Despite the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic at the start of the project, BENEDICAMUS has made good progress in the successful initial implementation of all of its work packages. The project adapted its initial activities and outputs to respond to what was possible in a pandemic period when members of the team were delayed in starting their employment contracts and re-locating to Oslo, and when research travel and in-person meetings were restricted.
The unique feature and strength of BENEDICAMUS is its pursuit of a transformative focus on an exceptional liturgical moment in the Western Christian liturgy. BENEDICAMUS benefits from many advantages of a micro-historical approach: it uses a single ritual moment to ask bigger questions about music history. Yet in scope, the various genres and practices that the "Benedicamus Domino" encompasses, and the radically different forms that assumes across time, are much more substantial, even ubiquitous, than the subject of a typical micro history. These inherent paradoxes—highly specific yet open and wide-ranging—make "Benedicamus Domino" an especially provocative and productive object of study for a longue durée history in which creative objects and practices are afforded a central role in shaping historical and analytical approaches.
Work within all of the work packages is still ongoing, and the second half of the project will develop and expand existing contributions to the three work packages as follows 1) the currently available "Benedicamus Domino" database will be substantially enlarged, with the addition of many new sources and melodies 2) the chronological focus in work package 2, which has so far predominantly addressed the period 1200–1300, will be broadened to include 1100–1200 and will continue to develop strategies for engaging analytically with "unwritten" music and practices 3) the emphasis in work package 3, so far been devoted entirely to music-making in female communities, will now shift also to encompass informal devotional practices, "simple" musical styles and their cultural or institutional contexts, that are still poorly understood or overlooked by scholars.
The project will continue to shape its results and approaches in response to manuscript discoveries of sacred music in the period c.1000–1500, bringing to light and interrogating the implications of new evidence. Its work serves productively to question disciplinary boundaries and established historiographical frameworks: conventional chronological periods, ideas of centre and periphery, sacred and secular, written and unwritten, and Latin and vernacular traditions.
