Writing in the early part of the twentieth century, Louis Gougaud provides the epigraph to this chapter by concluding his study of medieval church dance with the observation that there were two seasons in the year appropriate for dancing and rejoicing in song: Christmas and Easter.Footnote ¹ The former began in early winter on the Feast of St. Nicholas (December 6), and the latter ended in midsummer on the Feast of St. John the Baptist (June 24).Footnote ² Although Gougaud was concerned primarily with the role of dance and its accompanying music in religious contexts, abundant evidence throughout medieval Europe attests to the fact that certain times and seasons were marked by an efflorescence of song. Perhaps the most familiar of these seasons of song in Latin and vernacular contexts is springtime, as evoked in the exordium of a rondellus in thirteenth-century Parisian manuscript F: “The beginning of spring … gives us joy, [so] let us sing, eia!”Footnote ³ Medieval song across genre and language offers countless examples in this vein, interlacing song and season in ways that reflect not only the natural world and its seasons, but an awareness and marking of the pluralistic medieval calendar and the communities who lived according to its rhythms.Footnote ⁴

Calendar and seasonal time represent a key to interpreting the performance contexts and cultural functions of the Latin refrain song. With chiefly devotional texts and frequent links to the liturgy through troping, it is no surprise that Latin song plays a role in the musical landscape of the liturgical year as well as in extraliturgical devotional and festive rituals; indeed, medieval Latin song has long been envisioned as a form of religious and festive recreation.Footnote ⁵ In this chapter I suggest that the refrain song reflects a unique and heightened relationship with the medieval year in ways that are constructed and expressed through poetry and rhetoric, patterns of creation and transmission, and implicit as well as explicit performance contexts. Throughout this chapter the refrain song emerges as a nexus for the musical and poetic expression of time and temporality, rooted in its harmonization with the calendar year; the thematic, topical, and material contours of the refrain song are shaped around calendar and seasonal time in remarkably consistent ways over several centuries of cultivation and transmission.

In addition to aligning with the calendar year, the poetry of the refrain song repeatedly dictates how time, and especially festive time, should be experienced. Rather than passively reflecting notions of time, the refrain song could influence or change the way time was experienced. This develops out of a poetic vocabulary of sobriety and moderation that signals the inherent temporal plurality of the medieval calendar as both a record of solemn and devout feasts and a framework for seasonal and festive celebration. As Gougaud’s description of two dancing seasons suggests, the medieval year could be defined according to season (spring and winter), feast days (Christmas and Easter, the feasts of Sts. Nicholas and John the Baptist), or dates associated with so-called “pagan revelries” (New Year’s and May Day).Footnote ⁶ Within the medieval calendar, certain moments occasioned greater temporal plurality than others; these were moments when song, as Gougaud observed, became a preferred, if occasionally contested, mode of expression. The Latin refrain song closely traced these periods of heightened temporal plurality, its music, poetry, and performance fostering a figurative and literal reframing of how time was experienced.

Calendrical Song: Thematic Distribution and Manuscript Ordering

Patterns of manuscript transmission and the ordering of the refrain song beginning in the thirteenth century, along with the framing of refrain songs by means of rubrics and prefaces in the fourteenth century, signal an awareness of the refrain song as ritually and poetically tethered to the liturgical year. The poetry of the devotional refrain song is highly calendrical, coalescing chiefly around the liturgical seasons of Christmas and Easter, with songs also dedicated to the Virgin Mary and Christ.Footnote ⁷ The seasonal year is also emphasized with songs celebrating springtime or the transition from winter to spring; in many cases these are not secular songs, but instead, as discussed later in this chapter, allegorically frame the seasons. Figure 1.1 offers a synoptic view of the major liturgical and festive themes and topics explored in the poetry of the refrain song, with liturgical period or feast paired with season.Footnote ⁸ The thematic grouping of refrain songs aligns with liturgical and seasonal periods spanning from early winter, signaled by the Feast of St. Nicholas (December 6), to the New Year (January 1) and its octave, and then springtime, from Easter to Pentecost and its octave – a reflection, in other words, of Gougaud’s “dancing seasons.”

Figure 1.1 Calendrical and seasonal distribution of refrain songs

The thematic distribution of the refrain song is compelling since it does not mirror that of Latin song more broadly. Although Latin songs survive in all poetic forms and musical structures for the feasts and seasons listed in Figure 1.1, refrain songs survive more often, in greater quantity, and across more sources, for these specific feasts and temporal periods. St. Nicholas, for instance, appears in medieval Latin song more frequently than any other saint, and more than two thirds of these songs have refrains.Footnote ⁹ Similar ratios obtain for the other temporal periods indicated in Figure 1.1, with noteworthy numbers of refrain songs for Easter and springtime in particular. Easter is generally not well represented in the versus of the twelfth century, and although it appears as a topical focus in later conducti and cantilenae, Christ’s Resurrection is most numerously and explicitly celebrated in refrain songs, and especially rondelli. I examine this link later in this chapter in relation to the springtime topos; here, however, it reflects a correspondence between form and poetic content. Finally, although the feasts of the Nativity and the Circumcision are amply represented in Latin song, refrain songs for the latter are unusually well represented and, as detailed later in this chapter, present a special case study within the history of medieval Latin song.

Individual manuscripts reveal further how the transmission of the refrain song shapes and underscores its calendrical orientation. Form provides a primary organizing principle in sources for the refrain song, evidenced best by F, in which monophonic songs are copied in Fascicles X and XI, yet the majority of refrain songs, and all rondelli, are found in Fascicle XI. In manuscripts where refrain forms are deliberately clustered, another layer of internal organization is also typically employed. For smaller collections of songs, thematic homogeneity tends to be the convention. This is the case for the three Easter rondelli copied in the final folios of OBod 937, fol. 446^v–447^r, a manuscript otherwise transmitting texts pertaining to Thomas Becket; a series of Christmastide refrain songs, with rubrics indicating performance in relation to the Office Hours in the Austrian St. Pölten Processional; and a collection of Christmas and Marian refrain songs copied in the fourteenth-century Italian antiphoner, Bobbio.Footnote ¹⁰

In larger manuscript collections of refrain songs, calendrical ordering is used as an organizational tool. F is once again a central example, its sixty songs beginning with Easter (the first half of the collection), then moving to a mixture of Christmas songs, including groups of songs for Easter, the Virgin Mary, and St. Nicholas, as well as Christological songs and a single secular song (see Table 1.1). By contrast, the monophonic conducti in Fascicle X of F are not arranged calendrically or by any apparent logic beyond texture.Footnote ¹¹

Ordering according to form and subject matter is taken further internally; namely, the initial twenty-eight Easter songs in Fascicle XI are all rondelli, except for Passionis emuli. Following the main gathering of chiefly Easter and Christmastide rondelli up to folio 469^r, the scribe then copied a greater assortment of works and forms, including strophic and through-composed songs and one troped hymn.Footnote ¹² The ruled but empty folios following a tetrad of Nicholas songs also suggest the possibility that further songs for saints may have been planned. This is especially intriguing considering the position of St. Nicholas’s feast day at the beginning of the liturgical year in Advent; if further songs were planned for saints, their calendrical ordering in the Sanctorale may have mirrored the calendrical organization of the Temporale portion (Easter to Christmas) of the fascicle.

