Recurring between strophes of a single song, “refrains are, and have, memories” as John Hollander writes. This memory can extend beyond a single song; refrains frequently are, and have, memories of “their own genealogies in earlier texts as well.”Footnote ¹ As defined throughout this book, the Latin refrain is chiefly structural, repeating within and between strophes, its memories constituted within the space of an individual work. Yet, although it is fixed in the sense of its structural identity, the Latin refrain does not always lack a memory outside of its formal utterance and repetition between and within the strophes of a song. Latin refrains can and do repeat beyond the boundaries of individual songs, resonating through time and across place in memory, sound, and inscription.Footnote ² The circulation, or mouvance, of the Latin refrain shows how song and refrain were not always conceived of as inseparable units of form and meaning; at the same time, the mobile refrain also brings to the fore the ability of a repeated unit of text and music to become anchored in the memory and further recalled, deployed, reworked, and redeployed. Refrains, consequently, become fixed not only within song, but also fixed within the individual and collective memories of singers and scribes as they repeat across songs, creating rich genealogies of poetry and music.

In this chapter I explore Latin refrains with this key characteristic in common: They each have genealogies and memories beyond the borders of individual songs. Although it does not compare in complexity to the intertextual, citational, and intergeneric French refrain, the Latin refrain participates in an extensive, and at times complicated, network of textual and musical borrowing, reworking, and repetition within medieval Latin song.Footnote ³ This intertextual and intermusical network includes refrains that are reworked from other genres, most often chant; refrains that do not always serve as structural refrains, but are recycled more freely among songs; and refrains that are employed structurally across different songs.Footnote ⁴ Importantly, even when not employed structurally, these intertextual and mobile refrains always remain tethered to, and are rooted within, repertoires of devotional, strophic, Latin songs – their movement is invariably circumscribed by the limits of form, function, and language. The interplay of performance and inscription also informs how these refrains came into being and how they circulate. Although I am reliant on the written side of the Latin refrain’s transmission, the intertextuality I describe is underpinned by the lived experiences of the individuals and communities who performed, remembered, and wrote down Latin song and refrain.

Singers, scribes, and compilers are the typically unnamed agents driving the reworking, recycling, and reuse of Latin refrains. The intertextuality of Latin song and refrain reflects an origin within predominantly anonymous clerical and monastic communities, comprised of individuals who crafted, performed, and copied this repertoire as a form of devotional entertainment and, at times, incorporated it into their liturgies. By means of memory, inscription, or both, the wider circulation of the Latin refrain speaks to its role in expressing the unified voice of religious communities and its embeddedness within the rituals and language of the church. These refrains are not “owned,” or even composed, by individual, named composers, nor tethered exclusively to particular songs, genres, or functions, but instead are part of a broader, communal culture of devotional song, one in which refrains travel and repeat in the textual and memorial archives of religious communities. As Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis writes, “repeatability is how songs become the property of a group or a community instead of an individual, how they come to belong to a tradition, rather than to a moment.”Footnote ⁵ For the Latin refrain, its repeatability within strophic song as well as in larger networks of Latin song and poetry situates it within the tradition of devotional music that is rooted in the real, imagined, and poetically constructed forms of participation explored in Chapter 3.

Reworking Text and Music: Chant and the Latin Refrain

The intertextuality of music and poetry in the devotional Latin song frequently reveals intimate relationships with a range of texts and genres, even if rarely at the level found in contemporary genres such as the medieval motet or French refrain. For the refrain song, these relationships are strongest with chant, and especially with hymns and sequences, genres that share poetic, musical, and formal features with Latin song.Footnote ⁶ Office versicles, and the Benedicamus Domino versicle above all, represent additional points of contact between Latin song and the liturgy. Beyond formal and poetic parallels, textual, and more rarely melodic, references to and quotations of chant range from brief, passing allusions to sustained reworkings of entire lines and sections.Footnote ⁷ Unsurprisingly, these longer, more sustained, references tend to derive from familiar and widely sung chants – hymns such as Ave maris stella or sequences like Veni sancte spiritus are among the most often cited and reworked chants within the Latin refrain song repertoire.

The deliberate reuse and reworking of chant in the refrain song – as opposed to inadvertent parallels stemming from shared contexts and vocabulary – is always overt and underscored, in most cases, by how a poet-composer treats the borrowed text. The refrain serves as a particular locus for borrowed and reworked texts in refrain songs, effectively highlighting the reuse of a familiar text by embedding it in the repetitive structure of a new song. The communal associations of the borrowed chant, moreover, intersect with the responsorial performance practices and connotations of the refrain; the construction of “new” Latin refrains out of the “old” songs of the liturgy enables poets and composers to build on singers’ associations with chant and its role within communal forms of worship. The reworking of familiar chant texts and melodies establishes a genealogy between Latin chant and Latin song that allows the ritual connotations of the former to resonate in the latter, recalling for singers the memory and knowledge of the original contexts of borrowed text and music. Repeating within the structural framework of new songs, refrains reworked from chant demonstrate not only the intergeneric mobility and fluidity of devotional Latin poetry and its music, but also an aesthetic interest in repetition and recycling – the originality of songs that rework preexisting material rests in how they newly assemble familiar words, sounds, and phrases.Footnote ⁸

Although borrowing and reworking is found across the refrain song repertoire, certain works, and collections of works in certain manuscripts, illustrate a higher degree of engagement with preexistent materials than others. To put it another way, composers and poets working in certain milieus were more interested and invested in connecting devotional song to the liturgy than those working in others, which is reflected in the contents of the manuscripts they produced.Footnote ⁹ One such manuscript is the mid-thirteenth-century Parisian source F, whose conducti and refrain songs showcase an acute awareness of how chant – and hymns and sequences in particular – could serve as a creative starting point for borrowed material. The hymns Veni creator spiritus and Ave maris stella are reworked in several polyphonic conducti in F, for instance, and individual lines of many other hymns are cited throughout the manuscript’s fascicles of Latin song.Footnote ¹⁰ Sequences, too, are mined for their text and music in F, appearing either as single-line quotations or more fully fleshed-out reworkings of longer segments of text and music. Lines derived from chants and psalms appear with the greatest regularity in the final fascicle of largely refrain-form songs, with the majority of the sixty songs in Fascicle XI directly or indirectly referencing and reworking liturgical chant. The chanted liturgy resonates from the beginning of the fascicle, where the second song on the first folio (463^r), Felix dies et grata, draws its refrain from both the familiar psalmic text employed for Eastertide chants and a line of its first strophe from the Easter sequence Zyma vetus expurgetur.Footnote ¹¹

