This article examines a group of seventy-two fragments from a twelfth-century pontifical whose attribution is under discussion. They contain part of the dedication of a church, the ordo synodalis, and the ordines for the sick, marriage and baptism, and they display neumatic notation on red lines. The fragments are kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France: five of them are now in NAL 1989, while the remaining sixty-seven are kept in a temporary repository and have not been inventoried yet. As regards their origin, the fragments have been assigned either to northern France or to England. The article considers textual concordances, as well as palaeographical and musical features, in order to reconstruct their context of production, and leaves room for methodological observations.

Using evidence of the quality of vellum, fascicle structure, scribal hands and illustrations, this article argues that the first fascicle of the music portion of Oxford, Balliol College, 173A (fols. 74–81) is a self-standing booklet, perhaps created to teach a scribe the basics of music theory and how to arrange text while leaving space for illustrations or examples. A new fascicle structure of the gathering is proposed that accounts for a previously unrecognised missing folio. An analysis of the contents of the gathering demonstrates that the theory booklet is a compilatio, with portions of the Musica disciplina (or it sources) acting as a frame to start and end the booklet, with other works (Pseudo-Jerome, Isidore of Seville and Cassiodorus) inserted in between. The final folios are completed with a number of small tractatuli, including the brief dialogue Diapason quid est? The contents of both the booklet and the entire music codex are closely paralleled in one of the smaller manuscripts collected into Oxford, St John's College 188 and also Cambridge, Trinity College R.15.22. While it will be ever easier to study digital images of manuscripts and to create critical editions of well-defined texts, this article argues for the continuing importance of codicological study of manuscripts in situ to coordinate the placements of texts within the structure of codices.

This article presents new discoveries from a manuscript from the Collegiate Church of St Chad, Shrewsbury, with implications for the circulation of ecclesiastical music, particularly sequences, in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. It begins with a brief examination of the twelfth-century musical contents of the manuscript, which are shown to hold close scribal affinities: in particular, a ‘winged’ neume shape is contextualised by contemporaneous musical inscriptions found in a manuscript probably written at Haughmond Abbey. The remainder of the article considers music, mostly sequences, inscribed in a palimpsest gathering at the back of the St Chad's manuscript in the thirteenth century. Two of these are compared for the first time with their concordances, one concordance newly discovered. Examination of the preservation and record of these musical entries (with discussion of contrafacture and marginalia) sheds light on creative practices of citation and intertextuality, performance traditions, and processes of reading and recording music at St Chad's, ultimately illuminating the role the church played within a creative network across England and northern Europe.

A new daily ritual, commonly called the Salve Mass or Lady Mass, rapidly grew throughout the British Isles in the High Middle Ages inspiring new festive chants. John Harper's introduction to Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary establishes the sources of the Lady Mass in its fully developed form in the late Use of Salisbury and earlier related sources. Yet the Marian Mass collections in insular graduals, missals and non-liturgical sources identified in this article exhibit significant local adaptations not assigned in Salisbury Ordinals. I argue that extant Marian Kyries, alleluias and offertories contained in thirteenth-century insular liturgical sources of the Mass of the Virgin Mary are evidence of the daily Lady Mass. A study of chant variants and sources demonstrates the insular circulation of some of these chants outside of sources replicating the Lady Mass at Salisbury. The insular repertory of Marian Mass music, examined here for the first time with concordances in fragmentary and non-liturgical collections, reveals a lively exchange of repertory and compositional techniques between insular monastic and secular churches. This regionally developed, decentralised ritual had an important impact on music composition and transmission in the British Isles in the thirteenth century.

The motets in the fourteenth-century liturgical manuscript Oxford, Bodleian, lat. liturg. e. 42 have, despite some sidelong glances, not been the subject of any concentrated study since F. Alberto Gallo introduced them in 1970. This article proposes a date for the copying of these motets in the first few decades of the fourteenth century and demonstrates that they have much to add to ongoing debates about stylistic and notational change between the Ars Antiqua and Ars Nova styles. First, they underline the importance of considering polyphony within the context of the whole book that transmits it: e. 42's motets work together with its monophonic chant to emphasise a set of feasts which were particularly important for the compilers of this manuscript within their institutional context. Second, these motets act as an important reminder that narratives of fourteenth-century stylistic change must be heterogeneous: the wide-ranging mix of musical styles found in the motets of e. 42 add to an emerging picture of early fourteenth-century Ars Antiqua collections in which such stylistic eclecticism is a common feature. Third, e. 42's notation and its connections to that of other manuscripts enrich and complicate narratives of notational change in this period. Parallels for e. 42's ligature use can be found in a temporally and geographically diverse set of manuscripts. Its notation of semibreves, however, resembles that of a smaller group of manuscripts from the early fourteenth century and provides an important witness for the changes to semibreve rhythm at that time.

The quilisma is a sign found in the earliest surviving notations of Gregorian chant. Since the ‘chant restoration’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the sign is included once again in all chant books, and poses an inevitable question of interpretation to those studying and performing chant. However, since medieval times, there has been considerable debate whether the sign denotes a particular method of voice production, a particular rhythmic value and/or an element in a melody's modal orientation. Chant manuscripts of the northern Low Countries (the northern half of the modern-day Netherlands), although not well known for their melodic content, point to highly interesting developments in response to a continually changing musical aesthetic. Likewise, these manuscripts offer new insights into the quality of the quilisma: the sign was widely used in the region up to the sixteenth-century Dutch Revolt, and for much longer than in the better-known square notation. Through analytical and comparative study, the sign's occurrence, position, development, relation to other signs and functions are clarified and presented in this article along with insights into its unique notational development.