This article explores creative processes in the many settings of the prosula BENEDICAMUS in laude ihesu, transmitted in a large number of European manuscripts during a period of at least three hundred years. The fourteen different polyphonic elaborations reveal a desire for multi-voiced performance shared across the whole period and geographical area under discussion. Moreover, while many of the compositional techniques are similarly widespread, the individual settings remain insistently discrete, suggesting that it was more common for a community to produce its own version of the chant than to absorb another community’s practices. This study includes a list of all known sources with polyphonic inscriptions of the prosula, highlighting the hitherto unrecognized prominence of BENEDICAMUS in laude ihesu in musical and liturgical traditions of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries.
