Throughout medieval Europe, male and female religious communities attached to churches, abbeys, and schools participated in devotional music making outside of the chanted liturgy. Newly collating over 400 songs from primary sources, this book reveals the role of Latin refrains and refrain songs in the musical lives of religious communities by employing novel interdisciplinary and analytical approaches to the study of medieval song. Through interpretive frameworks focused on time and temporality, performance, memory, inscription, and language, each chapter offers an original perspective on how refrains were created, transmitted, and performed. Arguing for the Latin refrain's significance as a marker of form and meaning, this book identifies it as a tool that communities used to negotiate their lived experiences of liturgical and calendrical time; to confirm their communal identity and belonging to song communities; and to navigate relationships between Latin and vernacular song and dance that emerge within their multilingual contexts.

'What does the medieval refrain do in Latin song?, asks Mary Channen Caldwell at the opening of her engaging new study. A very great deal, as it turns out. Throughout Devotional Refrains, she argues for refrains as carrying multivalent musical and cultural meanings, beautifully demonstrating their often overlapping devotional, temporal, structural, and performative implications.'

Rachel May Golden - University of Tennessee

‘Panoramas open up a feeling of space. Caldwell is to be congratulated for creating such a feeling in her book, not only by laying out a wide range of material but also by challenging former assumptions around the refrain. The book can proudly take its place within historiography on medieval Latin song and can be considered a substantial contribution to that more agile structuralism in recent song studies, which does not shy away from big data, refines analytical tools, and relishes fuzziness.’

Jeremy Llewellyn Source: Speculum