The large territory of Northern and Central Europe covered in the Middle Ages by the Holy Roman Empire is considered in Chapter 9. We consider the music of mystics and visionaries, including St Hildegard of Bingen and the Dutch-speaking Hadewijch. Religious reform movements in northern areas and in Bohemia, including Modern Devotion and Utraquism, had important consequences for liturgical singing, and we observe the survival in these areas of polyphonic traditions apparently dating back to the centuries considered in Chapter 2. In the courtly environment, the Minnesingers took up the traditions of the troubadours, cultivating a distinctive approach to song in Middle High German and Middle Dutch. This chapter concludes with a manuscript of song whose name is well known but whose contents are difficult to classify: the thirteenth-century Carmina Burana juxtaposes Latin and vernacular, notated and un-notated, and the religious and secular, to a remarkable degree.

This chapter studies the Trinitarian theology of Jan van Ruusbroec and his ideal of the common life. It finishes with a short examination of the remarkable movement known as the Devotio Moderna (Modern Devotion), founded by Geert Grote.