The twenty-four stanza abecedarium, beginning Audi tellus, audi magni maris limbus (Montpellier, Bibliothèque de la ville, 6), stands at the beginning of a long tradition of similar songs of judgement. A closer study of the sources provides for a deeper understanding of the transformation of the original song into a versicle to the Libera me and by the thirteenth century the first two lines of the song were transformed into the beginning of an unusual litany asking ‘Ubi sunt’, which was again most often described in the rubrics as a trope to the Libera me, particularly on All Souls Day. Here, however, an unusual and varying cast of characters enter the text of the song and the liturgy, including classical philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, historic figures, such as Paris and Helen, and even the biblical heroes Samson and King David. By the later Middle Ages, the trope had been further transformed into a devotional song and was especially prominent in sources associated with the cloisters of the Devotio moderna and later in polyphonic settings by Caspar Othmayr, Jacobus Gallus and Orlandus Lassus.

This is the first study to examine the seven invitatory antiphons of the Birgittine weekly Office, the Cantus sororum, offering complete transcriptions of the melodies and texts. An important general finding is that these invitatories share many melodic similarities with great responsories, but on a more detailed level this article investigates precisely how these chants relate to known models, both complete melodies as well as individual melodic motives. Four patterns of composition among the Cantus sororum invitatories emerge: (1) unique texts may be combined with melodies that resemble other known chants outside the Cantus sororum; (2) texts and melodies that resemble other variants outside the Cantus sororum may be combined in new ways; (3) both text and melody are unknown outside the Cantus sororum.

Overall, these invitatory antiphons, like the rest of the Cantus sororum, represent creative work with existing melodies and texts, including reworkings, borrowings and consistent use of melodic motifs, comprising a significant part of a repertoire at once distinctly Birgittine in character and yet conforming to the common stock of Gregorian Chant. Melodic correspondences within the Cantus sororum as well as in the Birgittine Mass repertoire thus afford an interesting perspective on a soundscape in which the Birgittines functioned and where, through music, their identity was created and maintained.

Only two large collections of Hildegard of Bingen's music are extant, today housed in the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven (B-LVu, no shelf number) and in the Hochschul-und Landesbibliothek RheinMain in Wiesbaden (D-WI1 2, the so-called ‘Riesencodex’). The Riesencodex, though, was almost lost during World War II. It survived both bombing and plundering in Dresden in February 1945, only to be appropriated by the Soviet Administration in 1947. Using archival records from the Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in Wiesbaden from the 1940s and 1950s, I detail the efforts of a number of people to retrieve the manuscript after the war and bring it back to Wiesbaden. Franz Götting, the director of the Wiesbaden library, spent several years trying to recover the manuscript through official channels. Its eventual return to Wiesbaden in 1948, however, came about surreptitiously, largely through the efforts of Margarete Kühn at the German Academy in East Berlin and an American woman, Caroline Walsh, in Berlin as a military spouse.