Only with F, in the middle of the thirteenth century, do examples of calendrical ordering appear, in addition to ordering Latin song by form, voice number, or subject matter. Earlier manuscripts, including a source with many concordances in F, Tours 927, are frequently organized thematically and according to form or genre, but not calendrically.Footnote ¹³ In the fourteenth century and beyond, several manuscripts organize refrain songs by form as well as calendrically; among these, the Moosburger Graduale is most explicit due to rubrication.Footnote ¹⁴ The grouping of Latin songs into a discrete “cantionale” already sets the songs apart from the liturgical contents of the gradual; an introductory preface (translated and discussed later in this chapter) and rubrics, moreover, ensure that the songs are read as proper to certain feasts and rituals of the calendar year.Footnote ¹⁵ Attributed to the dean of the song school Johannes de Perchausen, the preface also specifies clericuli, young choirboys, as the intended audience, a community that makes sense given that the songs begin with the Feast of the Boy Bishop, a liminal ritual for choirboys that formed an accretion to the Advent and Christmastide liturgy (see Table 1.2).Footnote ¹⁶

The songs begin with the choirboys’ special festivities surrounding the election of the boy bishop, evidencing an alignment with the preface, in which choirboys are specified as the audience for, and performers of, these songs. The chorister-turned-bishop was typically elected on the Feast of St. Nicholas (a proto-bishop and patron saint of choirboys) in early Advent and presided during the weeks leading up to Christmas and, on occasion, through Epiphany. Logically, a song for St. Nicholas thus directly follows those for the boy bishop’s rites. In the cantionale, two Epiphany songs close out the collection, Tribus signis deo dignis and Stella nova radiat, and signal the end of the boy bishop’s seasonal reign. Between these two moments – the election of the boy bishop and Epiphany – the entire breadth of the Advent and Christmas season, including its saints, is adumbrated in devotional song, refrain, and rubric.Footnote ¹⁷

In a parallel example from fourteenth-century Ireland, the sixty unnotated poems, including thirty-nine refrain-form poems, of the Red Book of Ossory are accompanied by an introductory preface and, for the initial four songs, rubrication. For performance contexts, the preface attributed to the Bishop of Ossory, Richard Ledrede, indicates only that the songs were to be sung on “important holidays and at celebrations” (“in magnis festis et solaciis”); the rubrics on the initial folio of the collation are more specific, singling out the Nativity.Footnote ¹⁸ The first, “Cantilena de Nativitate Domini,” is followed by three more that indicate the same feast (e.g. “Alia cantilena de eodem festo”). Despite the lack of similar rubrics indicating the occasion throughout the remaining folios, which transmit fifty-six poems, Christmas or related poems (such as ones for Epiphany) are largely grouped near the beginning, while Easter poems appear in a cluster toward the middle of the collection. Significantly, unlike the preceding works, the final thirteen poems are not unique but instead incorporate borrowed material and exploit different poetic forms and styles.Footnote ¹⁹ The majority of the poems are for Christmastide and Eastertide; the remainder are either Marian, including one appropriate for the Feast of the Annunciation, or explore a small range of devotional subjects. The “magnis festis et solaciis” presumably refers chiefly to the feasts of the Christmas and Easter seasons, in addition to Marian feasts or devotions. The scribe thus consciously tried, even if not always precisely, to organize the poems along the lines of the great feasts cited, as performance context.

Between thematic and formal homogeneity and calendrical organization, sources for the refrain song show a tendency toward grouping by several parameters. While collating songs according to the presence of a refrain suggests an interest in formal typologies, the calendrical clustering and ordering apparent in several sources point to the close alignment of the refrain song with the calendar year and church seasons. In this, the transmission of the medieval Latin refrain song has much in common with liturgical Latin songs such as hymns or sequences, as well as later collections of sacred Latin and vernacular songs.Footnote ²⁰ Latin song, and the refrain song most of all, cannot be easily untangled from the church year and its musical expression. Although this is hinted at in the language, devotional register, and, in some cases, liturgical function of many Latin songs, the compilatio and ordinatio of sources for the refrain song underscore its calendrical embeddedness.

The Plurality of Time: Easter and Springtime

The refrain song engages in discourses around time not solely by reflecting the liturgical calendar through manuscript ordering, but also poetically by commenting on and intervening in the experience of time and its plurality of overlapping feasts and seasons. Refrain songs frequently offer implicit commentaries on the plurality of time, and specifically the calendar year; for instance, the widely transmitted song Dies ista colitur is rubricated in four sources, two referring to its performance in troped liturgies for the Feast of the Circumcision, and two others indicating Christ’s Nativity and the Virgin Mary as topics.Footnote ²¹ Dies ista colitur is meaningful in any of these contexts; the changing rubrics reflect theological parallels that enable the same song to praise the Virgin, while also celebrating Christ’s Nativity, and honoring his Circumcision. Rondelli in final fascicle of F offer special insight into how poetry and music participate in discourses of temporal plurality during Eastertide in particular. Specifically, within the large-scale calendrical ordering of Fascicle XI of F, the internal grouping of rondelli according to calendar and seasonal time, along with an unusually consistent poetic and thematic vocabulary, showcase an interest in promoting and tempering the celebration of feasts while symbolically fusing seasonal and liturgical cycles of time.

Latin refrain songs, and especially those in Fascicle XI of F, have frequently been described as lighthearted, ingratiating, festive, and energetic, in part due to long-standing associations with dance.Footnote ²² Certainly, the poems in Fascicle XI, along with their refrain forms and liturgical ordering, convey an entirely different mood than the conducti in earlier fascicles of F. De patre principio on the initial folio of the fascicle, with the refrain “Let us rejoice, eia” (“Gaudeamus eȳa”), sets the scene for similar invocations of praise and rejoicing.Footnote ²³ Yet the fascicle also includes songs and refrains featuring a more somber tone, as in the refrain of Mundi princeps eicitur for the Resurrection: “For life dies on the Cross … The victim who suffered for us | opens the gate of salvation.”Footnote ²⁴ Throughout the final fascicle of F, the poetry fosters festive celebration on one hand, and devotional contemplation and prayer on the other.

