ABSTRACT
Thomas Forrest Kelly’s The Beneventan Chant describes the regional chant o f the southern Italian Lombard duchy o f Bene vento from the seventh to the eleventh cen turies. This chant and the rite it orna mented were comparable in many ways to Ambrosian chant and the Milanese rite among the Lombards o f northern Italy. (They were doubtless anciently related.) From the ninth century, the Beneventan variety coexisted with Gregorian chant un til finally it gave way to its rival after the Norman extinction o f the Lombard prin cipality and the enfeoffm ent o f the city o f Benevento to the papacy in the mid eleventh century. Kelly’s study is at once a brief history o f the regional rite; a survey o f past research, reaching back to the early 1900s; a report on Kelly’s own discoveries o f new manuscript sources, several o f them palimpsest, together with a definitive cen sus o f the manuscripts presently known to contain vestiges o f the chant; and a splen didly comprehensive analysis o f old Bene ventan texts and music. Kelly’s detective research in Italian libraries has more or less doubled the known repertory o f old Bene ventan chant. His creative reflections have focused our understanding o f this im por tant repertory. His book is undoubtedly one o f the most significant studies o f West ern medieval chant to have been published in the last thirty years.
