This article traces the history of chants associated with the Adoration of a replica of the cross. It describes the development of an antiphon series for Good Friday afternoon found in Ordines Romani XXVII–XXXIII and selected northern French, German, Aquitanian, Spanish and Italian sources dating from the eighth into the twelfth century. Using illustrative tables, rubrics and facsimiles, the study compares liturgical features of the Adoratio crucis with its related Offices of the cross, the Exaltatio and Inventio, in a survey of the principal titles' texts and melodies.

The service books of the Ambrosian rite were produced relatively late: the oldest copy of the Manuale, the first to record the texts and some rubrics, dates from the early eleventh century; the earliest redaction of the ordinal, from shortly after 1126; the oldest copy of the antiphoner, which contains the notated melodies of both Mass and Office, from the mid-twelfth. All these books document a liturgy that had been extensively revised after the Frankish conquest of northern Italy in 774. The Frankish reforms did not result in the suppression of the Milanese rite (as they had the Gallican), but many changes were effected, changes that brought the ancient liturgy of northern Italy – without destroying all of its indigenous features – closer to the new, international, Gregorian rite. The purpose of this article is to re-examine the earliest references to the Mass of pre-Conquest Milan and its archdiocese, which reveal more than has been suspected, and to present new evidence concerning the Ambrosian sacrifice as it was in the earliest centuries, even before the time of St Ambrose.

Taking the Boethian understanding of the relation between the musicus and cantor as his point of departure, Jacobus – the author of the Speculum musicae – develops this relation in light of new ecclesiastical realities and the Aristotelian understanding of the relation between theory and practice. Without entirely abandoning an allegiance to the priority of theory over practice and the corresponding embodiments of these categories in the musicus and cantor, Jacobus redefines these terms to create a new threefold taxonomy: the Boethian musicus who understands but does not perform or compose, the practicus musicus who both understands and practises within an ecclesiastical context (and is the equivalent of the peritus cantor), and the cantor who sings without understanding. These developments within the Speculum musicae follow attempts by earlier authors to negotiate the relation between the heritage of antiquity and the cantus tradition of musical practice within liturgical contexts. Jacobus's solution also differs from solutions offered by contemporary and later authors.

The theory that the antiphon is a kind of refrain and that its original purpose was to be inserted between all the verses of its respective psalm was articulated by Giuseppe Maria Tommasi in the seventeenth century and has been transmitted by liturgical historians with little criticism ever since that time. The present article examines the evidence on which that theory rests, with special attention to the writings of Amalar of Metz, and finds it to be inconclusive or positively contrary to the claims that have been built upon it. The article considers the evidence of antiphonal psalmody at Mass, as transmitted in Ordo Romanus I, and finds support there for the view that antiphons were normally performed only at the beginning and end of their respective psalms. After considering briefly the Liber Pontificalis and the tradition of psalmodic differentiae, the article turns to the treatment of antiphonal psalmody by the liturgical historians Guillaume Durand and Radulph de Rivo in the late Middle Ages and finds in their writings no evidence of a belief that frequent interpolation was the authentic primitive practice. The article concludes that two iterations of the antiphon, once at the beginning and once at the end of the psalm, suited its original thematic intent and that the theory of reiteration after every verse – effectively conflating antiphonal and responsorial psalmody – may be no older than the liturgical scholarship of Tommasi in the late seventeenth century.

Guillaume de Machaut's Hoquetus David represents the only extant hocket of the Ars Nova. Although the Hoquetus is among Machaut's most commercially recorded compositions, it has received relatively little scholarly attention: while Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has focused on its rhythmic characteristics and Anne Walters Robertson on its possible raison d'être, many of the Hoquetus's unusual musical features remain unexplored. In Part I of this article, I compare the Hoquetus with Machaut's motets, as well as with thirteenth-century double hockets, in order to shed light on several of the work's anomalies. In Part II, I turn to matters of syntax, concentrating on Machaut's use of the dissonant seventh. I discuss and illustrate Machaut's surprisingly frequent use of the seventh to fifth progression in several passages from the Hoquetus, his motets and the Messe de nostre dame, and in turn demonstrate that the progression indeed constitutes a salient element of his compositional praxis. In Part III, I briefly address the question of method of performance. By inspecting the vocal ranges and melodic activity of the Hoquetus itself, I demonstrate that the Hoquetus David is indeed conducive for vocal performance, and in turn speculate how it might be performed despite its lack of text.

Studies of manuscripts such as the Trent Codices (I-TRbc 87–92) and Bologna Q15 (I-Bc 15) have shown that fifteenth-century scribes were not necessarily passive transmitters of the material they copied. Whether motivated by practical constraints or aesthetic preferences, they added, excised and re-composed sections or voices as they saw fit. The frequency and ingenuity of such emendations encourage us to examine them further – not as unwelcome alterations to a putative ‘Urtext’ but as creative acts in their own right.

This article focuses on one site of scribal emendation: the concluding Amen sections of early fifteenth-century Gloria and Credo settings. Frequently, otherwise concordant sources for the same piece transmit Amen sections that appear to be unrelated to each other. I propose that certain types of Amen settings were more susceptible than others to alteration and that one type – the short, self-contained, homophonic Amen – arose through scribal emendation. In order to describe in precise terms the choices a scribe might make, I introduce a nomenclature system for the Amen settings encountered in this period. Taking a panoptic view of the major sources for sacred polyphony in the first half of the fifteenth century, this article contributes to our understanding of scribal activity and manuscript culture.