The vocabulary of temperance and moderation in the refrain songs of F offers a strategic framing of the liturgical feasts cued in the poetry, constructing a repertoire of festive and celebrative yet sober songs. Indicative of this duality of tone is the frequency of the adjective sobrius (literally meaning “not drunk,” or “sober”) throughout the songs, and accompanying turns of phrase that convert joyous outpourings into temperate expressions.Footnote ²⁵ Although the adjective is not uncommon in Latin poetry, it appears with conspicuous regularity in the Easter rondelli of F (see Table 1.3).Footnote ²⁶ These five Easter songs each employ sobrius as a way to inflect expressions of praise or to moderate the voicing of joy. This is especially noteworthy in the context of songs for major feasts and holidays of the church year; song and voice are constant themes throughout the fascicle, yet always referred to in ways that suggest these utterances are carefully controlled and never excessive.

The refrain forms and musical settings are also noteworthy in light of this rhetoric of restraint. The rondelli in F present particularly careful and controlled forms; their largely syllabic, narrow-ranged, and strophic musical settings are far from excessive, as in Vocis tripudio (see Example 1.1). Lacking melismas, large leaps, and ligated pitches, the musical setting proceeds largely stepwise; the two musical phrases, moreover, are nearly identical, resulting in an economy of musical material. Not all refrain songs are as unassuming and sparse as Vocis tripudio in F; indeed, in Tours 927, the musical setting of the same poem is more adventurous melodically and formally.Footnote ²⁷ In keeping with the rhetorical tone throughout the songs in Fascicle XI of F, however, musical settings often convey a sense of moderation and restraint by avoiding melismas and leaps. Individual songs may be lighthearted or energetic, keeping the theme of rejoicing front and center, but the fascicle on the whole advocates for the “sober” musical commemoration of liturgical time.

Example 1.1 F, fol. 465^v–466^r, Vocis tripudio, first strophe and refrain

Exultemus sobrie and Psallite regi glorie in Table 1.3 are, moreover, part of an internal cluster of songs that reflect a different temporal duality. In addition to balancing rejoicing with moderation, a series of nine rondelli plays with the poetic plurality around Christ’s Resurrection and springtime, while also gesturing toward Christ’s Nativity, the earthly birth preceding his divine rebirth (see Table 1.4).Footnote ²⁸ All nine songs are steeped in vernal symbolism, referencing flowers, springtime, and, in many cases, the transition from winter to spring; each also identifies the “flower” in question as Christ, the “King of Glory” and “King of Heaven.” The word “flower” (“flos”) and its various forms alone occurs more than forty-three times over the course of these nine songs (including repetition due to refrains), unremittingly relating spring’s vernality to Jesus as the ultimate flower of Christianity.Footnote ²⁹

Notably, these nine songs have been linked to Christ’s Nativity in previous catalogues and inventories, with the arrival of springtime and Christ as flower understood as allegorical references to his birth.Footnote ³⁰ The refrain of Novum ver oritur, for instance, includes the word “epȳphania,” although in this context it appears less likely to refer to the Feast of Epiphany, as has been assumed, and instead to a more general idea of manifestation or appearance. This is supported in the fifth strophe by a reference to the trope of the dragon (Satan or sin) being crushed by Christ as he steps from the tomb on Easter morning, although this strophe is solely transmitted in Tours 927:Footnote ³¹

Nowhere in any of the poems is Christ’s Nativity explicitly named (as it is in other Christmas songs in F); neither, however, is his Resurrection. Instead, the poems refer most often to the passing of winter and arrival of spring and all that the new season encompasses and signals. The beginning of spring (“veris principium”), which melts wintery ice (“glacie sepulta” and “victa glacie”) as winter departs and a new season begins (“hiemis extinguitur estas reducitur”), reverberates across the songs, resulting in a richly allegorical outpouring of springtime symbolism that links these nine rondelli and sets them apart from other Easter songs in Fascicle XI.Footnote ³²

Clear parallels emerge in these songs with the springtime topos in vernacular song and the Natureingang. Three songs begin with rhetorical gestures of season and time – Veris principium, Novum ver oritur, and Iam ver aperit terre gremium – while the remainder invoke springtime throughout strophes and refrains. One of the most striking moments in the nine songs is in the third and final strophe of Veterem merorem pellite in which a bird – a sonic marker of springtime – makes an appearance, replete with direct speech:Footnote ³³

The clamoring of the bird in this strophe reflects the broader trope of bird songs and sounds in medieval music; its message here is one of renewal, casting off the old (i.e. sin) in order to welcome the new (i.e. Christ).Footnote ³⁴ Evoking the topos of springtime and birds employed countless times in medieval song across register and language, Veterem merorum pellite features the allegorical reframing and repurposing of nature imagery in the context of Easter. Although neither new nor unique to F, the poets and compilers of the fascicle deliberately grouped songs engaging in the same allegorical mode that links liturgical and seasonal time.

The songs in the final fascicle of F shape the experience of festive time and the medieval calendar by highlighting tensions between different ways of experiencing time. In some cases, songs focus on the balance between rejoicing and restraint, advocating for the kind of lighthearted celebration frequently associated with Latin refrain songs, yet tempered rhetorically by moderation and sobriety. The series of Easter rondelli characterized by springtime topoi, on the other hand, acknowledge the intersection of liturgical and natural time, bringing Christ’s Resurrection together with the imagery of springtime. The emphasis on moderation and sobriety, moreover, is a marked feature of the fascicle that signals the broader cultural context of the refrain song beyond F. Although Eastertide is a specific focal point in F, the calendrical distribution of the refrain song includes the other major season of the liturgical year, Christmastide, bringing different concerns into play around the regulation of how the medieval year was experienced through song.

Reforming Festivity: Disciplining Time Through Song and Refrain

As the Easter rondelli in Fascicle XI of F illustrate, the refrain song intervenes most markedly at moments of temporal plurality in the medieval calendar. While the rondelli of F are concerned with Easter, springtime, and their “sober” celebration, the late fall and early winter season from the Feast of St. Nicholas through Epiphany on January 6 presents further tensions between liturgical, calendrical, and seasonal temporalities mediated in and through song. Within the span of early winter and Christmastide feasts and festivities, the refrain song and its material contexts highlight moments singled out for regulation and reform by church authorities, motivated by musical, choreographic, and ludic activities that stemmed from competing ways of celebrating feasts, holidays, and seasons.