One rondellus from F’s final fascicle, Mors vite propitia (fol. 464^r), demonstrates especially well the borrowing and reworking of the text and music of a sequence, in this case Sexta passus feria for Easter.Footnote ¹² Transmitted in F and the closely related Tours 927, Mors vite propitia reflects the degree to which a sequence can both be reworked and yet still recognizably resonate within a new poetic and musical structure. The versions in F and Tours 927, importantly, are not identical; in Tours 927, Mors vite propitia is more elaborate musically and formally than in F, and the two versions have only four of eight total strophes in common. These differences have implications for how closely each version connects to the sequence Sexta passus feria. As transmitted in F, Mors vite propitia features seven strophes with a three-line refrain interpolated following the first and final lines of each strophe. The refrain introduces the sequence text, consisting of the initial three-line strophe of the rhymed, rhythmic sequence. Since the refrain quotes the sequence verbatim, it shares its syllable count, rhyme scheme, and accent pattern at the conclusion of lines, all of which is mirrored in the strophes (see Table 4.1).Footnote ¹³ The refrain text comprises the most significant borrowing from the sequence since it repeats throughout the strophic song, resulting in the initial strophe of the sequence being sung a total of seven times in the course of a single performance. Beyond the refrain, strophe 5 contains the only other verbatim quotation of the sequence, drawing its text from the second paired strophe of Sexta passus feria, beginning “surgens cum victoria.” The remaining five strophes in F gloss the Easter narrative of Sexta passus feria, retelling the familiar story of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection in a parallel fashion to the sequence.Footnote ¹⁴

The straightforward manner in which the F version of Mors vite propitia adopts lines from Sexta passus feria speaks to the style and poetic form of the sequence itself. With rhymed aab strophes and a regular syllable count and accent pattern, the sequence already bears the typical features of the refrain songs in the final fascicle of F, making the process of borrowing smooth. Facilitated by the rhymed, rhythmical lines of the sequence, the poet not only incorporates full strophes of the sequence but also mirrors the scansion of the liturgical song throughout the song. All strophes of Mors vite propitia in F and Tours 927 repeat the 7pp+7pp+4pp strophic structure of the sequence, resulting in regular six-line strophes employing the same pattern.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, removing the refrain, which has its own internal 7pp+7pp+4p structure, reveals an identical form to Sexta passus feria in Mors vite propitia (see Table 4.2). The rondellus, in other words, nests two sequence-form strophes to arrive at six-line strophes with an interpolated refrain. The disyllabic rhyme scheme of the sequence is also imitated exactly in the rondellus throughout all six strophes, to the point of sharing the exact same disyllabic rhymes: -ia and -exit. Even in portions of the conductus not drawn from the sequence, the strophic material poetically mirrors its liturgical model.

As closely as the rondellus poetry models that of the sequence, the musical setting in F contributes an additional layer of borrowing and musical memory, by contrast to the version in Tours 927. In Tours 927, a slightly more elaborate melody circles around a different pitch center than F, resulting in a different melodic profile and text setting (see Example 4.1). The version in F is syllabic, featuring only three different melodic phrases versus the four in Tours 927. Differences such as these may signal regional preferences; different scribes recording whichever version of the tune they had access to in writing or by memory. In this instance, the contrasting versions gesture to a relationship deliberately constructed between song and sequence.

Example 4.1 Comparison of Mors vite propitia in Tours 927, fol. 10^v (a) and F, fol. 464^r (b)

Notably, the melody in F draws on the musical material for the initial pair of strophes of Sexta passus feria as it survives in an early thirteenth-century notated missal from the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris (Paris lat. 1112; see Example 4.2), and more widely across Europe; in Tours 927, Mors vite propitia does not demonstrate any musical links with the sequence repertoire in Paris or elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁶ The music for the initial pair of sequence strophes is transplanted note-for-note to the song, enabling the incipital line of music and text of the sequence to sound as the refrain in Mors vite propitia. Although the second melodic phrase of the song diverges from the sequence, the tonal area is retained and the final four-syllable lines in song and sequence share a near identical descent from C to G, with only minor variants. Consequently, while both versions of Mors vite propitia poetically rework Sexta passus feria, only in F is the music also reworked to reflect a melody sung locally for the sequence.

Example 4.2 Comparison of Sexta passus feria (Paris lat. 1112, fol. 267^r) (a) and Mors vite propitia (F, fol. 464^r) (b)

The different melody of Mors vite propitia in F, which reflects the setting of the Easter sequence as it was sung in Paris and elsewhere, parallels other differences between F and Tours 927. Although both versions use the entire first strophe of Sexta passus feria as a refrain, only the Parisian version of Mors vite propitia borrows additional text from the second strophe of the sequence, in addition to the music shared by the first two paired strophes. It seems likely the composer-poet or scribe responsible for the version of Mors vite propitia in F linked the song more closely to the sequence by musically and textually emphasizing the poetic borrowing already taking place. Whether this has implications for the chronology and origins of each version is debatable, although Tours 927 was almost certainly copied ca. 1225, approximately a quarter of a century prior to the copying of F, ca. 1240s–1250s.Footnote ¹⁷ It is possible that Mors vite propitia was musically and textually adapted for inclusion in F and performance in Paris since the sequence melody borrowed for Mors vite propitia in F was that sung at Notre Dame in Paris.Footnote ¹⁸

The unambiguous relationship of this song to the sequence Sexta passus feria sheds light on the ways in which a composer-poet could retool parts of a sequence, itself a relatively new addition to the liturgy, into a new Latin song, and even rework this song further to adapt it to a specific locale and its chanted rites. Mors vite propitia highlights both the fluidity and intertextuality of the Latin refrain song; although termed concordances in F and Tours 927, the differences in music and poetry between the versions in these two sources illustrate the flexible, nonstatic identity of Latin song that allows it to be adapted to the needs and aesthetic preferences of different communities. The intimate relationship between song and sequence foregrounded in the version in F, moreover, shows how preexistent material persists on multiple levels of form, poetry, and music. The memory of the refrain in Mors vite propitia extends not only to another version of itself, but also to the sequence upon which it is modeled poetically and musically. The intergeneric and intertextual memory and mobility of refrains is emphasized in the refrain of Mors vite propitia as it repeats through the mechanisms of borrowing and reworking from chant to song, and from strophe to strophe.

