ABSTRACT
Few musicologists would question the statement that the cathedral of Paris was one of the most important churches in Europe in the Middle Ages. The liturgy itself is a relatively untapped mine of information about the geography of the cathedral, for it can tell us much about the location of early altars to a number of saints, places visited in procession, and the various sites at which polyphony was sung. Nonetheless, it is one of history's ironies that because of the importance of Notre-Dame of Paris in French national life, the surviving documentary record of this most central of French cathedrals in its early years is woefully incomplete. Both the library and the treasury of Notre-Dame fell victim to the destructions of the French Revolution. The thirteenth-century Paris pontifical now in Montpellier includes a musical cue for Alma redemptoris along with Alle resonent fully notated at the end of the Terce procession on the Purification of the Virgin.
