In September 2004, the Centre for Medieval Studies in Trondheim hosted an international symposium during which chant scholars shared their research on offertories and their verses. The book is comprised of eight different perspectives presented during the conference. It is the third volume in a series published by the Centre for Medieval Studies, the first two of which focused solely on Norwegian chant sources. The present volume includes chant developments across Europe from late Antiquity to the high Middle Ages. The articles included describe offertory research that contests old assumptions, presents recent analyses and poses new questions to focus future work.

In his introduction, Roman Hankeln isolates three main concerns in offertory research. First, the variance in manuscript tradition poses complications for modern transcription and understanding. Second, the unreliable dating of individual offertories needs to be addressed. Third, he acknowledges a general lack of information concerning the musical style of offertories which hinders otherwise productive methods of musical analysis. In light of these problems, he groups the articles in the book into four broad topics: the early history of the offertory; form and style of the offertory; tropes in the offertory repertory; and interpretation through performance.

Joseph Dyer's article, ‘The Roman Offertory: An Introduction and Some Hypotheses’ opens the section on the early history of the offertory. He argues that offertories were not created to accompany the congregational procession to the altar before the Eucharist in the early Church, as previously assumed, but that they appear quite suddenly in the liturgy of seventh-century Rome, as a chant to be sung while the pope comes down to his congregation to accept their offerings. Dyer theorises that the most likely donors of these gifts were the new urban aristocracy in Rome, the ‘elite military war-lords’ whose favour and respect was important to the church. Therefore, the offertory might have been created in response to a shift in the political landscape in which the church had become dependent on the lay aristocracy to provide necessities and back their religious authority. Some musical characteristics of the early offertories correspond to Dyer's theory of their creation, including their formulaic nature and the widely applicable subject matter of their texts. The amount of vivid, historical detail used here to set the scene reminds the reader that a chant's origin and its societal, practical context are inextricable.

Andreas Pfisterer's ‘Super flumina Babylonis: On the Prehistory of a Roman Offertory’ examines one offertory in particular. Textual and musical characteristics are treated equally as clues to the origin of this chant. First, Pfisterer groups together manuscripts which negotiate the textually awkward placement of the repetenda in one of several ways, revealing that only the St Gall tradition does so in a way that accommodates the text's meaning. Then he explains the offertory melody and ambiguous modal assignments, drawing attention to a musical quotation in the melisma of the last verse. He concludes that the text and music were probably taken from an African tradition and assimilated into the Roman style, although he points out that it is difficult to comment on the musical characteristics since these remain relatively unstudied. Pfisterer's work on Super flumina Babylonis serves as an excellent model for future studies of single offertories, taking thorough account of both text and music.

The final article dedicated to the origins of the offertory is Ruth Steiner's study of Recordare mei Domine. Steiner traces the initial history of a section of the Lectio dealing with Judith and Esther where certain interpolations by translators and editors have been added to the Esther texts to make them more like the texts of Judith. These interjections stand in contrast to the older, Biblical texts based on the Greek. Two versions of the melody occur as well, first as an offertory and then as a responsory. Steiner shows that a reworked melody appearing in a group of northern Italian and Austro-German sources is then used for the offertory, to distinguish it from the responsory version in which the text was bisected into ‘respond’ and ‘verse’ and a melisma placed at the end of the first section. She notes that this type of research has become possible only lately, with the aid of recent dissertations on the subject,Footnote ¹ and the existence of large electronic databases such as CANTUS (http://publish.uwo.ca/~cantus) and modern critical editions of the repertory. Limitations of space prevent Steiner from explaining at length how she envisions the reworking of an old tune in a pre-Roman rite so that it becomes a viable Roman offertory: perhaps this is deliberately tantalising, and another way of inspiring future research.

Two studies fall under Hankeln's second topic of ‘Form and Style’: Rebecca Maloy's ‘Problems of Pitch Level and Modal Structure in Some Gregorian Offertories’ and Giacomo Baroffio's ‘The Melismas in the Gregorian Offertories: A Checklist’. Maloy notes that previous studies have concluded that the typically wide range of offertories is the result of an attempt to negotiate non-diatonic pitches within the notation system, but sees another reason for the alternation of plagal and authentic modes as a means of solving modal structural problems. The musical adjustments ensure that the transition at the repetenda is seamless. She uses three offertories, Anima nostra, Desiderium and In virtute, to describe these adjustments. Maloy's explanation takes modal theory into account in a convincing way, showing that scribes were concerned not only with notation but also with the sound of the chant – a point which should be emphasised as all too often the visual, notational aspects of chant receive much of the scholarly attention while its natural, aural identity remains unconsidered.