Recycling Refrains and Signaling Performance

While the borrowing and reworking of preexistent material is a significant feature of how the Latin refrain song was constructed and reconstructed over time, single words, phrases, or occasionally entire strophes also circulate among songs, creating intertextual networks independent of other genres. These refrains are units of text, and more rarely music, that are fluidly reworked across many songs, refrains whose genealogies are diffuse but can be traced to within, as opposed to outside of, the diverse corpus of Latin song. What I termed a New Year’s refrain in Chapter 1, “annus novus,” is one such example, a brief but distinctive noun–adjective pair that operates throughout Latin song as a marker of temporal meaning and an intertextual refrain. “Annus novus” serves in some instances as a structural refrain, repeating within or between strophes, but is not tethered to that function as it circulates more widely. These characteristics are shared with a number of other refrains that I will identify as intertextual, and their mobility speaks to the role of the Latin refrain within a communal song repertoire. These refrains, in Margulis’s formulation, “belong to a tradition” of Latin song by means of their repetition, and are not necessarily the unique, authorial products of individual poets and composers.Footnote ¹⁹ The tension between the fixity and fluidity of the Latin refrain song, moreover, is underscored in the repeated unmooring and reintegrating of the refrain in, and in between, song strophes.

Manuscript sources from the twelfth century onward transmit Latin refrains functioning intertextually among songs, with recycled refrains often clustered into certain sources, emanating from certain milieus, or associated with particular functions. Before I go on to discuss a group of shared refrains collected in two Austrian manuscripts, I begin with a simple, one-line refrain transmitted across several sources, a refrain whose identity is complex and complicated by its association with the liturgy and tropes. While the refrain is unchanging as it appears within individual songs, its movement across songs exhibits a lack of fixity to individual works that precisely enables the refrain to emerge as a locus for the production of intertextual meaning and an expression of mouvance, the mobility of medieval lyric.

The refrain is “psallat cum tripudio,” a phrase that can be translated differently depending on context but means something like “sing with great joy.” Although the term “tripudio” is often translated in a way that refers to dance, in poetic contexts and song it most often refers generically to exuberant rejoicing, and is also frequently associated with the voice and act of singing.Footnote ²⁰ Like many Latin refrains, “psallat cum tripudio” overtly asserts its vocality, the hortative subjunctive form of psallere an example of what Gunilla Iversen terms “verba canendi” in tropes and sequences.Footnote ²¹ Notably, this precise connection emerges between Latin song and the liturgy – “psallat cum tripudio” recurs across not only Latin songs, but also sequences and song-form tropes of the Benedicamus Domino versicle. And although it appears in chant, its origins are ambiguous and it does not, by contrast to the refrain of Mors vite propitia, reflect the reworking of a preexistent biblical or liturgical material. The refrain line emerges instead from within a flourishing eleventh- and twelfth-century tradition of composing new devotional, rhymed, and rhythmic Latin songs.

As a refrain, “psallat cum tripudio” is memorable, easily recycled, and even formulaic; its seven-syllable structure with an antepenultimate accent and a closing vowel on “-o” make it easy to rhyme with the Benedicamus Domino versicle in particular. Its nonspecific, even generic, meaning and allusion to singing also lends it the flexibility to appear across festive, devotional, and liturgical songs.Footnote ²² Putting aside liturgical sequences for the moment, the line survives as “psallat cum tripudio” in at least a dozen songs and Benedicamus Domino song-tropes, transmitted in sources that include Aquitanian versaria, troped liturgies, songbooks including the Carmina Burana and Later Cambridge Songbook, and liturgical books and tropers (see Table 4.3; sources listed in the Appendix).Footnote ²³ Although textually stable, the refrain line does not transmit any musical information. Instead, it is a poetic marker, or even topos, of devotional Latin song, its iterability connecting songs and singers across diverse contexts in a shared expression of vocal joy.

With the exception of sequences, “psallat cum tripudio” has a special relationship to refrain forms, even when it does not serve as a refrain. Within the dozen or so songs in which “psallat cum tripudio” is included, it appears as a refrain, or part thereof, in only four, although all but one song employs a refrain. Two of the four songs in which the phrase is part of a refrain, moreover, are closely related, and may be contrafacts: Promat chorus hodie and Puer natus hodie.Footnote ²⁴ The two songs, including three slightly different versions of Puer natus hodie, share similarities beyond the refrain. The initial strophes of each illustrate the close relationship between the songs, including occasion (Nativity), scansion (7pp lines in each strophe), and the refrain (see Table 4.4).

The musical settings of these songs are challenging to compare, since the version in the thirteenth-century troper and songbook Stuttg is notated with unheightened neumes and the one in the fourteenth-century service book and troper Engelberg Codex is unnotated. Only Promat chorus hodie is transcribable, along with the fifteenth-century version of Puer natus hodie in the Wienhäuser Liederbuch, manuscripts separated by several centuries (see Example 4.3).Footnote ²⁵ Despite this chronological (as well as geographical) gap, the melodies of these two songs are related, different starting and ending pitches notwithstanding. The initial gesture on “promat chorus” and “puer natus” is identical, if transposed, and the melodic contours of each closely track. The refrain is a locus for the most poetic, and apparently musical, play and variation too, as the Wienhäuser Liederbuch includes one further verse line (“nato dei filio”) and a more ornate setting for the refrain as a whole.Footnote ²⁶

Example 4.3 Comparison of Promat chorus hodie (St-M A, fol. 51^v) and Puer natus hodie (Wienhäuser Liederbuch, fol. 2^v)

Most interesting is the treatment of “psallat cum tripudio” and its integration into longer refrains rife with repetition and vocalic play in two songs copied in chronologically and geographically disparate sources.Footnote ²⁷ The inclusion of this refrain appears to cue a certain type of sonic and vocalic play that develops within each iteration of the longer refrain. This is taken to its fullest expression in the Engelberg Codex, where repeated vowels function both as anticipations and extensions of “contio” and “psallite”; as with all three versions, the refrains ultimately conclude with a full statement of “psallat cum tripudio.” Although the syllable count of the strophic material is regular within and across the songs, the refrain is decidedly irregular. The length and contours of its lines bend and shift, adding, subtracting, and expanding words and vowels. In this case, although the refrain varies, it remains recognizable since it employs the same vocabulary and an identical final line (“psallat cum tripudio”), as well as an inner refrain that divides the two-line strophe in half.Footnote ²⁸ The example of Promat chorus hodie and Puer natus hodie, in other words, speaks to the tension between sameness and variation, fixity and mouvance, which arises when refrains repeat beyond the boundaries of individual songs.