The refrain song’s emphasis on the Feast of St. Nicholas and rituals of the Advent season and Christmastide, including the Feast of the Circumcision (January 1), is significant since these seasons and feasts frequently coincided, like Easter and springtime rites, with extraliturgical, seasonal, and so-called “pagan” festivities. For Advent, the Feast of St. Nicholas initiated clerical and lay festivities, ushering in school holidays and secular early winter rituals and, in the church, marking the election of the boy bishop (as in the Moosburger Graduale, above). Within the liturgy of the church, the festive Christmas season also invoked significant excess and widespread celebration, including the clerical celebration of the feasts following Christmas (referred to as the Libertas Decembrica). Within and outside of the church, the Christmas season was additionally inflected by celebrations of the solstice and of the Kalends of January, reflecting ritual holdovers from antiquity as well as medieval New Year’s traditions. This varied cycle of winter festivities, which incorporated condoned and condemned, secular and liturgical, rites and rituals, has most often been termed a part of the “festive,” “merry,” or “ritual” year celebrated throughout the Middle Ages in church and town.Footnote ³⁵

Celebration of the festive year attracted near constant criticism from the church throughout the Middle Ages, which focused on varied practices ranging from mummery, games, and drunkenness to singing and dancing. Descriptions of singing and dancing in particular follow certain patterns – vulgar, lewd, pagan, diabolical, scurrilous, bawdy, and indecent are but a sample of the negative epithets applied to music and movement accompanying secular, seasonal, and liturgical festivities. Notably, the calendrical distribution of the Latin refrain song traces similar contours to these festive seasons and their “scurrilous” songs. Latin refrain songs are not, however, the scurrilous, bawdy, or diabolical songs decried by preachers, nor are Latin songs more broadly. Instead, the refrain song appears, in several instances, to be a strategic response to secular musical practices enacted in the celebration of the festive year. Evidence from condemnatory writings, manuscript contexts and paratexts, and the poetry of songs themselves identifies portions of the Latin refrain song repertoire as musical responses to the contested celebration of the festive year. This is already hinted at in the Easter rondelli of F; a broader perspective shows the way in which the Latin refrain song balances the simultaneous festive and solemn commemoration of other feasts and seasons.

Condemnations, typically ecclesiastical, of song and dance almost have the status of clichés in medieval texts, with a focus on vernacular song and the dances of women. Condemnations exist in the hundreds, mostly concerned with the body (especially women’s bodies), inappropriate performance spaces (such as cemeteries), and poetic register (lewd, sexual, etc.).Footnote ³⁶ Throughout legal texts, penitentials, sermons, chronicles, registers, and even exegetical writings, complaints are frequently recycled, with language and phrasing verging on the repetitive. Similarly, the occasions at the center of critique and admonishment form a relatively limited cycle of liturgical feasts, saints’ vigils and feast days, seasonal markers (equinoxes and solstices), and calendrical transitions, with the New Year featuring prominently.Footnote ³⁷ While liturgical feasts are singled out, complaints are most often framed around associated “pagan” celebrations and the desire to rid Christian rituals of non-Christian elements.Footnote ³⁸ Since many of these same feast days were obligatory holidays (festa ferianda), there was added incentive to maintain a degree of solemnity within and outside of the church, since communities were otherwise free from daily labors and therefore quite literally had time to fill with potentially unsavory activities.Footnote ³⁹

The surviving register of the thirteenth-century archbishop of Rouen Eudes Rigaud exemplifies the spirit of musical and poetic reform around certain feast days, at least in Normandy.Footnote ⁴⁰ Providing accounts of Rigaud’s archdiocesan travels between the years 1248 and 1269, the Regestrum offers insight into the activities of a range of institutions (male and female, secular and monastic), with a focus on recording and disciplining inappropriate behaviors. Throughout the years covered in the Regestrum, several feasts occasioned repeated musical, poetic, choreographic, and ludic offenses at a handful of female and male institutions: the Feast of the Holy Innocents receives seven mentions, and there are two for St. Nicholas, and one each for the feasts of Sts. John, Stephen, Katherine, Hildevert, and Mary Magdalene (see Table 1.5).Footnote ⁴¹ Prohibited activities in Rigaud’s entries vary from general to specific. Dance (choreas) is referenced on several occasions, and games make appearances too, while songs range from those described as “scurrilous” to the generic descriptor cantilenas. Significantly, Rigaud identifies several genres, namely virelais, conducti, and motets in the case of the entry from January 12, 1260, and also gestures toward the musical practices of women (specifically nuns) as well as men. In all cases, Rigaud attempts (and seemingly fails) to reform the celebration of certain feasts across his archdiocese and, more specifically, to abolish the nonliturgical songs, verses, and dances that detracted from otherwise sanctioned feasts.

Although the precise musical works cited by Rigaud remain unknown (and the level of exaggeration and embellishment in his account is unclear), extraliturgical Latin songs survive for the feasts he singles out in compelling numbers. This is especially the case for the Feasts of Nicholas and the Holy Innocents. Specifically, Rigaud’s reference to the singing of virelais on the Feast of St. Nicholas resonates with the existence of a significant corpus of Latin refrain songs venerating the saint from across Europe between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries (see Table 1.6). Significantly, Nicholas is not only the saint most substantially represented in the poetry of nova cantica, conducti, and cantiones, outstripped in popularity only by the Virgin Mary and Christ; he is also honored most often in refrain-form songs.Footnote ⁴² Although these Latin refrain songs are not virelais, the French forme fixe is similarly characterized by a structural refrain; the songs in Table 1.6 are, however, far from “dissolute” or “scurrilous.” Each poem comprises a doctrinally sound prayer to Nicholas, drawing in most cases on his vita and miracles and directing attention toward the theme of pious song, as in Laudibus Nicholai from the St-Victor Miscellany: “Let us devote ourselves to sweet songs and praises of Nicholas.”Footnote ⁴³

While it would be misleading to see these songs for St. Nicholas as pious substitutes for the virelais disdained by Rigaud, the existence of this complex of hagiographical songs speaks to an impulse to reframe festivities that expanded beyond boundaries set by the church.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is striking to note the resonance of Rigaud’s “clerks, vicars, and chaplains” with the communities and contexts of the sources in Table 1.6. For the most part, the manuscripts in this table reflect clerical milieus, although St-M A is closely linked with the Abbey of St-Martial in Limoges, and the origins of the Later Cambridge Songbook remain elusive.Footnote ⁴⁵ For Tours 927, F, the St-Victor Miscellany, and the Moosburger Graduale, clerical, pedagogical, or scholastic origins are likely. The St-Victor Miscellany emanates from the environs of a northern French university (see Chapter 5) and the songs of the Moosburger Graduale were compiled and in some cases composed by the dean of the song school in Moosburg, Johannes de Perchausen; while F and Tours 927 betray clerical origins, the former connected to the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the latter showing several signs of clerical compilation and use.Footnote ⁴⁶

These sources and songs, in other words, transmit repertoires composed by, or accessible to, a wide range of clerical ranks and students. Moreover, although Rigaud’s Regestrum only accounts for the archdiocese of Rouen, the northern French emphasis in the refrain songs for St. Nicholas is notable. Nicholas’s feast day was highly ranked across France by the twelfth century, and pockets of heightened devotion developed in Paris and northern France around his cult, including among clerics and students, as well as vernacular poets and playwrights.Footnote ⁴⁷ In Paris, for instance, Nicholas’s feast day at both the University of Paris and Notre Dame Cathedral was a day marked for festivity, yet was also frequently an occasion for excess and wrongdoing – like Rigaud, authorities in Paris lamented the way clerics and students celebrated a favored saint’s feast day (Nicholas was a patron saint of clerics and students, as well as the University of Paris).Footnote ⁴⁸ Across northern France, consequently, Nicholas’s feast day was an occasion for musical, ludic, and ritual excess. The survival of Latin songs, many with refrains, in honor of the saint attests to a desire to magnify the feast day with nonliturgical music at a far remove from the bawdy and scurrilous ditties sung and danced in village streets in Normandy and elsewhere. The refrain is a key pivot between secular excess and devotional exuberance; Rigaud’s virelais for Nicholas have their counterpart, albeit unstated, in the Latin refrain song.

