Melismas are used to decorate the performance of introits in the early manuscripts of East Francia and of the region of Aquitaine. The former group includes melismas attached to the ends of phrases in manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries. The Aquitanian practice, apart from a few introits that resemble the East Frankish usage, is to add substantial melismas – not the same as those used by the East Franks – to the final soloistic doxology, as a sort of flourish indicating the final reprise. These melismas are sometimes found in tonaries, perhaps for general application to any introit in the mode, and sometimes attached to individual introits. Melismas from Aquitanian tonaries, graduals and tropers are catalogued and described. These melismas are evidently portable, often being used for more than one occasion.

The church of Sint-Jan in the town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, on the northern frontier of the medieval diocese of Liège, cultivated unique local devotions to the widely venerated apostle St John the Evangelist. Most notable are five annual feasts, two of which are unknown elsewhere in Western Christendom – John's Exile on the Island of Patmos (27 September) and Return from Exile (3 December). Although Patmos figured prominently in the Western iconography of John's prophetic vision and writing of the Apocalypse, this event was largely overlooked in the Western Johannine liturgy. Drawing from an exhaustive study of all extant service books, my comparative analysis of the office chants and readings for John's Exile and Return examines how the ‘s-Hertogenbosch clergy synthesised Eastern and Western narratives of John's evangelical and prophetic activities on Patmos. A previously ignored liturgical imprint sheds new light on local reception of a fifth-century text of Syrian origin – the Acts of John by Prochorus – widely disseminated in Byzantium but little known in the Latin West. The Matins readings from this source contradict the Western prophetic association of Patmos by imagining this island as the locus for John's preaching and writing of the Gospel, yet the concluding versified responsories, unique to ‘s-Hertogenbosch, call on John as both a preacher and a prophet – attributes that merge in the musical form and melodic embellishment of these previously unstudied chants. More broadly, this case study demonstrates how the office liturgy might conflate different hagiographic narratives.

This article examines the unusual commemorative Office of the Virgin from Barking Abbey in a fifteenth-century book of hours, Cambridge, University Library, Dd.12.56 (hereafter Dd.12.56). As already evident in the Barking Ordinal, the nuns of this Abbey venerated Mary, one of their patron saints, with a weekly full three-nocturn, twelve-lesson Matins service. Dd.12.56, however, has only recently been linked to Barking Abbey and drawing on new material in this manuscript in correlation with others from the Abbey, I argue that the Barking nuns compiled a unique series of readings and responsories to honour Mary. The progression through the three nocturns of Matins articulates a Marian theology that intersects with the nuns’ self-understanding and I demonstrate that they carefully crafted the lesser hours to highlight specific times of day and to complement Marian hymns sung at Barking. The accepted belief that books of hours were for personal devotion obscures the possibility that such books reflect communal liturgical practices, potentially serving multiple purposes within a monastic setting. Although Dd.12.56 dates from the fifteenth century, it may testify to a much older liturgical practice, which originated in the twelfth century when the three-nocturn format was still prevalent in Benedictine use and before it was largely replaced by a two-nocturn format in the thirteenth century. Benedictine tradition offered individual monastic houses the opportunity to craft this service. Dd.12.56 stands as a new and important testimony to the rich and imaginative ways in which the Barking community created, collated and curated materials that they steeped in their minds and hearts.