This monumental book is an exemplary case study of liturgy and religious life based on the close analysis of chant books used in a particular church, the convent in Kraków (Poland) founded in 1397 by Carmelite friars from the order's house in Prague. Boyce, the foremost scholar of Carmelite chant, focuses here on the convent's six extant medieval antiphoners and its thirty post-Tridentine liturgical manuscripts, revealing the continuity in the community's chant traditions over the centuries and the renewal of its repertory well into the eighteenth century. (The complete contents of all the manuscripts are listed in the appendix.) Not only does he present a corpus of material that has been relatively inaccessible to western scholars because of political as well as linguistic barriers, but he also demonstrates the methods by which the study of chant can yield a wealth of information on institutional identity, local history, and cultural responses to church reform.

The first chapter gives a brief history of the Carmelite order and of the Kraków convent. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the Carmelites' liturgy (introduced in the larger context of the liturgical practices of the religious orders) from its origins in the rite of the Holy Sepulcher to the ordinal of Sibert of Beka (1312) and the order's constitutions of 1357. Chapter 3 analyzes the contents of the six medieval choir books from the Kraków convent. A comparison of the Carmelite calendar to those of other religious orders frames the close consideration of distinctively Carmelite traditions such as the Commemoration of the Resurrection, the feast of St. Lazarus, and the feast of the Patriarchs Abraham Isaac, and Jacob. Boyce discusses the distinctively Carmelite versions of universal feasts such as the Transfiguration, Saint Anne, Mary Magdalen, and the Marian feasts (including the Conception and Our Lady of the Snows, for which the Kraków manuscripts preserve the Bohemian office tradition). The Kraków convent was dedicated to the feast of the Visitation, which was promulgated by Boniface IX in 1389 with the aim of ending the western schism. Boyce argues that the choice of this feast, with its eastern origins, is especially significant given the connection between Boniface and Queen Jadwiga, who invited the Carmelites to Kraków and also hoped to reunite the eastern and western churches. The Bohemian Carmelite version of this office in a Kraków choir book suggests the close relationship that Jadwiga promoted between Kraków and Prague through the Carmelite order.

The presence in the earliest antiphoner of the Kraków Carmelites of rhymed offices for Saints Wenceslaus, Ludmila, and Elizabeth of Hungary shows the influence of regional liturgical traditions; Carmelites elsewhere did not venerate these saints. Since the Carmelite liturgy was (at least in theory) uniform throughout the order rather than adopting regional traditions, the observance of such local saints' cults is noteworthy. The last part of chapter 3 examines chants that are of particular interest because they are rare or because their melodies were adapted from other chants, creating new relationships between the feasts on which the chants were sung.

Chapter 4 analyzes the Kraków convent's liturgy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including the changes made to render Carmelite feasts more Roman after the Council of Trent, and the new saints added to the calendar. For instance, the feast of the sixteenth-century Florentine Carmelite nun Saint Mary Magdalen de' Pazzi replaced the medieval Carmelite feast of the Three Marys. De'Pazzi's importance in Kraków shows the increasing influence of local cults on the convent's liturgy. Some of the order's medieval feasts, such as that of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, survive only in manuscripts of the early modern period and so are discussed in this chapter as well. One of the most remarkable post-Tridentine manuscripts from Kraków is a gradual produced in 1644, whose elaborate historiated initials Boyce interprets as “vehicles for promoting Counter Reformation doctrine as defined by the Council of Trent and for expressing particularly Carmelite values” (309). Boyce relates the iconography of an initial depicting the first Carmelites to the longstanding problem that the Carmelite order lacked a foundation legend; the special veneration of the prophet Elijah, which included a proper feast beginning in 1450, resulted in part from the need to identify a founder of the order. In the early modern period, the medieval antiphoners of Kraków still in use were updated in accordance with the Carmelite order's revision of its liturgy in response to Trent, causing certain offices to be replaced with new ones. As in chapter 3, the concluding section of chapter 4 presents musical features of the chants, in particular the extent to which newer versions conform to older ones. Boyce also considers the evidence for the application of post-Tridentine precepts of Latin prosody in the newly composed or revised chant melodies.

Throughout the book, Boyce sets the specific features of Carmelite liturgical usage into the broader context of the order's history and spirituality, as well as relating the liturgy specifically to the history of the Kraków convent. The organization of the whole is admirably clear, so that those who may not delve into the analyses and comparisons of the chant melodies in the choir books will benefit from the lucid syntheses that appear at key structural points of the volume. The ample explanatory background Boyce offers will enable all readers to follow the more technical discussions of chant and liturgy that are illustrated by numerous tables, musical examples, and figures. Carmelite Liturgy is recommended reading for church historians and musicologists alike, for it attests to fundamental musical and liturgical practices that shaped the profile and culture of a religious order and one of its houses over the centuries.