Performing Piety - Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries

What did nuns sing? How did they learn about music? How did the music affect their piety? This book answers these and many other questions about the musical life in English nunneries in the later Middle Ages. Drawing upon a wide range of historical sources, Yardley pieces together a mosaic of nunnery musical life. Formal monastic rules, medieval liturgical manuscripts, records from bishops' visitations to nunneries and other medieval documents provide evidence that even the smallest convents sang the monastic offices on a daily basis and that many of the larger houses celebrated the late medieval liturgy in all of its complexity.