The three words “psallat cum tripudio” represent the most stable element in both the refrains of Promat chorus hodie and Puer natus hodie, as well as across the other ten songs in this refrain network. In several instances, the refrain line is fully integrated into strophes. This is how it appears in the first strophe of Magno gaudens gaudio in the twelfth-century Later Cambridge Songbook, for instance, and in select versions of the widely transmitted Christmas song In hoc anni circulo.Footnote ²⁹ The refrain line appears most often, however, in the final strophes of songs, where it serves as part of a longer, formulaic marker of function and performance. The inclusion of “psallat cum tripudio” most often anticipates citations of the Benedicamus Domino versicle and its response, Deo gratias. In most cases comprising an entire strophe, this versicle formula typically begins with an invocation of a community of singers, identified as “contio,” followed by “psallat cum tripudio” and then the versicle text; lines might also be repeated or added to complete the scansion of the song’s strophes. The final strophe of Patrem parit filia illustrates the most basic shape of this versicle formula in several of its many sources: “ergo nostra contio | psallat cum tripudio | benedicat domino” (“therefore let our assembly sing with great joy and bless the Lord”).Footnote ³⁰ Variations on this formulaic strophe usually involve the inclusion of an additional line, as in Martyr fuit Stephanus: “ergo nostra concio | in chordis et organo | psallat cum tripudio | Benedicamus Domino” (Engelberg Codex, fol. 128^v).

What results from these repeated, strophic formulations is a doxology of sorts for song-tropes of the Benedicamus Domino, comparable to the seasonal and ferial doxologies employed in hymnody.Footnote ³¹ Significantly, doxologies do not belong to single hymns, but instead are itinerant both in terms of specific hymns and liturgical seasons, just as this Benedicamus Domino “doxology” is reused throughout song-tropes with different texts and for different occasions. A key difference between the changing and itinerant doxologies, or closing prayers, of hymns and this versicle “doxology” is that the latter functions chiefly as a marker of genre and performance, indicating where and how a Latin song is supposed to be integrated into the liturgy as a trope. Pointing, moreover, to the fluidity of genre among Latin songs, this versicle doxology can be included or excluded depending on whether its attached song was intended to serve as a versicle trope, or simply as a devotional, festive work. In the case of Patrem parit filia in the St. Pölten Processional, for instance, the Benedicamus Domino formula is switched out for a different liturgical formula. In this fifteenth-century source, the final strophe invites the lector to begin the reading using formulaic language that occurs as a closing formula across Latin songs: “lector librum accipe | profer iube domine | lectionem incipe” (“let the reader take the book, saying ‘iube domine,’ and begin the reading”).Footnote ³² Formulaic strophes like these were added to or removed from songs to alter their function and association with the liturgy, affirming the fluidity of Latin song in practice, performance, and transmission.

Formulaic or doxological strophes are, however, not refrains, and the integration of “psallat cum tripudio” into strophic formulas complicates and confuses its identity and identification. The repetition of this line as a stereotyped, even stock, invocation of vocalic rejoicing points to the broader tradition of Latin song and its performance. Repeated and recycled lines like “psallat cum tripudio” reflect a shared vocabulary and culture of devotional Latin song, a culture, moreover, that valued the reuse and the reworking of familiar material into new frameworks. Refrains that circulate in both expected and unexpected places were part of the poetic toolbox of poets and composers, indistinct from their poetic surroundings yet persistently recognizable and iterable; in this way, repeated lines like “psallat cum tripudio” come into closer alignment with the inherent tension between the indistinct and marked identity of the French refrain across diverse contexts.Footnote ³³ Different from French refrains that can invoke different forms of auctoritas, however, the reuse of simultaneously common yet distinctive lines in Latin song instead derives its intertextual power from their genealogy, or perhaps even ontology, within the tradition of devotional Latin songs, chants, and tropes.Footnote ³⁴ The auctoritas, if it can termed such, accessed by the reuse of “psallat cum tripudio” is rooted in collective knowledge and memory of song itself and its fluidity in performance and function. In what follows, the scribal cueing of refrains in two sibling sources offers a localized glimpse into the way refrains circulating among songs were further positioned at the intersection of not only memory and performance, but also inscription.

Cueing Refrains in an Austrian Abbey

Two fourteenth-century manuscripts from the Benedictine Abbey of St. Lambrecht in Austria, Graz 258 and 409, together transmit an assortment of practical and liturgical materials, as well as a sizable collection of Latin songs, many with refrains. As anthologies of Latin song – rubricated as conducti – the two Graz manuscripts map several networks of song and refrain transmission from the twelfth to the fourteenth century across Europe.Footnote ³⁵ The intertextual and intermusical networks constructed by refrains in the Graz sources, however, are complex and derive from scribal practices around the cueing of refrains and the inscription of Latin song. The pair of manuscripts bring to the fore tensions around the fixity and fluidity, and memory and inscription, of the Latin refrain and refrain song.

The smaller and more streamlined of the two in size, number of folios, and contents is Graz 258.Footnote ³⁶ The majority of the manuscript comprises a neumed antiphoner for the liturgical year dating to the late twelfth century; devotional Latin songs on the recto and verso of a single folio (fol. 2) are among various additions made over time to the main liturgical contents. Graz 409 is larger both in size and number of folios, and its contents (apart from Latin songs) are entirely textual and devotional, reflecting a provenance within a pedagogical and religious institution.Footnote ³⁷ Its Latin songs are copied in three different locations in the manuscript, always in a different hand from the nonmusical texts – on the initial flyleaves (fol. 1^r–2^v), at the end of a gathering (fol. 70^v–72^v), and on a final leaf (fol. 273^r).

In both manuscripts, the copying of songs appears to be at least partly driven by the opportunity of empty space. The songs were not part of the planned contents of the antiphoner of Graz 258 or the textual miscellanea of 409; rather, they were added at some point in each manuscript’s history. The reasons for their inclusion in Graz 258 seem somewhat clearer and more understandable; the musical nature of the liturgical manuscript aligns with devotional Latin songs, some of which may have served a liturgical function.Footnote ³⁸ For Graz 409, the reasons are less obvious. While the contents as a whole are devotional, the addition of music and poetry is somewhat out of place, although they align with the theological focus of the other contents. Given the close relationship between the hands responsible for copying the songs in both manuscripts, perhaps what we see in this pair of sources is a monastic scribe taking advantage of blank folios in manuscripts he had at hand, rather than attempting to match the contents therein.Footnote ³⁹

Above all, the Graz sources represent a repository of Latin refrains and refrain songs. Of the total number of fifty-four songs between the two sources, twelve out of fourteen songs in Graz 258 and thirty-two out of the forty in Graz 409 include refrains of varying forms and lengths. Within this combined total of forty refrain-form songs, six are concordant between the two sources. At least twenty-two have concordances outside of the Graz sources, although not all concordances have the same, or even any, refrain (see Table 4.5).Footnote ⁴⁰

The collection of strophic songs gathered in Graz 258 and 409 is unusual, first and foremost for its remarkably high ratio of songs with refrains. More unusual, although the songs were copied on the page in a relatively clear fashion, is that refrains are consistently cued irregularly and inconsistently, in a fashion not found in contemporary manuscript sources. Significantly, attention was paid by the scribes to the song as a defined unit of poetry and, when neumed, of music. Most, though not all, songs begin with a large initial flush left on the folio, and are followed by neat lines of text, heavy with abbreviation, which are highly legible. Red rubrics also proclaim the songs to be “conductus” and within songs, strophes are frequently rubricated with “V.”

