This article presents, contextualises and analyses four bifolios of medieval polyphony (Stockholm Riksarkivet, fragments 535, 813 and 5786) probably copied in Northern France around 1300. These fragments – recording three-voice organa and Latin motets – feature two different non-rhythmic uses of red notation described in fourteenth-century theoretical treatises following Philippe de Vitry but never seen before in practice: an organum uses red ink to highlight ‘alien’ notes added to its chant foundation and a motet tenor to prompt octave transposition.

This article synthesises new and existing evidence for a transitional and still little-studied period in the history of Latin-texted polyphony. It makes the case for an apparent gap in evidence for polyphonic composition and circulation at the turn of the thirteenth century into the fourteenth, exploring the possible explanations for and ramifications of a lacuna in surviving sources around 1300 and proffering new insights into what has been lost.

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.

Striggio’s forty-part motet Ecce beatam lucem survives in a unique manuscript source, dated 1587, in the Ratsschulbibliothek in Zwickau. Its text, first published in 1595, formed part of a Pindaric ode written by the neo-Latin poet and Calvinist Paul Schede Melissus (1539–1602). A closer consideration of Melissus’ biography indicates that he probably wrote it after 1575, long after the wedding festivities with which the motet has habitually been associated (Florence, 1565; Munich, 1568). Its subject matter – a Calvinist vision of the New Jerusalem – also makes it an unlikely wedding text and inappropriate for Catholic festivities. Rather, it was probably used as the text of a contrafactum, for an as yet unidentified occasion, with which Striggio himself had little or no connection.

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.

William Herebert’s Middle English poems, which appear in his Commonplace Book (c. 1314), have been undervalued by scholars. Yet, far from being a lonely purveyor of an ungainly series of translations, Herebert instead was a skillful adapter of Latin hymns into dance songs. Echoing his contemporaries and following the example of St Francis, Herebert revised the forms of two Latin poems, ‘Gloria, laus et honor’ and ‘Popule meus, quid feci tibi’, into two English lyrics: ‘Wele, heriȝyng and worshype’ and ‘My volk, what habbe y do þe?’ In doing so, he dealt imaginatively with poetic form, liturgical content, concepts of time and matching words to music – and he ended up producing early examples of English carols. Herebert’s achievements in dance song demonstrate that the seemingly outrageous idea of the dancing friar is not as alien to religious devotions as one might expect. We conclude with speculations concerning the performance of Herebert’s songs.

In the second half of the fourteenth century, the Italian music theorist Johannes Vetulus de Anagnia wrote a treatise named Liber de musica. Extraordinarily complex and replete with theological digressions, this work has to date remained little understood. Examining Liber de musica through the lenses of practice and philosophy sheds new light on this enigmatic text. Vetulus’s theory is in certain respects innovative, but in others it is conservative. Vetulus theorised a unique but impractical system of mensural divisions that synthesises and exhausts some of the central conceptual principles of contemporaneous performance. He makes sense of these divisions within a Platonist intellectual framework that reimagines Trinitarian theological concepts in a musical context. Approaching this treatise as far as possible on its own terms reveals that Vetulus developed a symbolic epistemology of music in which a mutual reciprocity could emerge between the tripartite structures of music, nature and the divine.