The provision of texts and melodies for the church rituals of medieval Rome must have been completed, at the latest, before the eighth century, when the considerable repertory that is generally called Roman chant was transmitted to Francia and eventually influenced the formation of Gregorian chant. It was about four centuries later, however, that the first large manuscript with musical notation, the gradual Cologny-Geneva, Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, 74 (henceforth Bod74) was copied in 1071 by the hand of Johannes Presbyter.

Because of an emphasis on the quest for the origins of Western chant and a perceived stylistic superiority of Gregorian over Roman chant, scholars have tended to examine chant books copied in Rome between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, more with the aim of reconstructing the status of the melodies before the transmission to Francia than for their intrinsic value as documents of their own times. Consequently, late compositions or signs of musical exchanges with other regions have either been overlooked or considered less worthy of examination.

The emphasis on the pre-eleventh century history of Roman chant has parallels in architectural studies, in which, as Sible de Blaauw remarks, the attention devoted to the early Christian and Carolingian history of Rome’s five patriarchal basilicas (St Peter’s, S. Giovanni in Laterano, S. Paolo fuori le Mura, S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura, and S. Maria Maggiore), for example, overshadowed the status and renovations that occurred to the same churches between the mid-eleventh and the end of the thirteenth centuries.