Noticing xxxiv - medieval music

In my editing life, I have been working lately on a translation of the Vita, or Life, of a 13th-century Premonstratensian "canoness" and mystic, Christina of Hane (1269–1292?). I don't usually listen to music while I edit, but today I thought it might help me make tracks if I put on something appropriately medieval.

Illustration from Escorial Codex E,
folio 79r, Cantigas de Santa Maria

I thought immediately of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, or "Canticles of Holy Mary," "420 poems with musical notation, written in the medieval Galician-Portuguese language during the reign of Anfonso X of Castile El Sabio (1221–1284) and often attributed to him. It is one of the largest collections of monophonic (solo) songs from the Middle Ages and is characterized by the mention of the Virgin Mary in every song, while every tenth song is a hymn" (thank you Wikipedia).

Illumination from Hildegard's
Liber Scivias (1152)
showing her receiving a
vision and dictating to her
scribe and secretary

The Benedictine abbess and mystic Hildegard of Bingen, "Sybil of the Rhine," is also appropriate geographically (Christina's Hane was only about 40 miles from Bingen), though she lived a full century earlier, from 1098 to 1179.

And of course Spotify has both a Cantigas de Santa Maria and a Hildegard von Bingen radio station! (They are rather different, believe it or not.)

Here are both sets of music for your listening pleasure: the first is a recording of some of the Cantigas by Sequentia; the second is some Hildegard by Hortus Deliciarum. It's really lovely music. It's what Christina of Hane herself might have heard, or something very like it, all those centuries ago, reverberating through her own church. Or perhaps she sang such tunes, in her devotional practice.