Chapter 4 explores the memorial aspects of the Latin refrain and its circulation between genres and among works, demonstrating how the Latin refrain and refrain song participate in an extensive, and at times complicated network of textual and musical borrowing, reworking, and repetition. These intertextual and intermusical networks include refrains that are reworked from other genres, most often chant; refrains that are employed structurally across different songs; and refrains that are recycled more freely among songs. Although relying on the written side of the Latin refrain’s transmission, these forms of intertextuality are underpinned by the lived experiences of the individuals and communities who performed, remembered, and wrote down Latin song and refrain; singers, scribes, and compilers are the unnamed agents driving the recycling of Latin refrains. Chapter 4 concludes with a case study of two fourteenth-century sources from an Austrian abbey that considers how the inscription of refrains within this monastic community evidences an evolving, living practice of remembering, singing, copying, and reusing Latin refrains.

Chapter 3 focuses on the implications of the refrain for performance, reappraising its role as a marker of responsorial song. The chapter argues that the refrain in devotional Latin song brought individuals and communities together in the moment of performance through the acts of remembering together, responding collectively, and worshipping communally. Drawing on the rhetoric, grammar, form, and musical texture of Latin refrain songs, this Chapter illustrates how poets and composers embedded ideas about performance, community, and communal participation in their compositions. Crucially, the songs themselves define communities rooted in the structures of the church; singers and songs belong to nested and hierarchical communities of clergy, choir, and laypeople, the power relations of which are determined in some cases by rank and in others by age. The efforts of the scribes and compilers who worked within these communities contribute additional layers of information to the meaning and performance of refrains, with rubrication and textual cues offering rare insight into specific contexts for the refrain song’s responsorial performance. Chapter 3 also suggests a relationship between the refrain song’s implicit choreographic identity and the discourses of community conveyed by the refrain.