While the great majority of Franco-Roman plainsong features lyrics adapted from the Bible, a long recognised but little studied minority sets excerpts from patristic sermons and commentaries. The antiphons and responsories for the night office on the feast of St Stephen are a case study of such literary borrowing. The lyrics of these chants feature a wide range of verbal debts and reminiscences from sermons written or inspired by Augustine, the majority of which were transmitted in the seventh-century Roman homiliary and thus recited as lessons at matins. Together, the plainsong and lessons develop a distinctively Augustinian portrait of Stephen as a kind, compassionate advocate for his persecutors rather than as the hard-nosed rhetorician he is depicted to be in the Bible. They thus illuminate the working methods and theological priorities of Roman lyricists as they crafted verbal texts for sung delivery in the Divine Office.

This article introduces a metrical adaptation to the contrapunctus method of pitch reduction commonly used to analyse Ars Nova counterpoint. Expanding the medieval concept of colouration from the mensural to the metrical, my contrapuncti highlight the flexible toggling between perfect and imperfect groupings at various rhythmic levels in selected motets by Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300–77). The viewpoint advanced here assumes no a priori metrical grid to parse the musical surface, but rather allows the articulation of sonority, cadence and form to reveal a fluid and unique metrical grouping structure for each piece. With metrical emphases shown as inextricable from contrapuntal and harmonic ones, the metrical contrapunctus captures a more comprehensive picture of Machaut's musical language.

This article builds on a close palaeographical, liturgical and musicological reading of a single Old Hispanic manuscript (Santo Domingo de Silos, Biblioteca del Monasterio MS 6) to draw conclusions about scriptorium size, working practices and scribal mobility in early medieval Iberia. We identify eight music scribes who worked in four distinct layers of scribal engagement with the manuscript. These scribes used three different notational styles, and draw on elements of both the León and Rioja melodic dialects. In this manuscript, León notation is used to notate Rioja dialect; Rioja notation can be used to notate León dialect. The notational styles and melodic dialects tell us that different groups of scribes had distinct cultural identities and were likely working across two or three institutions, and at different times. Some scribes specialised in particular solo genres, as we explore, suggesting strongly that some music scribes were also trained as solo singers.

It is known that the seventh book of Jacobus's Speculum musicae contains, alongside other quotations from Ars Nova treatises, the earliest extant transmission of the salient passage of Johannes de Muris's Musica speculativa, Conclusio XVIII, where Muris questions the nature of the fourth as a perfect consonance. However, the relevant passages of Musica speculativa cited and discussed by Jacobus have not yet been analysed in the context of the rich manuscript tradition of the Musica speculativa, which served the needs of musical education throughout Latin Europe for at least two hundred years. In order to position Jacobus's citations of Muris within the framework of the Musica speculativa tradition, I examine several significant variant readings contained in Speculum musicae, comparing them to two French, most probably Parisian, manuscripts transmitting versions A (A-SPL Cod. 264/4) and B (BnF lat. 7378A) of Musica speculativa. Both A and B versions are provided with colophons dated 1323 and 1325, respectively. Establishing which version of Musica speculativa was the source of Jacobus's citations provides a new basis for the dating of two other treatises by Muris to which Jacobus refers, namely Notitia artis musicae and Compendium musicae practicae, and, more generally, for the date of the seventh book of Speculum musicae.

The earliest known treatise on Boethian proportions in Middle English is attributed to ‘Chilston’ in London, British Library, Lansdowne 763. Nothing is known of Chilston's biography, although his treatise also survives anonymously in two related sources (New York, Morgan Library, B.12 and Dublin, Trinity College, 516). In 1927, Irish musicologist William Henry Grattan Flood suggested an identification between the author of the proportion treatise and the scribe of British Library, Royal 5 A VI, a priest's handbook dated to 1446. English lexicographer Jeffrey Pulver was quick to dismiss Flood's identification, which apparently discouraged any further assessment of it. This article reconsiders Flood's suggestion, taking into account 1920s political and cultural biases that might explain Pulver's swift rejection. A contextual exploration of the evidence supports the connection of the proportion treatise to Royal 5 A VI and sheds light on the milieu in which Chilston may have worked. Long recognised for his significance in the vernacular history of music theory and music pedagogy, the proposed contextual framework has significant implications for understanding the multiple functions of music theory in fifteenth-century England. Most notably, it documents the use of speculative music theory among readers and audiences with limited knowledge of Latin. A variety of uses for music theory reveal themselves within the emerging vernacular pedagogical practices of late medieval England. These reflect the broader production of technical texts in Middle English and the increased vernacularisation of English society at a pivotal moment of ecclesiastic and musical history.

Over the past century, scholars have identified examples of liturgical chant belonging to more than one Western liturgical tradition, including Franco-Roman, Old Hispanic, Old Beneventan and Milanese. In a seminal study, Kenneth Levy identified a set of offertories that circulate in the Franco-Roman, Old Hispanic and Milanese traditions, arguing that all existing versions derive from an earlier, Gallican tradition. This article expands the evidence for connections between the Franco-Roman and Old Hispanic traditions, identifying nearly two dozen Franco-Roman responsories that are shared with the Old Hispanic rite and may be of Gallican or Iberian origin. The diversity of their liturgical assignments and circulation patterns suggests that the exchange of repertory took place at different times and through different routes. Many of these responsories are assigned to the later layers of the Roman liturgy. Others were added to the Old Hispanic liturgy between the eighth and tenth centuries.

Just over half of these responsories show enough melodic connections between the Franco-Roman and Old Hispanic versions, in contour and melismatic density, to imply a shared melodic ancestor. Each version, however, uses the formulas associated with its own tradition, indicating that the melodies have been assimilated to the style and formulaic content of the receiving tradition. Despite the resulting melodic differences, we identify certain commonalities between Franco-Roman and Old Hispanic chant, such as text-setting strategies and common cadential contours, that facilitated the exchange of repertory.