Chapter 5 identifies the refrain as an axis between Latin and vernacular song, focusing on what the concentration of contrafacts in three unique manuscripts (the St-Victor Miscellany, Engelberg Codex, and Red Book of Ossory) reveals concerning the interpenetration of song cultures and their languages across Europe. Refrain songs in these notated and unnotated sources feature parallel forms of scribal evidence and intervention that illustrate long-standing interactions between Latin and vernacular refrains through contrafacture and offer insight into the multilingual communities behind the Latin refrain song repertoire. Two of the three sources - the St-Victor Miscellany and Red Book of Ossory - transmit only unnotated songs, moreover, while the Engelberg Codex lacks notation for six of its nine marginally annotated songs. This chapter suggests that the vernacular fragments, or refrains, behave in many ways like musical notation; knowledge of the melody attached to a given vernacular text (typically a refrain) enables the musical realization of the Latin poem. Independently of one another, the St-Victor Miscellany, Engelberg Codex, and the Red Book of Ossory treat the Latin and vernacular refrain in similar ways by using the refrain to initiate formal links across language and generate musical meaning in the absence of notation.

Chapter 4 explores the memorial aspects of the Latin refrain and its circulation between genres and among works, demonstrating how the Latin refrain and refrain song participate in an extensive, and at times complicated network of textual and musical borrowing, reworking, and repetition. These intertextual and intermusical networks include refrains that are reworked from other genres, most often chant; refrains that are employed structurally across different songs; and refrains that are recycled more freely among songs. Although relying on the written side of the Latin refrain’s transmission, these forms of intertextuality are underpinned by the lived experiences of the individuals and communities who performed, remembered, and wrote down Latin song and refrain; singers, scribes, and compilers are the unnamed agents driving the recycling of Latin refrains. Chapter 4 concludes with a case study of two fourteenth-century sources from an Austrian abbey that considers how the inscription of refrains within this monastic community evidences an evolving, living practice of remembering, singing, copying, and reusing Latin refrains.