Yet, in Graz 409 in particular, refrains are typically cued only once for each song, generally following the final strophe of the song, with only three exceptions where the end refrain is complemented by internal cues for refrains between strophes.Footnote ⁴¹ In Graz 258, refrain cues in half of its twelve refrain songs appear following each strophe, while in the other half the refrain is appended solely at the end of all strophes, as in Graz 409. The scribe in Graz 258 does utilize the cue word “repetitio” before the refrain of Dies ista colitur (fol. 2^v), the only unambiguous reference in either manuscript to repetition, although the refrain and its accompanying textual cue occur solely at the end of the poem, and not between strophes. In most cases, without knowledge of the songs or access to concordant sources, the songs in both manuscripts would appear to lack refrains based on how they were copied, unless scribal cueing practices across both sources are closely examined.

What I identify as “refrains” in Table 4.5, in other words, look more like poetic “tags” on the manuscript page, ranging from one to several words copied at the end of songs, at times bleeding into the margin.Footnote ⁴² The first letter of the refrain “tag” is typically capitalized and highlighted with red (see Figure 4.1). As an example, in Graz 409, all four strophes of Umbram destruxit penitus, a song unique to these two sources, are copied, and only after the final strophe is the single word “apparuit” copied, seemingly an acclamative conclusion much like the “amen” that concludes many Latin hymns and devotional songs. Its only concordance is in Graz 258, where the cueing is still somewhat ambiguous, but a scribe has more regularly included the word “apparuit,” or its abbreviation “app.,” after each strophe (each signaled by the capital “V”) (see Figure 4.2). Due to the witness of Graz 258, the “tag” in Graz 409 can be more accurately identified as a refrain, intended to be sung between each of the four strophes of Umbram destruxit penitus. In both manuscripts, however, only the word “apparuit” (“he appeared”) is included, suggesting a one-word refrain sung between the four strophes of Umbram destruxit penitus. Yet Table 4.5 includes seven instances between the two sources of refrains beginning with “apparuit” and, among these, five include only this one-word incipit or its abbreviation “app.” One time in each source, however, the refrain expands to become the lengthier “apparuit, apparuit quem virgo pia genuit Maria” (“he appears, he appears, who was brought forth from the Holy Virgin Mary”), in both manuscripts in the song Ave maris stella divinitatis. The single word “apparuit” thus seems to function as a cue not only for the refrain within an individual lyric, but also for the longer version of the refrain found elsewhere in each source. Of the thirty-four total refrain songs in the Graz sources, the lion’s share of twenty-six songs – when eliminating concordances – includes refrains beginning with only five distinctive words, with the majority of these reusing only four of these refrain incipits, “apparuit” among them (see Table 4.6). In Latin contexts, the sharing of refrains among works to this degree is exceedingly rare. Approximately 20 percent of the songs in the Appendix share refrains between two or more works, with the Graz sources transmitting the greatest number of shared refrains of any extant source. Unlike “psallat cum tripudio,” however, these refrains are more variable in length or word order, as I discuss below, although they invariably retain an identical incipit or cue word.

Figure 4.1 Graz 409, fol. 72^r, Umbram destruxit penitus, refrain cue circled.

Reproduced by kind permission of the Universitätsbibliothek, Graz

Figure 4.2 Graz 258, fol. 2^r, Umbram destruxit penitus, refrain cues circled.

Reproduced by kind permission of the Universitätsbibliothek, Graz

The manner in which the refrains are inscribed in Graz 258 and 409 is key; since they were cued only once, and typically incompletely, singers and users of the manuscript were required to not only extrapolate the insertion of refrains between strophes, but also either connect the refrain incipits to longer versions within the manuscript or concordant sources, or simply recall them from memory. Conversely, if recording local song practices, the cueing suggests that scribes did not feel the need to fully outline familiar practices and forms. The cueing practices around refrains in Graz 258 and 409, in other words, suggest a collective body of remembered refrains, a common currency of responses that could be deployed in performance or added at will by a scribe.

Sharing, Adding, and Subtracting Refrains

Of the five shared refrain incipits in the two Austrian sources listed in Table 4.6, none presents a straightforward case. Variation characterizes each refrain both in terms of how it appears in the Graz sources and among external concordances; the degree of similarity that must obtain to label refrains as identical is a central, indeed crucial, question for these shared refrains. The Graz sources do not make this easy, since the partial cueing of refrains leaves only incipits or brief multi-word phrases in many cases. Moreover, while in certain cases songs and refrains have concordances elsewhere, some of the songs transmitted outside of the Graz sources do not include refrains at all or include entirely different refrains. The songs in the two manuscripts exhibit ties through concordances to sources such as twelfth-century versaria, thirteenth-century festive liturgies, songbooks and poetic anthologies, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century service books and tropers, and many other sources in between. Some of the songs copied in the Graz sources survive in polyphonic settings, others in text-only sources. Yet, due to their particular approach to sharing, adding, and subtracting refrains, this pair of fourteenth-century manuscripts do not appear to copy or draw from any one source or intertext, instead transmitting a relatively unique arrangement, and versions, of many widely transmitted songs.

The most stable of the five refrains in terms of its shape and repeats across songs, the refrain beginning “apparuit” nevertheless has a complex history, appearing in over a half-dozen songs, with the songs in the Graz sources included. Most notably, the “apparuit” refrain belongs to a famous complex of Christmas song-tropes known by the Latin incipit Resonet in laudibus that originated in tropes of the Nunc dimittis for Christmas and which became a widely known Christmas song in Latin and with a German text.Footnote ⁴³ In the Graz sources, however, the “apparuit” refrain is unmoored from any liturgical context and is instead linked to four strophic songs celebrating Christ’s nativity, paralleling the survival of the refrain in several strophic songs transmitted elsewhere, including Fulget dies hec pre ceteris, Nove lucis hodie, Resonemus laudibus, and some strophic reworkings of Resonet in laudibus.Footnote ⁴⁴ The textual stability of the refrain is rooted in the incipit “apparuit,” a core sentiment, and a recognizable if variable sequence of words; when variation within the refrain occurs, it usually involves word order or the elimination of words. In the Graz sources, a fully realized form of the “apparuit” refrain appears twice, once each in Graz 258 and 409 as “apparuit, apparuit, quem virgo pia genuit Maria.” In the other three songs with which it is associated in the Graz manuscripts, Dies ista dies pretiosa, Mirabatur antiquitas, and Umbram destruxit penitus, only the incipit “apparuit,” or the even briefer “app.,” appear. Of these four songs, Dies ista dies pretiosa has one concordance that lacks any refrain, and Ave maris stella divinitatis appears in the later printed Finnish/Swedish Piae Cantiones of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In these later sources, the word order of the refrain is slightly changed (“apparuit quem pia virgo genuit Maria”).

