Text, Music, and Liturgy in the Hispanic Rite: The Vespertinus Genre

The Hispanic rite, a medieval non-Roman Western liturgy, was practiced across the Iberian Peninsula for over half a millennium and functioned as the most distinct marker of Christian identity in this region. As Christians typically began every liturgical day throughout the year by singing a vespertinus, this chant genre in particular provides a unique window into the cultural and religious life of medieval Iberia. The Hispanic rite has the largest corpus of extant manuscripts of all non-Roman liturgies in the West, which testifies to the importance placed on their transmission through political and cultural upheavals. Its chants, however, use a notational system that lacks clear specification of pitch and has kept them barred from in-depth study.

Text, Liturgy and Music in the Hispanic Rite is the first detailed analysis of the interactions between textual, liturgical, and musical variables across the entire extant repertoire of a chant genre central to the Hispanic rite, the vespertinus. By approaching the vespertini through a holistic methodology that integrates liturgy, melody, and text, author Raquel Rojo Carrillo identifies the genre's norms and traces the different shapes it adopts across the liturgical year and on different occasions. In this way, the book offers an unprecedented insight into the liturgical edifice of the Hispanic rite and the daily experience of Christians in medieval Iberia.

Raquel Rojo Carrillo, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, University of Cambridge Faculty of Music.

Raquel Rojo Carrillo is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Music. Her research focuses on the plainchant repertoires of medieval Iberia. She is currently co-author of the "Liturgical Chant Bibliography" of the Plainsong & Medieval Music journal and serves as coordinator of Hispanic rite chant sources in the Spanish Early Music Manuscripts database, which is part of the CANTUS Index network.