Shared Sounds: Using Borrowed Melodies to Create Shared Contexts in Late Medieval Saints’ Offices

This article explores the use of borrowed chants and melodies to create and affirm sanctity in late medieval martyr saints’ liturgies, with a focus on Jan Hus, St Adalbert, and St Demetrius within the Bohemian and Hungarian liturgical traditions. Common, Semi-Common, and Proper chants with contrafacted melodies played an important role in providing intertextual nuance and establishing a shared sound with earlier repertories. This shared context then imbued both familiarity and authority on the new chants, and therefore the celebration, legitimising a new feast from its inception and adding a layer of sonic complexity reaching beyond the words. The borrowed sounds thus underpinned the sanctity of the new feasts and anchored new liturgical practices within established musical traditions.