Johannes de Garlandia is one of the most important theorists of measurable music during the thirteenth century, yet the study of his writings has always been frustrated by a problematic biographical situation. Not only is the history of manuscript transmission and attribution regarding Johannes de Garlandia's writings complicated, but both Johannes and de Garlandia were popular and common names in medieval Paris, where the theorist is thought to have lived.

Despite their intriguing testimony to the vagaries of musical life in late medieval England, relatively little attention has been given by musicologists and historians of religion to the wealth of commentary on liturgical and secular music penned by the followers of the Oxford heretic John Wyclif. In a brief mention of this material in The Premature Reformation, her magisterial study of Wyclif and the Lollards, Anne Hudson suggests that the Lollards’ suspicion of musical display reflected their more general hostility towards the decoration of churches.

The study of the medieval motet in France has recently been rejuvenated, in part by returning to the motet's point of origin – its tenor. Some scholars have focused on the tenor's pitch content, showing how it shapes the motet's harmonies, and how it is in turn shaped by local chant variants; others, by considering the tenor's text and the origin of that text in the liturgy and frequently in the Bible, have shown the motet to be perhaps the quintessential musical manifestation of medieval intertextuality. By bringing together sacred and secular, Latin and vernacular, the motet, better than any other musical genre, exemplifies both the Boethian ideal of music as something much larger than sound and the interconnectedness of all things in the medieval mind. The discovery of hitherto unknown chant sources for motet tenors is therefore an opportunity to reinterpret the texts of the motets they underpin.

In the course of a discussion of the Christian liturgy and religious rituals in general, Mircea Eliade maintained that every religious festival, any liturgical time, represents the reactualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past, since words and gestures of a ritual are thought to be charged with a power of reactualization so that the event imitated is believed rendered present for the community's welfar. My analysis of the Piacentinian Christmas texts will be based on the phenomenological theories of religion elaborated by Eliade and Odo Casel. It will examine how the medieval Mass was not only a religious ceremony in praise of God but also a cultic experience in terms of the time and space of the ceremony. The liturgical apparatus will be considered as the actual vehicle that creates the proclaimed reality of the celebration, because it is within the power of the Mass to bring us into the same temporal dimension with the saving deeds of Christ and to place us in their immediate presence. By indicating the complexity of dimensions involved in religious practice, its ritual, mythological, doctrinal and experimental aspects, this phenomenological approach to the medieval Christian liturgy implies that the telos of each individual Mass goes beyond the liturgical celebration itself. It would seem to be of some interest, then, to subject to a detailed investigation those texts that were selected in a specific diocese at a certain time to achieve such a telos.

Simon Mellet, scribe and vicar at the cathedral of Cambrai, is among the best-known music scribes of the fifteenth century. Jules Houdoy's classic study of Cambrai Cathedral (1880) documented numerous payments made to Mellet for copying, payments which have remained an important source of information for our understanding of the career of Guillaume Du Fay and the role of the Cambrai Cathedral as a vital musical centre in the fifteenth century. Simon Mellet's thirty-six-year career dominates the study of the production of music manuscripts at Cambrai. Payments made to Mellet are mentioned in most research on Du Fay and on sacred polyphony in the Franco-Burgundian regions. It is through these documents that we know of lost works by Du Fay, such as the Requiem, and of the existence of the composer Rasse de Lavenne. The payments even tell us of apparently wholly lost genres, such as the lamentations by Busnois, Ockeghem and Fremiet that were copied by Mellet in 1475–6.

Two decades ago Thomas Forrest Kelly remarked in a footnote to an article concerning responsory prosas that the extent of the repertoire of these additions to the Office can be seen only by surveying large numbers of medieval Office books. In the haystack of a faded thousand-page breviary, he remarked, the needle of a single small prosula can be a real joy! The foundation of this essay is just such a needle, and I hope to employ it to add a few threads to the ever-developing tapestry woven by practitioners of the sister disciplines of history and musicology. My purpose is to present an analysis of a liturgical portrait of Thomas Becket, focusing upon the texts and musical settings of two prosas unique to the British Library manuscript Add.

Liturgical Chant Bibliography 8 again lists publications covering all aspects of cantus planus, particularly Western chant. In order to present a clear overview of the various types of publications, they have been subdivided into: (1) Editions and facsimile editions, (2) Books and reprints, (3) Congress reports, (4) Chant journals, (5) Collections of essays, dictionaries and periodicals, (6) Articles in periodicals. Access to the contents of the bibliography is facilitated by separate indices of authors, subjects and manuscripts. Prefaced to the bibliography is a list of additions to Liturgical Chant Bibliographies 6 and 7.