542.

85 Edited in Green, ed., Herrad of Hohenbourg, 2:144. On the manuscript and its reconstruction, see Engelhardt, Herrad von Landsperg; Green, ed., Herrad of Hohenbourg; and Griffiths, Garden of Delights. On the music in the Hortus Deliciarum, see Kenneth Levy’s contribution titled “The Musical Notation” (ch. 7) in Green, Herrad of Hohenbourg, 2:87–88.

86 See Lawler, ed., Parisiana Poetria, 112–129 on figures of repetition, including annominatio and traductio.

87 Although references to newness and novelty resonate especially well in songs for the New Year, similar expressions can be found being used in a self-referential way in nova cantica; see Llewellyn, “Nova Cantica,” 148.

88 Only the refrain is notated polyphonically; see Chapter 3.

89 For similar examples of grammatically ordered Latin songs, see Caldwell, “Singing Cato.”

90 In his Parisiana poetria, Garland defines one type of annominatio as “mutatione unius dictionis” (“declining a single word”). Lawler, Parisiana Poetria, 120–121.

91 Edited (with emendations here according to the manuscript) in Chevalier, Prosolarium, 6. St-M A does not include the sixth strophe and there are additional variants in earlier strophes; for a comparison, see Caldwell, “Singing Cato.”

92 See Bugyis, Kraebel, and Fassler, eds., Medieval Cantors, especially the overview of a cantor’s responsibilities on pp. 2–3.

93 The final strophe, moreover, specifies “cantica … organica,” which may reflect the polyphonic setting of the refrain.

94 As Plumley argues in “French Lyrics.” For a New Year’s song that frames song as a gift, see Gui de Basoches’s Adest dies optata socii, edited in Basochis, Liber epistularum, 88.

95 For the most recent discussion of this song, see Boudeau, “L’Office de la Circoncision de Sens,” 1:427–428 and 2:581–585. Novus annus hodie is also preserved in a different version in Trento, Archivio Capitolare, MS 93, fol. 374r (three voices), and Trento, Castello del Buonconsiglio, Monumenti e collezioni provinciali, MS 1376, fols. 59r and 142v–143r (for four and three voices, respectively).

96 Edited in full in Anderson, ed., Notre-Dame and Related Conductus, 2:viii, with the version in Munich 21053 on ix.

97 Davis, Gift, 13.

98 Le Goff, In Search of Sacred Time, 17.

Figure 0

Figure 1.1 Calendrical and seasonal distribution of refrain songs

Figure 1

Table 1.1 The contents and thematic organization of F, fol. 463r–476v (Fascicle XI) (for folio numbers see the Appendix)

Figure 2

Table 1.2 Liturgical organization of the cantionale in the Moosburger Graduale, fol. 231r–246r (for folio numbers see the Appendix)

Figure 3

Table 1.3 “Sober” songs in Fascicle XI of F

Figure 4

Example 1.1 F, fol. 465v–466r, Vocis tripudio, first strophe and refrain

Figure 5

Table 1.4 Easter/springtime rondelli in F

Figure 6

Table 1.5 References to music, dance, and games on feast days in Rigaud’s Regestrum, ca. 1249–1265

Figure 7

Table 1.6 Refrain songs for St. Nicholas

Figure 8

Table 1.7 New Year’s songs

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