While parallels between the Latin refrain song and Rigaud’s records are difficult to establish, his register offers an important perspective on the musical disciplining of feast days. Texts like Rigaud’s witness how song, accretion, and festivity were linked in the context of the calendar year, highlighting the “noisiest” moments and, consequently, the ones most in need of reform and regulation. Feasts and holidays had a particular soundscape throughout medieval Europe, with quotidian labors ceasing and the devotional labors of the daily Mass and Office increasing by means of tropes and polyphony, along with the bells that pealed according to the rank of the feast and mood of the season.Footnote ⁴⁹ Song played a role in this soundscape too, at times adjacent to the liturgy (as in tropes or in the context of dramas and plays) and other times at ambiguous moments involving both devotional and secular forms of recreation.

Pious Substitutes in the Moosburger Graduale and Red Book of Ossory

Manuscript sources for the refrain song provide further textual and repertorial insights into how composers, poets, and scribes conceived of the relationship between song and the festive year. The inclusion of Latin song in troped liturgies and the existence of unique paratexts such as prefaces or descriptive rubrics allow for a cautious understanding of Latin song, and especially the refrain song, as reflecting the church’s attempts to control the experience of the festive year within local communities and song cultures. In addition to troped liturgies of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, two main witnesses are fourteenth-century manuscripts in which textual prefaces contextualize collections of songs and poems: the Moosburger Graduale and Red Book of Ossory together frame calendrically ordered song collections as repertoires intended as festive yet pious substitutes for the lewd songs frequently embraced by named communities of choirboys and clerics.

The preface in the fourteenth-century Moosburger Graduale, self-consciously written by the former dean of the song school Johannes de Perchausen, is the longer of the two and rehearses many of the age-old complaints of church authorities around the song and singing:

Citing a conciliar decretal, Johannes denounces the singing of “worldly” songs and colloquies in the church, since they disrupt the priest at the altar and promote “laughter and lasciviousness.” He offers as a replacement a collection of songs, all but one with refrains, to be sung by pueri, choirboys, at the time of the Nativity and the ritual of the boy bishop, whose election occurred on the Feast of St. Nicholas.

Unfortunately, Johannes never clarifies whether the songs were to be sung during a church service or at some other moment, although one clue survives in the rubrication of the songs that accompany the boy bishop’s rituals (see Table 1.2). The first rubric (“cum episcopus eligitur”) refers to the election of the boy bishop, while the second and third (“cum itur extra ecclesiam ad choream” followed by “item alia”) pointedly invite the boy bishop, and his choirboy entourage, “to the dance” outside of the church. The installation of the boy bishop then follows (“cum infulatus et vestitus presul intronisatur”), presumably now back in the church.Footnote ⁵² The remaining rubrics solely refer to the feast days and do not offer further glimpses into the choreography or performance of the songs. Yet Johannes’s framing of these works as a response to “lascivious” and “worldly” songs, along with the clear festal orientation, first around the boy bishop’s feast and then subsequently the major feasts of Christmastide, offers a strong statement on the refrain song as a musical pivot from secular excess to devotional recreation.

The brief preface attributed to the Bishop of Ossory, Richard Ledrede, in the Red Book of Ossory resonates rhetorically with Johannes’s in the Moosburger Graduale. In what is described by Ardis Butterfield as a “belligerent instruction” by a “thin-lipped bishop,” the preface notes that the Bishop made the songs for the vicars, priests, and clerks of the cathedral for important holidays and celebrations so that “their throats and mouths, consecrated to God, may not be polluted by songs which are lewd, secular, and associated with revelry.”Footnote ⁵³ In the broader context of condemnations against song, Ledrede’s introductory remarks seem less belligerent than part of a longer history of crackdowns on musical outpourings of festivity. Although the rubrication that follows is less informative than that in the Moosburger Graduale, the context of the songs within the festive calendar of “great feasts” is readily apparent, and their performance by clergy made explicit by Ledrede. Latin songs for liturgical feasts are once again framed as pious substitutes, although I examine further in Chapter 5 how music as opposed to poetry fits into Ledrede’s conception of “lewd” versus devotional.

The picture emerging from these prefaces is one of church authorities reframing the sonic experience of time. By determining the sounds by which the highest feasts were commemorated outside of or adjacent to the liturgy, authority figures in religious communities refocused attention on the year as defined by the church in devotional song, rather than as expressed through secular music making.

A spirit of reform similarly emerges in the context of elaborately troped liturgies for the Feast of the Circumcision on January 1.Footnote ⁵⁴ The troped Circumcision liturgy is especially notable for its connection with the clerical Feast of Fools, also known as the Feast of the Staff, a special yet often raucous feast day celebrated by subdeacons during the Libertas Decembrica, a cycle of feast days following Christmas particularly celebrated by different clerical ranks.Footnote ⁵⁵ Max Harris has most recently argued that the orthodoxy of the often-critiqued “Feast of Fools” was reinscribed within the context of the troped liturgy of the Feast of the Circumcision, sources for which include significant numbers of Latin songs.Footnote ⁵⁶ Harris’s arguments align with views outlined by Susan Boynton and Margot Fassler concerning clerical festivities around Christmas and the Daniel Play, respectively, identified in each case as resulting from a desire for greater order and reform.Footnote ⁵⁷ Within the context of troped Circumcision liturgies, Latin song thus plays a role in this process of reform; even the well-known conductus Orientis partibus, often interpreted as bawdy and earthy due to its “braying” vernacular refrain, “Hez hez sire asnes hez,” ultimately participates in affirming the theology of the Feast of the Circumcision.Footnote ⁵⁸ Beyond the Feast of Fools, the Feast of the Circumcision overlaps calendrically with the New Year – the tensions and reconciliations that occur musically and poetically between the feast and popular holiday are found not only in troped liturgies but throughout Latin song.

To close this chapter, I offer a case study on how the Latin refrain and refrain song – at times transmitted in sources for the troped Circumcision liturgy – navigate between the calendrical and popular celebration of January 1 as the Feast of the Circumcision and the medieval New Year. Significantly, examination of songs for the New Year enables a new perspective on how the Latin song and refrain mediates between competing and complementary temporalities beyond the witness of individual manuscripts. In the examples and manuscripts discussed so far, the contexts have been, for the most part, highly localized and attached to particular communities; considering songs from across time and place better demonstrates the cultural function of the Latin refrain song within discourses around the medieval year and its sounding.