Since all four songs with the “apparuit” refrain in the Graz sources are unnotated, a comparison of musical settings is impossible. However, because the refrain survives outside of the Graz sources, including in later settings of Ave maris stella divinitatis, it is possible to compare the music of the refrain as it circulates more widely. One complication is the integration of the “apparuit” refrain in the Resonet in laudibus song-trope complex where it repeats within strophes, but not always as a structural refrain (similar to the behavior of “psallat cum tripudio”). In the comparison in Example 4.4, I have included only instances in which the “apparuit” refrain serves as a structural refrain outside of, although in some cases related to, the Resonet in laudibus complex in Fulget dies hec pre ceteris, Resonemus laudibus, Ave maris stella divinitatis, and Nove lucis hodie.Footnote ⁴⁵ Sources for notated versions of these songs are transmitted in predominantly fourteenth-century sources; across these songs, the melodic setting of the refrain exhibits similar contours, especially among certain manuscripts and between select songs. In particular, the Piae Cantiones, Moosburger Graduale and SG 392 all transmit a similar melody for the refrain, while in the two fourteenth-century service books and tropers from Aosta (possibly copied for the Cathedral) the refrain is markedly different. In terms of specific songs, among the first three songs in Example 4.4, the refrain shares the same tonal space, beginning and ending on E and outlining a range of a fifth from D to A (with an added lower neighbor to C in the Piae Cantiones). The refrain melody in Ave maris stella divinitatis, Fulget dies hec pre ceteris, and Nove lucis hodie, in other words, is similar enough across four sources to be recognizably the same; the refrain as it appears in Resonemus laudibus in the Aosta manuscripts sits at the farthest remove melodically and textually. Only the Moosburger Graduale transmits the refrain in two different songs in one source, and in this case the text and music of the refrain are nearly identical, although the music and poetry of each song’s strophic material are not shared.

Example 4.4 Comparison of “apparuit” refrain in Ave maris stella divinitatis, Fulget dies hec pre ceteris, Nove lucis hodie, and Resonemus laudibus

Indeed, the four songs whose refrains are compared in Example 4.4 are not contrafacts; their strophic material shares neither the same poetic scansion nor the same musical settings. Along with the other three unnotated songs in the Graz sources employing the “apparuit” refrain, these seven Latin songs are linked solely by means of the text and, in some cases, the music of the “apparuit” refrain alone. This external network of concordances has implications for the series of four unnotated songs in the Graz sources and their one-word “apparuit” cues, in addition to further confirming the identity of the cues seen in Figures 4.1 and 4.2 as markers of repeated refrains. The wider, and relatively stable, transmission of the refrain across songs featuring different strophic forms illustrates that the “apparuit” refrain was not tethered to particular poems, melodies, or even to the Resonet in laudibus song-trope complex. That is not to say that several of the Latin songs employing the “apparuit” refrain could not have served a liturgical function; the final strophe of Umbram destruxit penitus, for instance, begins with a formulaic invitation to the reader to begin the reading “accede, lector, et lege,” and Resonemus laudibus in the Aosta manuscripts is a Benedicamus Domino song-trope. However, the “apparuit” refrain circulates within the broader sphere of devotional Latin song that includes tropes, not only of the Nunc dimittis in the Resonet in laudibus complex, but for other parts of Mass and especially the Office. Finally, the origins of the refrain are ambiguous. Akin to “psallat cum tripudio,” the language and vocabulary of the “apparuit” refrain are familiar, even generic, but not related to a specific liturgical, biblical, or theological text; instead, it emerges from within the tradition and poetic conventions of devotional Latin song and trope.

Within this song tradition, certain refrains formed a special currency of familiar and communal responses, refrains that communities of singers and scribes knew from other songs or tropes and could insert or add on to other works. Testifying to the choral, if not also communal, nature of several of the refrains included in Graz is the rubrication and scribal cueing in two sources with concordances, the fourteenth-century Seckauer Cantionarium and the fifteenth-century service book with devotional songs and tropes, SG 392.Footnote ⁴⁶ In both these contexts, refrains in common with the Graz sources are preceded by the rubric “chorus,” a marker of performance practice. In SG 392, the song is the mensurally notated Nove lucis hodie, in which the “apparuit” refrain is sung as a choral, monophonic response following polyphonic strophes. The first polyphonic strophe is notated successively, culminating not with the refrain, but instead with the text-only recording of the following two strophes. The refrain is written after this residuum, doubly cued in the left and right margins by scribes as a choral response (see Figure 4.3). The incipit alone of the refrain appears after the third entry of the first strophe (“apparuit,” at the end of the fourth system on p. 89); the complete music and text of the refrain, as seen in Figure 4.3, arrive only at the conclusion of the strophes in a manner similar to the Graz sources.

Figure 4.3

SG 392, pp. 88–89, Nove lucis hodie.

Reproduced by kind permission of the Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen

In another manuscript with concordances in the Graz sources, the Seckauer Cantionarium, the song Stella nova radiat (which appears as Figures 3.7 and 3.8 in Chapter 3) cues its refrain beginning “ergo novis” first by means of “chor.” (chorus) and then “pueri.” Considering the concordances for these performative refrains in the Graz collections, it is tempting to imagine a similarly choral performance practice in the Abbey of St. Lambrecht, one in which a curated collection of familiar, perhaps even memorized, refrains could serve a range of songs, readily recalled and interjected by the choir. The circulation of the “apparuit” refrain in particular, along with its monophonic choral performance inscribed in SG 392, certainly points in the direction of a refrain practice that was rooted equally in performance and inscription.

The other four shared refrains in the Graz sources present a more challenging perspective on the mobility of music and text than the “apparuit” refrain. The “gaudeat” refrain cued most often across the two Graz sources, and especially in Graz 409, is the slipperiest of all the shared refrains in the two manuscripts in terms of its identity and repetition. In eight songs, only the single word “gaudeat” appears as a cue; for the remaining three songs, two possible “gaudeat” refrains are provided: “gaudeat, gaudeat, gaudeat ecclesia” in Novi partus gaudium and Verbum patris humanatur, and “gaudeat omnis homo” in Sata tria fert Maria. Moreover, of the twelve total songs with the “gaudeat” refrain cue, seven have concordances, and none of these transmit anything resembling a refrain beginning “gaudeat.” Only two songs, Verbum patris humanatur and Ecce venit de Syon, have concordances in sources outside of Graz 409 that employ structural refrains, in neither case beginning with “gaudeat.”

