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.

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 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.