New Songs and Refrains for the New Year

The first of January was one of the most pluralistic and noisiest days in the medieval calendar, celebrated simultaneously as the Feast of the Circumcision, Octave of Nativity, and the New Year, as well as being linked to clerical festivities such as the Feast of Fools or Feast of the Staff, and Feast of the Ass. It was a temporally unruly day, whose identification as the beginning of the New Year was, in fact, contested, with the church making attempts throughout the Middle Ages to shift the celebration of January 1 away from unsanctioned customs and rituals by refocusing attention on the Feast of the Circumcision.Footnote ⁵⁹ Frequently linked to illicit New Year’s rituals, song provided one way in which a process of festal reform could be enacted within religious communities. Beginning in the twelfth century, the New Year began receiving increased musical and poetic treatment in the context of devotional Latin song as well as in troped liturgies for the Feast of the Circumcision.Footnote ⁶⁰ These songs did not ignore the popularized identity of January 1 as the New Year, but instead strategically fused nonliturgical commemorations of the New Year with theological themes drawn from the liturgical feast in the church calendar in an effort to reform and control the celebrations of this pluralistic day. Within and across songs, the New Year and its associated novelties instead became “virtual” refrains, opening a window into the associations formed between calendrical customs, theological ideas, and liturgical practices.Footnote ⁶¹ Latin song and refrain serve as pivots between temporalities beyond the witness of individual manuscripts, emerging as expressive linchpins in the pluralistic celebration of the New Year across medieval Europe.

The festal and calendrical pluralism of January 1 and its ensuing popular and clerical rituals presented a long-standing problem for the medieval church. Vitriolic language around the New Year includes New Year’s sermons by Augustine in which he laments the abuses occurring on the “Kalends of January.”Footnote ⁶² Included on his list of abuses are elements familiar from condemnations of other seasonal and calendrical celebrations, such as dancing, singing, masks, and gift giving.Footnote ⁶³ A few centuries later, Isidore of Seville echoed Augustine by noting raucous activity at the New Year, citing people who make “a lot of noise in everything they do, leaping around and clapping their hands in dancing.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Complaints continued into the eighth century; St. Boniface wrote to Pope Zachary in 741 that “when the Kalends of January begin, people lead ring-dances, shouting after the pagan manner through the streets, singing sacrilegious songs of pagan custom and gorging themselves with festive meals day and night.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Condemnations proliferated in the twelfth century, many resonating with and borrowing from earlier tirades against New Year’s abuses and paralleling the flourishing of songs for the New Year. Two well-known texts attributed to Parisian Bishops Maurice and Odo of Sully are particularly significant. A vernacular sermon by Maurice of Sully (ca. 1168–1175) is not only one of the first medieval references to the Feast of Circumcision as the New Year, or, as he phrases it the an renues, the renewed year, but also one of the first high medieval condemnations of the pagan practices of New Year’s gift giving and magic.Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1198, Odo of Sully issued a decree that outlined the reform of the liturgy, promoting the singing of polyphony while forbidding “rimos, personas, luminaria herciarum” (“rithmi, masks, and hearse lights”).Footnote ⁶⁷ As late as the fifteenth century, irreverent songs were still being performed. The behavior of priests and clerics in particular is described in a 1445 letter from the theology faculty at the University of Paris in which song is referenced as “cantilenas inhonestas” (“wanton songs”) and “verba impudicissima ac scurrilia” (“scurrilous and unchaste verses”).Footnote ⁶⁸ The complaints of theologians and church authorities are strikingly consistent, with song repeatedly underscored as central to, yet problematic within, New Year’s commemorations.

Not all references to the sonic festivities of the New Year were disciplinary in tone. A fourteenth-century Rituale from the Church of Saint-Martin of Tours records traditions around the festum anni novi along with what appears to be an abbreviated ordo prophetarum and descriptions of song and dance:Footnote ⁶⁹

The description of Saint-Martin of Tours is not dissimilar in spirit to the troped liturgies for the Feast of the Circumcision across France, within which song was regularly interpolated. Referring precisely to these festive liturgies, a 1327 endowment at Notre Dame du Puy prescribes “all-night” celebration of the New Year and the Feast of the Circumcision by means of sacred song, termed lo Bosolari, which is manifested in the troped Circumcision liturgies preserved in Le Puy A and B, two sixteenth-century manuscripts with contents and structure shared with earlier thirteenth-century sources such as Sens 46 and LoA.Footnote ⁷¹ While music making for the New Year frequently met with hostility, alternatives to scurrilous songs and dances made their way into the rites of medieval churches through troped liturgies.

The festive complex of January 1 also forms the central poetic discourse of dozens of Latin songs beginning in the twelfth century, some integrated into troped liturgies for the Feast of the Circumcision and others disseminated in songbooks and tropers.Footnote ⁷² All the songs highlight the plurality of the date and its ritual associations in one way or another. Since January 1 was also the Octave of Christmas, many of the songs were equally appropriate for the Nativity, linking the New Year with Christ’s birth as well as his Circumcision. This is the case for Procedenti puero, whose strophes detail the Virgin Mary’s giving birth to Christ while the refrain repeatedly exhorts joy in the New Year: “Eia, this is the new year! Give the glory of praise; God is made both man and immortal.”Footnote ⁷³ The New Year is invoked in calendrical terms too, as in a conductus sung at Lauds on the Feast of the Circumcision at Beauvais and Sens, Kalendas ianuarias. The conductus begins by calling on Christ to make the first day of the year a sober occasion – probably an implied commentary on the proclivity of clerics to celebrate the Kalends in a less than solemn fashion.Footnote ⁷⁴

The symbolic staff or baculus associated with the boy bishop and featuring in clerical festivities, variously termed the Feast of Fools or Feast of the Staff, likewise finds ample expression in songs for the New Year, always carefully framed within the theology of the occasion. In the Latin refrain song Annus renascitur, for example, the “renewed year” is the occasion for worship of the staff (“baculus colitur”), couched within a series of familiar seasonal typologies involving the casting off of the old and welcoming of the new.Footnote ⁷⁵ The theme of novelty serves as a key strategy for linking the popular celebrations of January 1, with the theology of the church year and its feasts, in particular the Feast of the Circumcision and the Octave of the Nativity. Repetitively focusing on newness, New Year’s songs and texts meditate on the theological resonance of calendrical novelty with Christ’s Birth and Circumcision. The newness of the New Song effortlessly functioned as a typology for the temporal confluence of birth of Christ, his Circumcision, and the New Year.

