ABSTRACT
Oddly, the specialist publications about carols have had little impact on broader histories. The Neues Handbuch für Musikwissenschaft, vol. 3 (1989–90) dismisses them simply as ‘laienhaften Carols’; The Cambridge History of fifteenth-century music (2015) gives them less than a page (out of 900) and Richard Taruskin (2005) states that the style had probably been around since 1066. That is why this book needed to be written.
