Given the existing, high-quality scholarship on medieval liturgies for end of life pre-served in Western European manuscripts, it is not immediately obvious what can be gained from further work with the material. Damien Sicard has examined rituals for the dying in 139 manuscript sources, documenting the transmission patterns of individual prayers and chants and assessing the likelihood of their Roman origins. Frederick Paxton’s pivotal publication, Christianizing Death, traces the development of deathbed rites from late Antiquity through the Carolingian era, when their overall structures became largely fixed. James Donohue considered several medieval rites as forerunners of the now-cur-rent version published by the Roman Catholic Church in the early 1980s. Most recently, Paxton has produced an in-depth discussion and edition of the medieval rites from Cluny Abbey, in France.

Robust as this scholarship is, particularly in terms of source documentation, editorial skill and theological analysis, it neglects one of the deathbed rituals’ most integral and formative elements: music. In the Middle Ages, rituals for the dying were largely sung; indeed, Paxton has described them as ‘multi-media event[s] of highly choreographed movements, sounds and smells’. Yet scholarship thus far has been limited to texts of the rituals.

Incorporating music into this scholarly discourse integrates a fundamental aspect of the rituals and allows for a more comprehensive understanding. It also provides a different and insightful vantage point. Rather than accessing the rituals through their words – their intellectual content – a focus on the music invites a closer consideration of the rituals’ performative aspects and, by extension, of their participants. The following discussion examines both the music and the functions of music in one of the most influential deathbed liturgies of Western Europe, the ritual of the early Franciscan order, as it is preserved in the thirteenth-century Italian manuscript Chicago, Newberry Library, Vault Manuscript 24.

This manuscript is particularly appropriate for a study of this type because among sources that contain medieval rituals for the dying – even among sources of the early Franciscan ritual – Newberry 24 offers some of the most detailed representations of music. In certain positions, the scribal work of Newberry 24 includes pitch-specific music notation, reflecting the melodic pitch content of some of the ritual’s chants and making the manuscript an especially informative witness to the ritual’s musical aspects.