Holy Treasure and Sacred Song explores the complex interplay between relic cults and the liturgy in medieval Tuscany. Drawing on documentary, literary and visual evidence rarely considered together, it reveals that liturgical texts, music, and ritual were integral to the clergy's well-informed promotion of saints buried in their churches.

Sacred music is a universal phenomenon of humanity. Where there is faith, there is music to express it. Every major religious tradition and most minor ones have music and have it in abundance and variety. There is music to accompany ritual and music purely for devotion, music for large congregations and music for trained soloists, music that sets holy words and music without words at all. In some traditions—Islamic and many Native American, to name just two--the relation between music and religious ritual is so intimate that it is inaccurate to speak of the music accompanying the ritual. Rather, to perform the ritual is to sing, and to sing the ritual is to perform it. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Sacred Music contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 800 cross-referenced entries on major types of music, composers, key religious figures, specialized positions, genres of composition, technical terms, instruments, fundamental documents and sources, significant places, and important musical compositions. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about sacred music.

Anthony Ruff, O.S.B., has written a brilliant, comprehensive, well-researched book about the treasures of the Church's musical tradition, and about the transformations brought about by liturgical reform. The liturgy constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium stated many revolutionary principles of liturgical reform. Regarding liturgical music, the Council's decrees mandated, on the one hand, the preservation of the inherited treasury of sacred music, and on the other hand, advocated adaptation and expansion of this treasury to meet the changed requirements of the reformed liturgy. In clear, precise language, he retrieves the Council's neglected teachings on the preservation of the inherited music treasury. He clearly shows that this task is not at odds with good pastoral practice, but is rather an integral part of it. The book proposes an alternate hermeneutic for understanding the Second Vatican Council's teachings on worship music.

This study explores ways in which Dante presents liturgy as enabling humans to encounter God. In Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante’s “Commedia,” Helena Phillips-Robins explores for the first time the ways in which the relationship between humanity and divinity is shaped through the performance of liturgy in the Commedia. The study draws on largely untapped thirteenth-century sources to reconstruct how the songs and prayers performed in the Commedia were experienced and used in late medieval Tuscany. Phillips-Robins shows how in the Commedia Dante refashions religious practices that shaped daily life in the Middle Ages and how Dante presents such practices as transforming and sustaining relationships between humans and the divine. The study focuses on the types of engagement that Dante’s depictions of liturgical performance invite from the reader. Based on historically attentive analysis of liturgical practice and on analysis of the experiential and communal nature of liturgy, Phillips-Robins argues that Dante invites readers themselves to perform the poem’s liturgical songs and, by doing so, to enter into relationship with the divine. Dante calls not only for readers’ interpretative response to the Commedia but also for their performative and spiritual activity. Focusing on Purgatorio and Paradiso, Phillips-Robins investigates the particular ways in which relationships both between humans and between humans and God can unfold through liturgy. Her book includes explorations of liturgy as a means of enacting communal relationships that stretch across time and space; the Christological implications of participating in liturgy; the interplay of the personal and the shared enabled by the language of liturgy; and liturgy as a living out of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. The book will interest students and scholars of Dante studies, medieval Italian literature, and medieval theology.

The first study focusing on the composition of new plainchant in northern-French confraternities for masses and offices in honor of saints thought to have healing powers

This book explores the issue of ecclesiastical authority in Romanesque sculpture on the portals and other sculpted “gateways” of churches in the north Italian region of Lombardy. Gillian B. Elliott examines the liturgical connection between the ciborium over the altar (the most sacred threshold inside the church), and the sculpted portals that appeared on church exteriors in medieval Lombardy. In cities such as Milan, Civate, Como, and Pavia, the liturgy of Saint Ambrose was practiced as an alternative to the Roman liturgy and the churches were constructed to respond to the needs of Ambrosian liturgy. Not only do the Romanesque churches in these places correspond stylistically and iconographically, but they were also linked politically in an era of intense struggle for ultimate regional authority. The book considers liturgical and artistic links between interior church furnishings and exterior church sculptural programs, and also applies new spatial methodologies to the interior and exterior of churches in Lombardy. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, architectural history, and religious studies.

This path-breaking account of music's role in Venice's Mediterranean empire sheds new light on the city's earliest musical history.