Baroffio's study comprises a checklist of the characteristics of offertory melismas, briefly discussed with the aid of many examples. These characteristics include: a descending scale, three internal repetitions, repeated formulas with slight alteration, an ascending scale and ornamentation on a single pitch. A CD-ROM included with this book contains his database, entitled MELISMA: as well as the database itself, a Microsoft Access file made up of 327 records each representing a single melisma according to incipit, word, feast and other identifying features, there are two PDF files exported from it, listing the melismas in order of appearance and in alphabetical order according to incipit. Some of the potential uses for the database are listed, including comparing the treatment of the same word or syllable, or melisma lengths, or the number of melismas in one offertory. Baroffio generously provides his colleagues with the results of his long hours of gathering data and adds to the ‘Open Source’ approach he has taken in so many other fields of chant research. However, the reader is left wondering why he chose not to describe his overall impressions of the data, undoubtedly gained throughout its compilation, even if they are not yet firm enough to form conclusions.

Two articles are dedicated to offertory tropes as another angle from which to approach the repertory. Gunilla Björkvall's contribution, ‘Corpus Troporum Volume XII: Forthcoming Text Edition of Offertory Prosulas’ focuses on three main sections of this edition: the manuscript sources, the base texts for the tropes, and examples taken from the forthcoming publication. Grouping the seventy-four sources (mostly graduals, tropers and sequentiaries) according to provenance and specific variants, she credits both Hankeln and Andreas Haug for their help in clarifying some of the musicological aspects involved in some instances of textual variance. Eight pages of appendices illustrate the different ways in which the texts are analysed in the new edition. The inclusion of Björkvall's study of texts in what is mainly a musicological publication represents the sort of interdisciplinary approach necessary for future research.

The second article concerning tropes is contributed by the editor of this collection, Roman Hankeln. In ‘What does the Prosula Tell? Aquitanian Offertory-Prosulas and their Significance for the History of Offertory Melismas’, Hankeln demonstrates that prosulas may have been used as a mnemonic device to preserve offertory melismas. By comparing Aquitanian sources and isolating three instances of inserted pitches, he imagines a situation whereby ‘competing alternatives’ combine with simple insertions to manage new texts. By studying these slight variants, he addresses the mutable identity of a melisma throughout the transmission process. Hankeln concludes that, while it remains impossible to reconstruct the melisma using only prosulas, comparing variants does offer an impression of a given local tradition. Several explanatory tables are inserted throughout this dense study at the appropriate places (a method which could have come in useful in several other articles as well, instead of relegating them to the end of each article as an appendix). Hankeln's study evokes, but does not actually mention, some of the larger, general questions about chant transmission: how might a melisma be broken up in the mind of the singer? Was this a device to enable accurate recall? And even if not directly used for this purpose, could different ways of parsing the melody affect its stability in performance later?

The final contribution to this collection is by Jerome F. Weber, entitled ‘Offertories with Verses on Sound Recordings’. Weber's article is most appropriately seen as a four-page preface to his twenty-four-page discography following. First, he notes that not everyone knows that offertories have verses at all, and that many recordings do not include them. He then outlines a history of recordings of offertories with their verses, beginning with a recording made in Rome around 1933 and continuing to the present, naming ensembles and directors around the world who specialise in chant interpretation. Weber's extensive discography is of great value, not only because of the exhaustive list of relevant recordings but also because it is arranged alphabetically according to the offertories performed, instead of according to date or ensemble. This enables it to be used by those wishing to compare different interpretations of the same chant, perhaps even Super flumina Babylonis or Recordare mei Domine, as discussed in detail in other articles in this volume. Weber's work goes some way to balancing the historical and analytical aspects of offertory research by reminding us that we must never entirely forsake our ears for our theories.

For the researcher specifically interested in offertories this book is indispensible. To my knowledge, it is unique in its goal of presenting many perspectives and methodologies of experts from around the world, all focused on the same chant genre. Whether readers are interested in offertories for their historical, liturgical, musical or textual characteristics, they will find interesting arguments and relevant research here. More broadly, this collection reflects the present state of chant research in general, outlining the most important concerns on the minds of today's scholars and offering a survey of analytical approaches developed to investigate them. Although each article is necessarily restricted in size, the strength of this collection lies in the number of different authors represented who each offer new questions about old assumptions, mapping out the scholarly landscape for those who would undertake future research.