A New Catalog of Medieval Hymn Melodies in Manuscripts in France by Christian Meyer Published as RISM B/XIX/1

Barbara Haggh-Huglo

Thursday, November 20, 2025

No genre of sacred music is more ubiquitous than the hymn, which has embellished the worship services of every Christian confession from Antiquity to the present day, yet no genre is more difficult to catalogue than the medieval Latin hymn, because some hymns with the same text were sung to different melodies, and some hymn melodies were sung to different texts. Furthermore, some medieval hymns or cycles of hymns were local compositions or compilations, but others were diffused and used more widely, and the rules for their use (ordonnances) sometimes differed from place to place. A new addition to RISM’s Series B – Les Mélodies de l’hymnaire médiéval, IXe – XVIe Siècles, France – brings a clear and logical order to this great variety of hymns, which makes this volume indispensable for future scholars of hymnody and a model for future catalogues of hymns in manuscripts found in other countries. No scholar is more experienced in preparing catalogues and editions of medieval texts than Christian Meyer, and his catalogue reflects that experience in its detail and accuracy.

Meyer’s catalogue presents all the notated hymn melodies in the manuscripts of French public libraries, including several in Paris: the libraries of the Arsenal, Sorbonne, Mazarine, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This he accomplished by reducing and reformatting the entries of his Catalogues des manuscrits notés dans les bibliothèques publiques de France to descriptions only of the notated hymns in each manuscript and by comparing each of those described hymns to the hymns in the pioneering edition of hymn melodies by Bruno Stäblein, as he explains in his Introduction. The front matter comprises:

• The Table des manuscrits with full citations of each included French manuscript and other used numbers in parentheses
• An Introduction explaining the content and order of the catalogue of hymns
• Three tables consisting of sets of rules for assigning hymn melodies, the hymns sung at ferial and dominical offices, and the thirteenth-century Dominican hymnal in calendric and liturgical order
• A classification of the main manuscripts of the catalogue by their city of origin, provenance, or religious order
• Library sigla, which are those of RISM but without the prefix F-, because all cited libraries are in France; this practice was already adopted in Meyer’s catalogue, RISM B/XVIII/1
• A bibliography and other abbreviations

The main parts of the catalogue consist of the catalogue of manuscripts with hymns in alphabetical order by city, the index of hymns in alphabetical order by text incipit, and the index of hymn melodies, which is in two parts: first, the hymn melodies published by Stäblein in his given order and second, the hymn melodies not published by Stäblein that are in the French manuscripts catalogued by Meyer, which are each assigned a number by Meyer and whose melodies he transcribed in Volpiano font. This order of main sections corresponds to that used by the author for the proses and sequences in manuscripts in France in RISM B/XVIII/1 (see the announcement).

Like all other volumes of the B series, RISM B/XIX/1 has been published by Henle Verlag:
Christian Meyer: Les Mélodies de l’hymnaire médiéval, IXe – XVIe siècles, vol. 1 France, Catalogue descriptif, Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 2025, 814 p., ISBN 978-3-87328-168-4, ISMN 979-0-2018-2533-5

Category: New publications