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Mary Channen Caldwell’s research on music in medieval Europe engages with the complementary disciplines of historical musicology and medieval studies and is driven by interests in the cultural, ritual, textual, and material aspects of music and its production, reception, and transmission. Across research and teaching, Caldwell employs methodologies that recognize the importance of notes on the page (incomplete as they are in premodern sources) while seeing these abstract reflections as part of complex systems of cultural meaning and history. While music is always at the core, her writing and teaching connect with a range of interrelated disciplines, including manuscript studies, gender studies, religious studies, liturgiology, hagiography, and dance studies. Published and forthcoming articles on a range of topics related to these interests appear in, among others, Early Music History, Plainsong & Medieval Music, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Musicology, Revue de musicologie, Music & Letters, and Speculum, as well as in edited volumes.

Caldwell’s first book, Devotional Refrains in Medieval Latin Song (Cambridge University Press, 2022), offers a critical approach to the Latin refrain and its songs, bringing attention to an understudied corpus of over 400 Latin vocal works from the Middle Ages. She explores for the first time the Latin refrain as a vibrant and multidimensional part of the varied landscape of medieval song, arguing for the importance of Latin song traditions within the devotional as well as daily lives of religious and educational communities across Europe. Her second book, Music, Miracles, and the Making of St. Nicholas (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press), continues this interest in music and culture, showing how music shaped the cult of St. Nicholas and, in turn, how Nicholas’s cult transformed the history of medieval music. She is also writing a book on song and conversion in medieval Europe, exploring song as a medium, metaphor, and agent of religious transformation. She also co-edited with Dr. Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne Latin Song in the Medieval West (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming 2026), which features an introduction and thirteen contributions by international scholars.

At Penn, Caldwell is the co-director of a concert series between the Department of Music and Penn Libraries called “Music in the Pavilion” (https://www.library.upenn.edu/page/music-pavilion-series). In 2018, she co-organized an interdisciplinary symposium titled “Gothic Arts” with colleagues in Art History and History, which brought together scholars from within and outside of the United States (http://web.sas.upenn.edu/gothicarts/), and in 2024 a virtual symposium hosted by Penn on early dance with the Dance Studies Association, New Work on Old Dance: A Pre-1800 Dance Studies Symposium.

Caldwell received her PhD in Music History and Theory from the University of Chicago in 2013 and a Bachelor of Music degree from the School of Music at Queen’s University (Ontario, Canada) in 2006. Her teaching and research have been supported by the University of Chicago, the American Musicological Society, the John Anson Kittredge Fund, the American Philosophical Society, the NEH, the American Academy of Religion, UCLA’s CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, the Wolf Humanities Center, and the Radcliffe Institute. In 2021, Caldwell was awarded the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Caldwell presents regularly at conferences and symposia in Canada, the United States, and Europe, including papers at the national meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Medieval Academy of America.

Recent Publications

Journal Articles

“Music, Conversion, and Musical Conversion in Medieval France.” Medieval Encounters (forthcoming 2026).

“Singing to St. Nicholas at Sea: Listening to the Medieval and Modern Voices of Sailors.” Religions: Special Issue Saintly Voices: Sounding the Supernatural in Medieval Hagiography, edited by Catherine Saucier. 16 (10), 1257 (2025): 1-23. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16101257

“Singing and Learning (in) Latin in Medieval Europe.” Philomusica On-Line 22, no. 1 (2023) Musica e letteratura al tempo di Dante: 53-95. http://riviste.paviauniversitypress.it/index.php/phi/article/view/2258.

“Dancing in Silence in Premodern Europe.” postmedieval, special issue on “Legacies of Medieval Dance,” edited by Kathryn Dickason, vol. 14, nos. 2-3 (2023): 371-391.

“Multilingualism, Nova Cantica, and the Cult of St. Nicholas in Medieval England and France.” Speculum 98, no. 4 (2023): 1053-1088.

“Against the Dangers of the Night: The Compline Versicle Custodi nos domine and its Tropes in Medieval France.” Journal of the Alamire Foundation 15, no. 1 (2023): 69-106.

“‘To His Beloved Friends…’: The Epistolary Art of Song in Medieval France.” Textus & Musica 5 (2022) Circulations et échanges des technicités et des savoirs musicaux et littéraires au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance: https://textus-et-musica.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/textus-et-musica/index.php?id=2504.

“‘I have trodden the winepress alone’: The Voice of Christ and the Mystic Winepress in a Thirteenth-Century Conductus.” Revue de musicologie 108, no. 1 (2022): 3-40.

“Conductus, Sequence, Refrain: Composing Latin Song across Language and Genre in Thirteenth-Century France.” The Journal of Musicology 39, no. 2 (2022): 133-178.

“Singing Cato: Poetic Grammar and Moral Citation in Medieval Latin Song,” Music & Letters 102, no. 2 (2021): 191–233.

“Troping Time: Refrain Interpolation in Sacred Latin Songs, ca. 1140-1853.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 74 no. 1 (2021): 91-156.

“Cueing Refrains in the Medieval Conductus.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 143, no. 2 (2018): 273-324.

“A Medieval Patchwork Song: Poetry, Prayer and Music in a Thirteenth-Century Conductus.” Plainsong &Medieval Music 25, no. 2 (2016): 139-165.

“‘Flower of The Lily’: Late-Medieval Religious and Heraldic Symbolism in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS français 146.” Early Music History 33 (2014): 1-60.

Book Chapters

“Is Medieval Choreomusicology Possible?” In Choreomusicology: Dialogues in Music and Dance, edited by Samuel N. Dorf and Helen Julia Minors, 175–208. New York: Routledge, 2025.

“St Nicholas and the Singing of Liturgical Versicles.” In Music and Liturgy for the Benedicamus Domino c. 800–1650, ed. Catherine A. Bradley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2024): 83-113.

“Revisiting the ‘Clerical Dance Song’ in Medieval Europe.” In Tanz al Musik: Perspektiven für die Historische Musikpraxis, edited by Christelle Cazaux, Martina Papiro, and Agnese Pavanello. Basler Beiträge zur Historischen Musikpraxis 42, 29-60. Basel: Schwabe, 2024.

“Texting Vocality: Musical and Material Poetics of the Voice in Medieval Latin Song.” In Ars Antiqua: Music and Culture in Europe, c. 1150-c. 1330, edited by Gregorio Bevilacqua and Thomas Payne. Speculum Musicae vol. 40, 35-72. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020.

“Litanic Songs for the Virgin: Rhetoric, Repetition, and Marian Refrains in Medieval Latin Song.” In The Litany in Arts and Cultures, edited by Witold Sadowski and Francesco Marsciani. Studia Traditionis Theologiae, 143-174. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020.

“‘Pax Gallie’: The Songs of Tours 927.” In The Jeu d’Adam: MS Tours 927 and the Provenance of the Play, edited by Christophe Chaguinian, 87-176. Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017.

Encyclopedia Entries

with Timothy McGee. “Dance.” Oxford Bibliographies in “Medieval Studies.” New York: Oxford University Press (forthcoming 2021). DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780195396584-0121

“Musical Hagiography in Western Europe with Reference to the Cult of St Nicholas of Myra,” in “Holy Persons.” Edited by Aaron Hollander and Massimo Rondolino. In Encyclopedia of the Global Middle Ages, Bloomsbury/ARC-Humanities Press, 2021.

Media Coverage

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Country Focus

Expertise by Geography

British Isles, England, France, Western Europe

Expertise by Chronology

Medieval, Pre-17th century

Expertise by Topic

Book History, Literary History, Material Culture, Religion