What kind of refrain, then, is “gaudeat”? It is unquestionably different from the “apparuit” refrain, however similarly the two refrains are treated and cued in the Graz sources. Thanks to its distribution throughout twelve songs, concentrated especially in Graz 409, the “gaudeat” refrain connects a significant network of songs and concordances outside of the Graz manuscripts. Moreover, the refrain itself – or at least its incipit – occurs across a trio of songs in the twelfth-century Aquitanian versarium St-M A. In these three songs, the refrain is both musically and textually variable, linked by means of the incipit “gaudeat.” In Nunc clericorum concio and Congaudeat ecclesia (fols. 33^v and 51^r), the refrain is “gaudeat homo” and in Regi nato Domino (fol. 41^v), the refrain is “gaudeat omnis homo,” the same textual refrain found in the Graz sources for Sata tria fert Maria.Footnote ⁴⁷ The “gaudeat” refrain serves a structural role in each song in St-M A, as well as in Sata tria fert Maria, although it manifests differently in each. The similarity, as Margaret Switten observes, relates “songs in a wider universe”; the fact that they are not identical does not matter as much as their recognizable similarity, or family resemblance. These “gaudeat” refrains are generic in sentiment; their repetition – or better, perhaps, their resonance – across songs is less the act of direct quotation or citation, and more about a shared, responsorial vocabulary of rejoicing.

Within the Graz sources alone, the “gaudeat” refrain links a disparate group of songs. Unlike “psallat cum tripudio” and “apparuit,” “gaudeat” is not connected primarily to refrain forms; in fact, a striking characteristic of this refrain tag in the Graz manuscripts is that it is appended to songs whose concordances do not feature refrains. Only two songs, cited above, include structural refrains outside of Graz, and in neither instance does the refrain resemble any version of the “gaudeat” refrain. Ecce venit de Syon in particular is illustrative both of how refrains functioned independently of song and how a song’s strophes could be ordered, copied, and probably sung in a similarly fluid manner. Eight manuscript sources transmit the Christmas song Ecce venit de Syon (or Sion, depending on source); of these, five transmit the refrain “eia et eia iubilando | resonet ecclesia,” and the remaining three transmit either no refrain or, in the case of Graz 409, the single-word cue “gaudeat.” Moreover, in only two sources are an identical number of strophes arranged identically (Engelberg 102 and Stuttg); across all other sources, the strophes are variable in number and order, although they share several core strophes.Footnote ⁴⁸ The modular construction of Ecce venit de Syon is readily apparent, the stability of the song’s identity resting on the transmission of certain core elements rather than on an identical number and ordering of strophes – or, for that matter, on the presence or absence of a refrain.Footnote ⁴⁹

The inclusion and exclusion of refrains in the transmission of Ecce venit de Syon from the twelfth-century Hortus Deliciarum to the fifteenth-century St. Pölten Processional suggest that the refrain was a modular, fluid component of the song. Since the song is strophic and not a rondellus, the addition or subtraction does not disturb the scansion of the poem; indeed, all Latin refrains circulating with a degree of independence are attached to strophic songs and not rondelli. What is unusual about Ecce venit de Syon is not necessarily that some versions are transmitted without a refrain, but that there are two possible refrains with which it is sung. In the case of songs with the “apparuit” refrain, by comparison, the refrain is reused, but the songs themselves do not employ different refrains in different sources. Yet between Graz 258 and 409, a scribe has chosen to include the “eya et eya” refrain of Ecce venit de Syon in the former, rubricated with a capital “V” following the formatting of the previous strophes, and “gaudeat” in the latter. In Graz 258, a different hand has then added a single word after the “eya et eya” refrain, “gaudet” (see Figure 4.4). Is it possible the scribe who added “gaudet” did not notice that the song already had a refrain and he was adding a cue based, for instance, on the refrain cue included in Graz 409? In Graz 409, the “eya et eya” refrain is not included, and therefore the scribe does not “double up” on refrains.Footnote ⁵⁰ Another question might be whether the “gaudet” of Graz 258 can be understood as a cue for the “gaudeat” refrain; the missing vowel and different scribal hand could suggest a later addition made in error, or even a mistaken attempt to copy the strophe beginning “Gaudet asinus et bos.” In either case, it remains true that the refrain of Ecce venit de Syon varies between the two Graz sources, and that these two refrains themselves circulate more broadly.

Figure 4.4 Graz 258, fol. 2^v, Ecce venit de Syon.

Reproduced by kind permission of the Universitätsbibliothek, Graz

The written-out “eya et eya” refrain of Ecce venit de Syon in Graz 258 is, in fact, also appended to a song unique to Graz 409, Nuntio dum credidit, where it is copied in full following its final strophe. Three other songs in the Graz sources also have refrains similarly beginning with “eia.” Two songs – Salve maris stella and Primus homo cum pro pomo – include either the abbreviation “eia et eia” in the former, or “eia” in the latter; the third, Tres signatas calculo, transmits a longer, unique refrain beginning “eia dicit canticum.” Considering the presence of two longer refrains beginning with “eia,” the abbreviated cues are ambiguous.Footnote ⁵¹ The “eia et eia” refrain cue of Salve maris stella probably points to the refrain of Ecce venit de Syon and Nuntio dum credidit thanks to the duplicated “eias” linked by “et”; the single “eia” in Primus homo cum pro pomo, on the other hand, could indicate either refrain. Since the “eia et eia iubilando | resonet ecclesia” refrain appears to be more widely known, at least by the scribal community at St. Lambrecht, then I would suggest that this was the intended realization of the cue in Primus homo cum pro pomo. Significantly, this is yet another song whose concordances in two later manuscripts of the troped Feast of the Circumcision (Le Puy A and B) lack a refrain. The only song that circulates beyond the Graz sources with the “eia et eia” refrain is Ecce venit de Syon. One possible scenario is that this refrain was initially familiar from Ecce venit de Syon and then recycled by singers and scribes at the Abbey of St. Lambrecht. Although this does not explain the absence of the refrain in Ecce venit de Syon transmitted in Graz 409, it might explain why it became associated with two songs unique to the Graz sources (Salve maris stella and Nuntio dum credidit), as well as with a song that was circulating more widely without a refrain, Primus homo cum pro pomo.

