Latin Song in the Medieval West

Latin Song in the Medieval West reconsiders the porous boundaries and shifting identities of medieval Latin song through new methodologies and interdisciplinary inquiry. Moving beyond inherited binaries—text and music, sacred and secular, Latin and vernacular—the volume explores what it meant to sing in Latin across diverse social, cultural, and performative contexts. Rather than treating Latin song as coterminous with the liturgy, the essays foreground its multivalence: its mobility across institutions and regions, its adaptability across genres, and its capacity to accrue meaning over time.

Bringing together musicology, literary studies, history, theology, and performance studies, the contributors examine Latin song in relation to ritual practice, intertextuality, gender, memory, transmission, rhetoric, genre, and voice. Several essays also interrogate “song” itself as a conceptual and theoretical category, asking how medieval thinkers and singers understood its powers and possibilities.

Taken together, the volume presents Latin song as a dynamic and culturally embedded practice central to medieval intellectual, devotional, and social life. By situating Latin song within broader networks of performance and meaning, Latin Song in the Medieval West offers a rethinking of how Latin song functioned—and why it mattered—in the European Middle Ages.

An Open Access version of the following chapter will be available on publication on the Liverpool University Press website: Alessandra Ignesti, “Ritual Archaeology of a Song-Form Trope for Christmas: Reworkings of Cum gaudio concurrite”.