This fifth volume in Brepols's series of Medieval Church Studies is a translation and partial revision of Gunilla Iversen's Chanter avec les anges. Poésie dans la messe médiévale: interprétations et commentaires (Paris, 2001). It will be welcomed by all who know Iversen's work and particularly those in English-speaking countries who teach medieval literature, liturgy and music. As a volume introducing, analysing and contextualising the vast repertories of ‘post-Gregorian' Mass texts, it is an important resource, and its fine presentation, with six colour plates and forty-four black-and-white manuscript images, makes it a handsome one too.

Iversen modestly describes Laus angelica as a ‘personal and arbitrary’ selection of examples of Mass poetry from the repertories of tropes and sequences which proliferated across Europe from the tenth century onwards (p. 281). Given the breadth and variety of genres studied and the sheer number of chants extant, it is unlikely that any such survey could fail to be anything but ‘personal’. Iversen is in fact an ideal guide to this liturgical poetry as an experienced editor of several volumes of the invaluable Corpus Troporum series and author of many articles on tropes to the Ordinary of the Mass in particular. The chapter on the poetry of Hildegard of Bingen is perhaps the only part of the book which feels a little ‘arbitrary’, given its lack of direct connection to the Mass, but its inclusion can be justified through its consonance with the didactic purpose of the volume and Iversen's evident delight in Hildegard's often frustratingly oblique style.

The book is structured along the lines of a celebration of the Mass, beginning with the introit and its tropes and continuing with texted Kyries, Gloria tropes, sequences (with chapters on both the early and the late styles), and Sanctus and Agnus Dei tropes. The placement of the six colour plates at the liturgical division of the Mass between sequence and Sanctus is a nice touch. Each chapter begins with an introduction to the genre, including exegesis from medieval liturgical commentators such as Amalar of Metz, Rabanus Maurus, Aurelian, Sicard of Cremona and Jean Beleth. These authors are cited at length with translation provided in parallel columns, a feature intended to improve on the French volume which placed the translations after the original Latin, and this does greatly aid the legibility of the text. The embedding of many of the black-and-white images into the text is also an improvement in both presentation and ease of reference. One change which might have been welcome would have been to trim some of Iversen's introductions to the quotations, which are often a near-exact repetition of the quotation itself. In chapters where there are a significant number of such redundant paraphrases, this can become irritating; some cuts here might have benefited the flow of the text.

The translators, as modest as Iversen herself, claim that the parallel English translations of the many chant texts, such as those of the commentaries, eschew the ‘élan of the French translations’ (p. xvii); this, of course, makes them model translations for students of these often obscure texts and excellent examples for teaching. The authors make it clear where ambiguous or ‘faulty’ grammar in the Latin renders translation difficult and meaning obscure, a regular feature of these liturgical texts where ‘musical’ aspects of the poetry such as assonance override grammatical precision or clarity. Iversen's analysis of these texts not only explores such aesthetic aspects but also draws on a deep well of knowledge of Scripture and the Fathers in order to guide the reader through the themes and rhetoric which shape them. She has a real sympathy and admiration not only for the poetry but also for the men and women who made it, and is a great advocate for further study, particularly of the Ordinary tropes – these as yet have not received the attention they deserve compared to that lavished on sequences and even Proper tropes.

Space does not allow Iversen to explore the specific material, social and institutional contexts of the texts she studies, so that the complicated transmission of these chants and their subsequent problematic ontology is left untreated. Broad regional and chronological trends are outlined, but local variation, adaptation and appropriation is mostly left out of the picture. The texts are thus left to stand in (splendid) isolation within the general exegetical context provided by commentators and the other texts Iversen brings to them; this is partly a necessity of the volume's status as survey and introduction, a florilegium of choice examples and textual criticism, but some intimation that things are not so simple would have been welcome. Although Iversen is not a musicologist, and the music for these chants is thus never specifically discussed, she constantly reminds the reader that these were texts to be sung, and adds a valuable final chapter detailing and interpreting the large number of words and phrases used in the sequences and tropes to describe music and singing. One might have wished for a similar glossary of rhetorical and metrical terminology, especially in a volume which could well be used by students as an introduction to medieval Latin liturgical poetry. This is slight criticism, however, as Iversen for the most part manages to analyse the texts without recourse to a great amount of technical vocabulary, and her explanations are clear and uncomplicated.

As an advocate for this important but neglected aspect of Medieval culture, Iversen is enthusiastic and engaging, and it is greatly to be hoped that this volume will find a place on the shelves of academic libraries throughout the world. The translation is a great success, and the result is a book which can only do good for the study of these repertories.