Abstract

The Abbey of Moissac, standing at the confluence of the Garonne and Tarn in southwestern France, is celebrated today for its Romanesque sculpture. High above the door to the abbey church, the twelfth-century tympanum depicts the twenty-four elders of the Apocalpyse, their voices eternally suspended in a canticum novum (new song) before the enthroned Lamb. This sculpted vision of heavenly liturgy offers us a way into reconsidering the history of medieval Latin song in this period. By examining a newly identified corpus of strophic recorded around the edges of manuscripts copied at Moissac, this paper first expands the material base of what music historians have come to know as the “New Song”. Reports of Moissac-trained singers spreading Gregorian Reforms in the Iberian Peninsula then extend our appreciation of the role of song in the Reconquista, but the tympanum encourages us to think further. It gives shape to an ideal of laus perennis(perpetual praise) that governed the Cluniac pursuit of perfection. From hymn cycles to cloister songs to Marian Offices, the diverse songs recorded at Moissac do more than document a song repertory; they enact a vision of ceaseless praise within a “kingdom of priests” ruling over the whole earth.