Johannes de Garlandia is one of the most important theorists of measurable music during the thirteenth century, yet the study of his writings has always been frustrated by a problematic biographical situation. Not only is the history of manuscript transmission and attribution regarding Johannes de Garlandia's writings complicated, but both Johannes and de Garlandia were popular and common names in medieval Paris, where the theorist is thought to have lived.

In the course of a discussion of the Christian liturgy and religious rituals in general, Mircea Eliade maintained that every religious festival, any liturgical time, represents the reactualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past, since words and gestures of a ritual are thought to be charged with a power of reactualization so that the event imitated is believed rendered present for the community's welfar. My analysis of the Piacentinian Christmas texts will be based on the phenomenological theories of religion elaborated by Eliade and Odo Casel. It will examine how the medieval Mass was not only a religious ceremony in praise of God but also a cultic experience in terms of the time and space of the ceremony. The liturgical apparatus will be considered as the actual vehicle that creates the proclaimed reality of the celebration, because it is within the power of the Mass to bring us into the same temporal dimension with the saving deeds of Christ and to place us in their immediate presence. By indicating the complexity of dimensions involved in religious practice, its ritual, mythological, doctrinal and experimental aspects, this phenomenological approach to the medieval Christian liturgy implies that the telos of each individual Mass goes beyond the liturgical celebration itself. It would seem to be of some interest, then, to subject to a detailed investigation those texts that were selected in a specific diocese at a certain time to achieve such a telos.

Two decades ago Thomas Forrest Kelly remarked in a footnote to an article concerning responsory prosas that the extent of the repertoire of these additions to the Office can be seen only by surveying large numbers of medieval Office books. In the haystack of a faded thousand-page breviary, he remarked, the needle of a single small prosula can be a real joy! The foundation of this essay is just such a needle, and I hope to employ it to add a few threads to the ever-developing tapestry woven by practitioners of the sister disciplines of history and musicology. My purpose is to present an analysis of a liturgical portrait of Thomas Becket, focusing upon the texts and musical settings of two prosas unique to the British Library manuscript Add.

Liturgical Chant Bibliography 8 again lists publications covering all aspects of cantus planus, particularly Western chant. In order to present a clear overview of the various types of publications, they have been subdivided into: (1) Editions and facsimile editions, (2) Books and reprints, (3) Congress reports, (4) Chant journals, (5) Collections of essays, dictionaries and periodicals, (6) Articles in periodicals. Access to the contents of the bibliography is facilitated by separate indices of authors, subjects and manuscripts. Prefaced to the bibliography is a list of additions to Liturgical Chant Bibliographies 6 and 7.