The final two shared refrains, beginning “sonet vox leticie” and “hei in ista die,” exhibit some of the same characteristics and ambiguities as the “gaudeat” and “eia et eia” refrains. The refrain beginning “hei in ista die” is attached to only two songs in Graz 409, one of which, Deinceps ex nulla, is found in the Moosburger Graduale with the same refrain. The other song, Paris preter morem, is transmitted more widely in both text-only and polyphonic settings, but never with a refrain. Moreover, what appears in concordant sources as a single strophe of Paris preter morem is copied by the scribe of Graz 409 in such a way as to suggest that the lengthy strophe was chopped up in performance into shorter units, using capital letters and red highlighting to apply internal, if irregular, divisions. What results is a pseudo-strophic form for Paris preter morem that would have enabled the scribe’s added refrain, “hei in ista die,” to be performed between these newly created strophic divisions.Footnote ⁵² The scribe of Graz 409, in other words, adapts and reworks the song’s form on multiple levels.

A similar situation obtains for the refrain beginning “sonet vox leticie.” Three songs, all in Graz 409, carry a refrain cue, and in the case of Gaude Syon iubila, a written-out refrain beginning “sonet vox letitice.” Gaude Syon iubila, moreover, has a concordance in the St. Pölten Processional, where the same refrain is regularly cued between strophes. Of the other two songs, Hostis perfidus et invidus is unique to Graz, and Nove geniture survives in several sources as text-only and for one or two voices. In all its sources, Nove geniture includes a short repeating line at the end of each strophe, “nato Christo”; in the majority of sources, including Graz 409, this line is not marked off as a refrain, however, and instead is grammatically and scribally integrated into each strophe.Footnote ⁵³ Only in the Moosburger Graduale does rubrication identify “nato Christo” as a refrain in a variant version of the song. It seems likely that the scribe of Graz 409, like most scribes who copied this song in other sources, did not consider “nato Christo” to function as a refrain, and so – in keeping with the broader project of adding structural refrains to strophic songs in both Graz sources – they appended the cue “sonet vox letitice” to suggest the performance of this refrain between the five strophes of Nove geniture. As with the “eia et eia” refrain, we might envision a similar process by which the refrain from a better-known song, in this case Gaude Syon iubila, is repurposed for other songs, even those that may already carry their own refrain in some sources.Footnote ⁵⁴

Throughout the Latin song collections of Graz 258 and 409, we witness the malleability, fluidity, and transformability of Latin song and refrain. Whether reflecting performing practices at the Abbey of St. Lambrecht or a more personalized agenda, the almost excessive interest in Latin refrains on the part of the scribes is a local phenomenon with reverberations throughout sources of Latin song. One of the key features of the refrains shared and recycled among songs in the Graz sources and elsewhere is their origins; unlike those reworked and borrowed from the liturgy and biblical texts, these refrains emanate from and are constructed around the performative vocabulary and grammar of Latin song. The origins of these refrains are, consequently, diffuse and unspecific. The mobility of individual refrains, moreover, speaks to the wider orbit of Latin song and refrain and the role of memory and inscription in performance, transmission, and adaptation. Most strikingly, Latin refrains emerge from the Graz sources as both the remembered and transferable parts of song, initiated in the abbreviated repetition of the refrain across folios. The regularly irregular refrain cues mark the ability of refrains to be cued from memory while also potentially reflecting performing practices that involved the addition, subtraction, and reworking of refrains in strophic Latin song.

Cueing practices inevitably reveal something about the workings of the refrain at the level of performance, as well as expectations concerning form and genre, and this is taken to an extreme in the Graz sources.Footnote ⁵⁵ As Ingrid Nelson writes with respect to the English lyric, “written lyrics often bear witness in their very incompleteness to their survival in other contexts: in the popular memory, for instance, and in performance.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The material life of the Latin refrain in the Graz sources suggests most acutely its existence in the memory of its performers and through the very act of performance itself. As refrains circulate within and beyond the Graz sources, they bear witness to wider intertextual networks within repertoires of Latin song, linking songs and sources separated by centuries and regional borders, and highlighting how different communities adopted, adapted, performed, and copied a corpus of Latin song that belonged both to everyone and to no one.

Conclusion: Refrains in Song, Memory, and Text

Although often overlooked, the complexities of the Latin refrain and its genealogies highlight tensions in medieval Latin song between fixity and fluidity, repetition and variation, and memory and inscription. This chapter has explored the Latin refrain from several related perspectives that reveal intertextual networks of song and refrain rooted in, and expressed through, composition, performance, and inscription. Importantly, examining the ways in which the Latin refrain serves as a locus for practices of reworking and intertextuality both shifts it closer and pushes it farther away from the cultural workings of the intertextual French refrain. While the Latin refrain mirrors some of the mobility of the French refrain, the reworking and recycling of refrains in Latin song are not signals of a citational poetic and musical practice, nor are they invocations of auctoritas, as has been argued for the intertextual French refrain. The Latin refrains I discuss in this chapter are self-referential; they chiefly emerge from and belong to the repertoire of Latin song itself; its language, conventions, poetic and musical contours, and meaning as an expression of the collective yet unified voice of devotional communities.

As the examples throughout the chapter demonstrate, and perhaps most especially the gatherings of songs in the Graz manuscripts, intertextuality and mobility go hand in hand with memory and inscription. A tension emerges within networks of Latin song and refrain between memory, performance, and inscription, revealed in scribal habits around refrains. When copied on the manuscript page, refrains inevitably sit at the edge of the written record, inscribed and cued incompletely and inconsistently in ways that gesture toward the realization of refrains beyond the witness of the written page. Even absent the scribal ambiguities in the Graz sources, the Latin refrain is the part of song that simultaneously remains firmly in the ear and in performance, even while disappearing off the page, as it is progressively abbreviated by scribes upon each return, cued with briefer and briefer textual gestures.Footnote ⁵⁷

I have continually returned to the idea that refrains are inherently memorable. Refrains are memorable not only through their relative simplicity and brevity, a feature of many Latin refrains, but also through their repetition, much in the same way that earworms embed themselves in one’s aural memory.Footnote ⁵⁸ When refrains repeat across a repertoire of songs, or are themselves reworked from snippets of familiar songs, they become memorable on a different plane, housed in the multigenerational and collective memory of the scribes and singers responsible for crafting, performing, and copying devotional Latin song. In the next chapter, I continue following the refrain as it traverses the boundaries of individual songs. Yet, rather than focusing on Latin contexts alone, I consider the ways in which refrains move across language through contrafacture, extending the memories and genealogies of the refrain into repertoires of French, German, and English song.