The Service-Books of the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis

`impressive study ... Robertson writes an exhaustive and detailed account of the liturgy of Saint-Denis. She painstakingly documents the additions and changes to the calendar from the ninth-century to the thirteenth' Journal of the American Musicological Society `admirable book ... intensely detailed study ... Taken as a whole, the book's greatest difficulty - its narrow concentration on the details of service books - is its greatest strength, for the astonishing amount of hard research which has gone into it is unlikely ever to be repeated for this institution and will surely provide a model for studies of many more.' Times Literary Supplement `A general strength of the book is the inherent flexibility of its overall structure which allows selected themes to be explored in the most straightforward way ... The connections between music, liturgy and politics are convincingly drawn ... a useful point of reference.' Early Music 'a substantial work of meticulously careful and thorough scholarship ... Its specialized pedigree and its wider background are both excellent ... Anne Walters Robertson has been notably successful in amassing, organizing, and conveying the sense of an enormous body of material. She writes clearly and with precision, at times most elegantly ... we can thank Robertson for a generous profusion of riches that are surely of interest to more than the specialists in this field ... It is a veritable mine into which scholars and even general readers may burrow.' NBBruno Turner, Notes, September 1993 'this is a readable book ... It manages to preserve a balance between the sequential exposition necessary to one that may be read from cover to cover and the self-containment of sections necessary in a book that may be used for reference. Extensive footnotes allow the reader access to a wealth of further information and the works of other scholars ... this wide-ranging work provides an excellent introduction, not only to the service books of Saint-Denis, but also to the problems of working in the field of medieval liturgical books.' Isobel Preece, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 2.2. 1993