This relationship is made explicit in two sermons by Richard of St-Victor written around the middle of the twelfth century.Footnote ⁷⁶ Not only does Richard explicate the relationship between the metaphorical New Song and the New Year, but he brings to the fore a plethora of related novelties and renewals in an effort to recontextualize the New Year within a theological framework. In a brief and little-discussed sermon designated “in novo anno,” Richard employs a line from the Psalms on the New Song as his theme: “Sing ye to the Lord a new canticle: because he hath done wonderful things” (“Cantate Domino canticum novum, quia mirabilia fecit”) (Psalm 97:1). Throughout the sermon, Richard elaborates on the significance of the “New Song” with simple, repetitive language, emphasizing the typological replacement of the Old with the New, frequently in terms of song: “Song is life. New song, new life. Old song, old life. New life of justice, old life of sin” (“Canticum est vita. Canticum novum, vita nova. Canticum vetus, vita vetus. Nova vita justitia, vetus vita culpa”).Footnote ⁷⁷ Even more remarkable is another sermon by Richard, this time for the Feast of the Circumcision. His awareness of the duality of January 1 as the Feast of the Circumcision and the New Year is made abundantly clear in a litanic and rhetorical rumination on novelty:

With each new pairing, newness infuses the sermon text, ending with a statement of renewal based on Christ and his Circumcision and the renewal of the world with the arrival of the New Year: “We are renewed in the new man through the new circumcision, in this new year, in this world, so that in it [the New Year] we may win the right to be renewed in heaven.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Richard’s sermon is made more intriguing by a passage detailing descriptions of secular New Year’s activities familiar from the earlier critiques. While his emphasis on novelty in the sermon has largely escaped notice, his condemnatory remarks in the same sermon have been widely cited in scholarship on New Year’s abuses, in which priests and clerics are singled out, as is the performance of “vain and foolish rhythmic poetry” and even clapping.Footnote ⁸⁰ Rarely mentioned in scholarship citing this condemnation is its larger textual context in a New Year’s sermon. This passage lies in the midst of a longer address, which, while decrying certain types of excessive behavior, emphasizes themes and vocabulary repeatedly foregrounded in medieval Latin New Year’s songs. Even while condemning foolish, unchaste, or wanton song, Richard nevertheless hints at an appreciation of “New Songs” celebrating the “New Year” – as long as the latter is understood as an allegory for Christ’s Circumcision and the former are far from “vain and foolish.”

Among extant “New Songs” for the New Year, some prominently feature the seasonal refrain “annus novus,” which repeatedly emphasizes the New Year in a rhetorical parallel to Richard’s sermon (see Table 1.7). “Annus novus” repeats both within songs in refrains and as a repeated strophic incipit, as well as among songs, forming a broad discursive and intertextual network of poems distinguished by the temporal marker. Mirroring springtime exordia or Natureingangen, the poetic topos of the “new year” functions as a signal of time, situating each song within a particular calendrical moment.Footnote ⁸¹ Within the larger corpus of songs for the New Year, this collection of annus novus songs more acutely refracts, navigates, and resolves tensions inherent in January 1 as a day of temporal and festive plurality. The “annus novus” refrain and exordium in Latin song specifically frame the New Year by acknowledging the plurality of January 1 – and, indeed, its popularized rather than official identity as the New Year – while emphasizing its liturgical identity. The repetition of the “new year” in the Latin song enables, akin to Richard’s sermon, a rhetorical reclaiming of the feast day and its novelty for the church and its calendar.

While the repetition of “annus novus” within and across the songs functions as an intra- and intertextual “virtual” refrain, all but three songs additionally employ structural refrains (Anni novi novitas, Anni novi prima die, Annus novus in gaudio, Ecce novus annus est, Novus annus dies magnus, and both versions of Novus annus hodie) and in two songs “annus novus” appears within the refrain itself (Circa canit Michael and Procedenti puero). Two songs survive without notation: Anni novi reditus, a rithmus appended to a letter by Gui de Basoches, and Anni novi rediit novitas in the Carmina Burana, although the latter is transmitted alongside notated songs. While not widely disseminated, the songs emanate from a variety of contexts across Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Significantly, the Moosburger Graduale and manuscripts with troped liturgies for the Feast of the Circumcision are among the sources transmitting New Year’s songs, along with songbooks and tropers, including F and Tours 927, for example. Many of the songs in Table 1.7, in other words, are part of either calendrically and liturgically ordered song collections or liturgies for the January 1 feast day. Notably, five songs refer either to their position within a liturgical rite or are included in a troped Feast of the Circumcision: Anni novi circulus, Annus novus in gaudio, Ecce novus annus est, Novus annus dies magnus, and Novus annus hodie.Footnote ⁸² Songs like Ecce novus annus est in the Moosburger Graduale do not have a specific liturgical position, but rubrication (and the evidence of Johannes de Perchausen’s preface) supports its performance adjacent to the liturgy – the rubric in this case is “Ad novum annum.”Footnote ⁸³

Each song explores the pluralistic identity of the medieval New Year. At the farthest remove from the thematic core of these New Year’s songs is Anni novi rediit novitas in the Carmina Burana. Although beginning with the same topos of renewal (“New year has brought renewing; winter’s gone, short daylight lengthens …”), it becomes clear that the seasonal exordium serves a similar function in Latin as it does in vernacular song – to contextualize a love song.Footnote ⁸⁴ The remaining songs, by contrast, trade solely in devotional themes, focusing attention on the New Year as an anchor for different forms of calendrical, theological, and liturgical exegesis. In all cases, poets set the scene temporally through “annus novus,” while refocusing attention on the church, its members, and sanctioned festivities.

A significant intervention of the Latin New Year’s song is its explicit linking of the New Year and the Feast of Circumcision. Although frequently associated in sermons such as Richard of St-Victor’s, the earliest poetic suturing of feast and calendar day is in Anni novi prima die. Transmitted in the now-destroyed twelfth-century Hortus Deliciarum, an illuminated encyclopedia compiled by Abbess Herrad of Landsberg for novices at Hohenburg Abbey, Alsace, the neumed Anni novi prima die is preceded by the rubric “de circumcisione Domini” and its developing refrain focuses on the rite of circumcision:Footnote ⁸⁵

The refrain makes the rubric virtually unnecessary, since circumcision is the song’s primary, repeated message; strophe 4 also refers directly to circumcision with the “festum cole” (Feast of the Staff or penis). Moreover, the refrain itself features internal repetition, with thrice repeated words (“dum,” then “qui”) beginning each reiteration, first emphasizing the temporal immediacy of the ritual and then the personhood of Christ. All five strophes, by contrast to the variable refrain incipit, begin with the identical “anni novi” incipit and focus on identifying and expanding upon the “when” and “who” of the refrain. The song layers repetition in semantically meaningful ways – refrain and strophes together emphasize the temporality of the song, the ritual act of Circumcision, and themes of novelty through repetition.

