Nausica Morandi, Officium Stellae: Studio comparativo e trascrizione dei testimoni liturgico-musicali, La Tradizione Musicale 17. Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo per la Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, 2016. xxxii + 468 pp. €65. ISBN 978 88 8450 690 0.

cantorum who had been granted as subdeacons the privilegium of wearing the mitre in the exercise of their office. Another case study of transformation is Anna de Bakker’s examination of the Office of Arnulf de Villers (d. 1228), a Cistercian lay brother. The fact that a prose vita was adapted for a liturgical observance is hardly remarkable, but de Bakker illustrates how Goswin, the author of the saint’s office (and vita), shaped the ‘dialogue’ between responsories and readings to define his subject as not just a local holy man but an ‘eternal figure’ (p. 338). The responsory Egressus igitur, for example, invokes Abraham as one who, like Arnulf, departed ‘de terra et cognatione sua’. The extreme penances and mortification which the saintly Arnulf imposed upon himself are recorded in grisly detail in a hymn which begins (incongruously?) Gaude mater ecclesia (Table 18.1). The closing essay by Claire Taylor Jones on the reformer Johannes Meyer (d. 1485) has little relationship to the title of the book. She chronicles Meyer’s strenuous endeavours to impose on convents of Dominican nuns a strict Observance of the Rule of Augustine and the customs of the Order. Meyer copied, translated and edited ‘sistersbooks’ (histories of convents composed in German by the sisters themselves) and other materials related to his mission, in which he was assisted by reforming nuns. Meyer laid particular stress on education, so that the choir nuns would understand the Latin of the office they were bound to recite. Any reader who takes this book from the library shelf will surely be able to find chapters that relate to his or her interests. Not to be found, however, is much information about ‘medieval cantors and their craft’. That might require a different kind of research in archives, ordinals and customaries. York Medieval Press has done an excellent job of producing a readable text in a sturdy binding. The manuscript illustrations are of serviceable quality, though Rankin’s ‘Plate X’ (p. 57) seems to have gone astray.