Ritus et Artes is an interdisciplinary series which presents innovative research on religious and cultural practices of the European Middle Ages and their post-medieval manifestations. Elements of medieval religious rituals, embedded in various traditions, have passed through into Western cultural heritage, memory, and sensibilities, informing thereby the development of the arts in the West. The series is particularly concerned with literary, musical, artistic, and architectural aspects of liturgical and ritual practices in the Middle Ages as well as the survival, revival, and resignification of these practices in the arts and related areas up to the present time, offering theological, aesthetical, philosophical, and general historical perspectives on their reception. Music, Liturgy, and the Veneration of Saints of the Medieval Irish Church in a European Context, This book opens up discussion on the liturgical music of medieval Ireland by approaching it from a multidisciplinary, European perspective. In so doing, it challenges received notions of an idiosyncratic 'Celtic Rite', and of the prevailing view that no manuscripts with music notation have survived from the medieval Irish Church. This is due largely to a preoccupation by earlier scholars with pre-Norman Gaelic culture, to the neglect of wider networks of engagement between Ireland, Britain, and continental Europe. In adopting a more inclusive approach, a different view emerges which demonstrates the diversity and international connectedness of Irish ecclesiastical culture throughout the long Middle Ages, in both musico-liturgical and other respects. The contributors represent a variety of specialisms, including musicology, liturgiology, palaeography, hagiology, theology, church history.

Celtic studies, French studies, and Latin. From this rich range of perspectives they investigate the evidence for Irish musical and liturgical practices from the earliest surviving sources with chant texts to later manuscripts with music notation, as well as exploring the far-reaching cultural impact of the Irish church in medieval Europe through case studies of liturgical offices in honour of Irish saints, and of saints traditionally associated with Ireland in different parts of Europe.