The volume under review is a worthy addition to the long-established Historia project of the Cantus Planus study group of the International Musicological Society. It maintains the high standards of previous offerings with an edition of a saint's office that will appeal to both scholars and performers.

St Hilary of Poitiers, the saint honoured by this office, preserved complete and incomplete in several versions, was, like the more famous Athanasius of Alexandria (296/298–373), a staunch a defender of Nicene orthodoxy against Arius and his followers. Hilary was born to pagan parents, probably in Arles, c.315. He converted to Christianity and was elected, as a married man with a daughter, as perhaps the first bishop of Poitiers in 350. Six years later, in punishment for opposing a pro-Arian bishop backed by the emperor, he was exiled to Phrygia, where he familiarised himself with eastern theology. Back in Gaul by 360, Hilary continued to confront heterodox bishops. In alliance with Eusebius of Vercelli he attempted (unsuccessfully) to have the Arian bishop of Milan, Auxentius, deposed. (Auxentius held on to his position until his death in 374, when he was succeeded by Ambrose.) Hilary composed a number of Scripture commentaries, including a Tractatus mysteriorum, which interpreted the Old Testament in allegorical terms. His most important dogmatic treatise, De Trinitate (De fide adversus Arianos), necessarily had a polemical aspect, given the need to clarify the relationship between the divine and human natures in Christ. Three abecedarian hymns (one incomplete) are also credited to him.Footnote ¹ Hilary died at Poitiers in 367 or 368. His feast day is celebrated on 13 January; he was named a ‘Doctor of the Church’ by Pope Pius IX in 1851.

The edition of the office is preceded by an exemplary introduction, whose subdivisions are clearly laid out in the table of contents. (The reader will discover immediately from the two-column layout that this a bilingual publication, in English and French.)Footnote ² Pages 4–19 of the introduction provide an excellent overview, amply footnoted with primary and secondary sources, of Hilary's life and the development of his cult. The texts of the chants and readings (derived from the saint's vita written by Venantius Fortunatus, bishop of Poitiers from 600) allude to Hilary's heroic defence of orthodoxy, but the miracles attributed to him are by no means neglected.

Haggh-Huglo has identified three offices of St Hilary: two follow the secular cursus, one the monastic. The secular form of the office (nine psalms and nine lessons at Matins) is preserved in five manuscripts, among them one from Säckingen (Baden-Württemberg). According to a legend Hilary's relics were transferred there by an Irish missionary, Fridolin, who had an intense devotion to the holy bishop. This explains devotion to him in a locale at no little remove from Poitiers. The earliest source of the secular office (though incomplete) is the well-known antiphoner Toledo, Biblioteca capitular 44.1 (c.1023, from Sant Sadurní of Tavèrnoles according to Lila Collamore).

The manuscript that forms the basis of the edition is a secular breviary from Saintes (BNF lat. 16309; second half of the thirteenth century).Footnote ³ Notated on a four-line staff drawn in red ink, it is the only source to contain all the texts and music for the chants, hymns, lessons, prayers and rubrics for office and Mass (common of a confessor bishop).Footnote ⁴ To explain the presence of a special Hilary office at Saintes, Haggh-Huglo offers the reasonable hypothesis that Alphonse, count of Poitou and Saintonge, Poitiers and Toulouse, whose patronage extended to Saintes, promoted the veneration of Hilary in that city. To be sure, Hilary's memory was not neglected in the diocese of Poitiers: by the early fourteenth century there were 112 churches dedicated to him.

A monastic version of the office with a different antiphon series in adiastematic notation is preserved in a twelfth-century addition to the celebrated tenth-century tonary from Saint-Bénigne de Dijon (Montpellier, Bibl. Interuniversitaire de Médecine, H 159). A facsimile and transcription of this office is provided in Supplement 5 A/B of the edition.

Haggh-Huglo dates the composition of Hilary's office within a rather broad time frame: 816 to 930. The first date is that of a letter of Nidibrius of Narbonne to Abbot Helisachar concerning the proper textual link between the end of a responsory verse and the final phrase of the respond that followed it. The responsories of the Hilary office correspond to this ideal, but whether the compiler of the responsory texts just followed what might seem to be a logical course or whether he was influenced by the aforesaid letter cannot be known. The terminus ad quem (930, the year of Hucbald's death) is calculated from the fact that the antiphons and responsories are not modally ordered (1 to 8), as came to be the norm for newly composed offices.

The melodic style of the pieces (antiphons and responsories) is not exceptional, but there are occasional melismatic flashes – one on the first syllable of the doxology of the ninth responsory of Matins, O princeps egregie (p. 70) and (perhaps to make a point) on the first word of ‘perhenni gloria’ (‘[with] eternal glory’) of the responsory Beatissimus vir Hylarius (p. 87).

Appendices 1 and 2 present comparative tables of the contents of notated manuscripts with the ‘secular or canonical’ and monastic offices, respectively. There are, in all, eight appendices that organise material from disparate sources. The indexes facilitate finding chants and readings (or mentions thereof) by title or genre – even those not present in the lat. 16309 manuscript that forms the basis of the edition.

A brief review cannot do justice to the thoroughness with which Haggh-Huglo has assembled materials, notated and unnotated, that relate to the celebration of Hilary's office. While fulfilling all the demands of scholarship, the publication is also an excellent performing edition. The music is well spaced and matched to the text syllables. Melodic variants are reported in immediately following tables, thereby leaving the notated music unencumbered. Whatever is not provided – for example, the texts of the invitatory and psalms – can be easily supplied.Footnote ⁵ The only corrections I might propose are: ‘communi’ (p. 50) should be ‘commemoratione’ as elsewhere (p. 79), and ‘morebatur’ (p. 58, stave 2) must be a misprint for ‘merebatur’.

At the end of the introduction, Professor Haggh-Huglo generously acknowledges the assistance of all those who helped her to bring this excellent edition, dedicated to the memory of Michel Huglo, to publication by the Institute of Mediæval Music, now under the direction of Debra Lacoste.