The use of repetition to emphasize the New Year and novelty is a striking feature of both Richard’s Circumcision sermon and Latin New Year’s songs, as Anni novi prima die illustrates. In Anni novi novitas in the Moosburger Graduale, for example, the first strophe functions much like Richard’s sermon with its litany of newness, employing rhetorical figures of repetition, including annominatio and traductio, to extend and amplify the theme of novelty:Footnote ⁸⁶

The refrain of Circa canit Michael similarly plays with the stem “nov-,” its morphemic repetition creating a tongue-twister of a refrain that situates the joys of Christ’s birth in the strophes within the context of the New Year:

Across New Year’s songs, the opening rhetorical gesture to time is drawn repetitively throughout strophes and refrains, constructing a meta-refrain of novelty that resonates within and between songs.Footnote ⁸⁷

Indicative of this saturation, the incipital repetition of “annus novus” in Anni novi prima die finds a parallel in Annus novus in gaudio. An example of “successively notated polyphony” from the twelfth-century versus repertoire in St-M A, Annus novus in gaudio similarly includes a refrain and incipital repetition on “annus novus” in each strophe.Footnote ⁸⁸ In this case, the noun–adjective pair “annus novus” is systematically declined throughout the song, each strophe grammatically distinct yet repetitive, and always beginning with a statement on the New Year.Footnote ⁸⁹ An example of annominatio, a rhetorical figure whose numerous manifestations include the use of the same word in different inflections, the emphasis on the New Year is unmistakable:Footnote ⁹⁰

The incipital declension of annus novus throughout the song creates a virtual strophic refrain that mirrors the structural refrain between strophes; as with Anni novi prima die, repetition is layered on top of an already repetitive framework. However, Annus novus in gaudio avoids the topic of circumcision – the focus is on the celebration of the New Year under the cantor’s leadership.

The song plays a functional role, however, in the festive liturgy for the Circumcision at Vespers in Le Puy A. Yet rather than aligning the feast and calendar day, as in Anni novi prima die, Annus novus in gaudio centers on the manner in which an unnamed community celebrates the New Year, positioning festive song for that day under the auspices of the authoritative figure of the cantor. This is especially significant in light of the role of the cantor in religious communities – they were responsible for “keeping the time,” calculating the feasts of the liturgical year using the computus, keeping track of the liturgical calendar, its seasons, and its accompanying chant, and in some cases writing new music for feasts.Footnote ⁹² In Annus novus in gaudio, the cantor is further linked to the keeping of time by virtue of their identity as the celebrative figurehead of the New Year and the leader of its musical festivities. Although the Feast of the Circumcision is poetically sidelined, the song nevertheless takes up the task of moderating the sound world of January 1, calling on the singers to praise the cantor with “tota … ars musica.”Footnote ⁹³ In other words, Annus novus in gaudio implicitly disciplines music for the New Year by positioning the cantor – the authority behind liturgical time and its musical expression – as the object of praise.

Like Annus novus in gaudio, not all New Year’s songs make reference to Christ’s Circumcision as the focal point of January 1. Several songs similarly elide Circumcision in favor of other aspects of January 1 festivities, coordinating the New Year with, for instance, the Feast of the Staff, or Baculus (Anni novi novitas and Anni novi reditus), albeit always with a theological overlay. Only one of the songs in Table 1.7, Novus annus hodie, refers to gift giving, a New Year’s practice inherited from antiquity and widely decried by church authorities, although it becomes a focus in later French New Year’s songs.Footnote ⁹⁴ Novus annus hodie survives in two forms with closely related texts: in Munich 21053, it is a refrain-form Benedicamus Domino song-trope; in Sens 46 it is a refrain song with a related text but entirely distinct and lengthy refrain, rubricated as “Conductus ad bacularium”; finally, in F, it is a three-voice conductus with only a single strophe and iteration of the refrain of the version in Sens 46.Footnote ⁹⁵ While the poem in Munich 21053 explicitly refers to the Circumcision (“in hac circumciditur”), the version in F and Sens 46 refers only to the “novus annus” as a “festum annuale,” annual feast, involving song and celebration. Yet, the vocabulary of sobriety and moderation frequently found in the Latin refrain song appears here too in the refrain of Novus annus hodie in F and Sens 46, further linking song with the allegorical gifts of mouth, heart, and good works:

Novus annus hodie avoids describing the “horizontal” or reciprocal exchange of gifts between people, as expressed in later French chansons; instead, the refrain focuses on offering a “vertical” seasonal tribute, directed heavenward.Footnote ⁹⁷ In Latin New Year’s songs, the gift of song is thus a spiritual rather than literal offering, folding a frequently censured ritual practice for the New Year into a devotional framework.

As an exordium and/or refrain, annus novus serves as a marker of time that initiates rhetorically rich meditations on novelty while also bringing into alignment varied ways in which the calendar day was celebrated by religious and lay communities throughout Europe. More than an opening gambit or formulaic marker of genre, “annus novus” and its related expressions of novelty saturate the poetic sound world of the New Year’s songs in ways that signal underlying cultural and theological discourses. What the New Year’s song does particularly well is straddle the line between the festivities for 1 January often decried by church authorities and sanctioned forms of music making and entertainment that revolve around the liturgy for Circumcision. The New Year’s song also survives within manuscript sources that frame and reform the musical experience of seasonal and liturgical time, including troped liturgies for the liturgical feast day and song collections of choirboys such as in the Moosburger Graduale. In the hands of poets and composers, song and refrain become expressive pivots in discourses around the New Year and its varied customs, bringing into the musical realm Richard of St-Victor’s meditation on theological novelty and new songs at the turn of the year.

Conclusion: Contexts for the Latin Refrain Song

Although not all refrain songs engage in poetic and performative discourses around time, the majority of songs and sources beginning in the thirteenth century are attuned to, and aligned with, the medieval year. Attending to how the Latin refrain song was framed in relation to time poetically, and within manuscript sources by poets, composers, scribes, and compilers, permits new insights into questions of transmission, performance, and cultural function. Manuscript sources bear witness to the explicit regulation of festive time by means of the refrain song, underlining the intervention of Latin song at the calendrical moments most in need of musical disciplining. The performance of the Latin refrain and refrain song is positioned in medieval sources and in the poetry itself precisely at times of heightened tension in the ritual and musical commemoration of the calendar year. This is most acute in New Year’s refrains and refrain songs, the thematically and textually linked group of works playing with the structural and inter/intratextual identity of the refrain while also poetically navigating the contested identities of January 1.

Situating the creation, transmission, and performance of the Latin refrain and refrain song within the calendar year confirms the embeddedness of the repertoire within clerical, monastic, and pedagogical institutions. The individuals and communities identifiable in sources and songs, including named figures and ranks such as Johannes de Perchausen, Bishop Richard Ledrede, anonymous cantors, and the clergy in Paris at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, are precisely those for whom the pluralistic medieval year had the greatest valency. Religious communities were tasked with not only computing time, but also navigating the year by means of chant and ritual. Rather than solely reflecting the “sacralization of time” enacted by chant and tropes, however, the refrain song enabled religious communities to reconcile calendrical, seasonal, and festive time in music, bolstering the calendar of the church while offering a way to experience and reframe time in song.Footnote ⁹⁸