Music and Liturgy for the Benedicamus Domino c.800–1650

For more than a millenium, singers in churches, monasteries, and private chapels across Europe have closed their worship with the joyful musical exclamation Benedicamus Domino (‘Let us Bless the Lord’). This moment has sounded in song many times a day: at the end of the Mass, the Office hours, outside the church walls in celebratory processions, as well as in informal sacred, devotional, and festive contexts. Benedicamus Domino was uniquely associated with an unprecedented amount of creative freedom in the sacred rituals of the Christian West: plainchant melodies could be adopted at will from other parts of the liturgy, and this moment inspired a proliferation of poetic and polyphonic elaborations from the eleventh century on.

This collection of essays brings together interdisciplinary contributions from eighteen scholars, illuminating the wide range of ritual, musical, poetic, manuscript, and generic contexts for the Benedicamus Domino versicle in the period c.800­–1650. Individual chapters engage with the evidence of liturgical commentaries and Patristic texts, Ordines, and hagiographies. They present and analyse musical and textual embellishments of the Benedicamus Domino, as well as their written traces and material contexts, with several sources discovered or discussed in detail here for the first time. Encompassing a wide geographical and generic scope, this volume reveals unsuspected continuities and contrasts in the history of the Benedicamus Domino versicle in medieval and early modern Europe.

Catherine A. Bradley, Introduction

I. Song
Sam Barrett, Organa, Neumae, and Dissent in Benedicamus Songs at the Abbey of Farfa in the Early Twelfth Century
Mark Everist, The Benedicamus Domino and the Parisian Conductus: Distribution, History, and Structure
Jan Ciglbauer, Closing Formulae of Central European Cantiones: Witnesses to Tradition and Functional Fluidity in Fifteenth-Century Bohemia

II. Hagiography, Theology, Liturgy
Mary Channen Caldwell, St Nicholas and the Singing of Liturgical Versicles
Sigbjørn Olsen Sønnesyn, The Augustinian Concept of Iubilus and Medieval Liturgical Theology
Samuel Cardwell, When Did the Benedicamus Enter the English Liturgy?
Gionata Brusa, The Performance of the Benedicamus Domino according to the Libri ordinarii from the Ecclesiastical Province of Salzburg

III. Early Plainchant Practices
Giulio Minniti, Early Benedicamus Domino Minitexts in the Margins: New Discoveries
Marit Johanne Høye, Benedicamus Plainchant Melodies and their Relationships with Kyrie Source Melodies
Thomas Phillips, A Norman Benedicamus Domino Tradition in the Twelfth Century: New Insights from St Albans Abbey

IV. Female Communities
Martha Culshaw, Benedicamus Domino and the Order of Saint Clare in Fourteenth-Century Brussels
David Merlin, Echoes from a Viennese Nunnery St. Maria Magdalena: Situating Benedicamus Domino Chants between Shared Traditions and Local Practice in the Later Middle Ages
Laine Tabora, The Unique Collection of Monophonic Benedicamus Domino Melodies and Tropes from Medieval Riga

V. Polyphony
James R. Tomlinson, Polyphony for Benedicamus Domino and Deo gratias in Late Medieval English Sources
Antonio Calvia and Anne Stone, A Newly-Discovered Polyphonic Benedicamus Domino in Milan
Alessandra Ignesti, Benedicamus Domino Polyphony in the Trent Codices
Michael B. O’Connor, The Renaissance Polyphonic Benedicamus Domino in the Iberian World

Bibliography
Index of Compositions
Index of Manuscript Sources
General Index