ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the birth of the Mass cycle, tracing its origin through, and points of contact with, several earlier and related phenomena from the organisation of chants into complete Masses in the Franciscan Gradual of 1251 to the practice of creating scribal composite Masses in the fourteenth century, Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame (which arguably blends scribal and compositional composite), the isorythmic motet, and the Mass pair. It follows several features of these earlier phenomena through to the earliest English Mass cycles, demonstrating, for instance, how the vestiges of Mass pairs may still be seen in some of these early works.
