I have two points to make about the chapter title, and these points will help situate my overall argumentation here.

This chapter explores how writing affected the nature of custom itself. The writing of custom did not fix or petrify custom and end its malleability or creativity, as scholars have assumed. Drawing on the work of literary scholars on the nature of medieval vernacular text and manuscript culture, I argue instead that each manuscript provided one authoritative version of custom and constituted one voice in a conversation over custom that continued with written text. This conversation can be seen where differences between manuscripts show diverging opinions about proper custom. This, in turn, meant that custom remained creative and dynamic even in written form. The purpose of the coutumiers was not to copy practised custom and faithfully record it with perfect accuracy in text. Rather, the coutumiers were meant to change the patterns of thought of ‘those who would hear or read the text’ and show them how to think in a legal manner, like a lawyer, judge, or sophisticated litigant. Teaching modes of thought rather than rules permitted those who did not spend years in university to understand the framework and rhetoric of lay courts, and enabled them to navigate these through changing rules, time, and circumstance.

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.

Chapter 6 picks up on several threads that run throughout the previous chapters, including community and performance, refrains and collective memory, the mobility or mouvance of refrains, and the question of place and locality for the performance and dissemination of Latin refrain songs, and puts them into a broader cultural and historical context. Chapter 6 also points to further contexts for the refrain song outside the scope of the book, as well as possible avenues of interpretation and research for songs and refrains that were not discussed, such as secular refrains. The chapter also briefly discusses the afterlives of Latin refrain songs, from the late medieval carol and the rise of print culture to modern recording practices.