Music in the Carolingian World

Music in the Carolingian World stems from a conference honoring the career and wide-ranging research of Prof. Charles M. Atkinson, leading scholar in early-medieval studies and author of the award-winning monograph, The Critical Nexus (2010). The volume brings together seventeen essays to explore the broad ramifications of music as an arena of study in early-medieval culture; taken together, they manifest the status of music not just as a field of research, but as a metadiscipline that embraces numerous fields and specializations in medieval studies, including philosophy, theology, literature, philology, paleography, liturgy, education, political and institutional history, as well as the practice, theory, and transmission of chant and related musical repertories. The essays are grouped into the four thematic categories of Verbum, Numerus, Ars, and Cultus, bookended by three keynote essays that touch in different ways on the theme of metadisciplinarity.