Biography
Catherine A. Bradley is Associate Professor in Early Music and a Fellow of St John’s College.
She holds a 2 million Euro Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council for her project BENEDICAMUS (Musical and Poetic Creativity for a Unique Moment in the Western Christian Liturgy c.1000–1500). She is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press journal Plainsong and Medieval Music and editor the of Royal Musical Association Monographs series. She has received the Royal Musical Association Dent Medal (2023), the Early Music Award of the American Musicological Society (for her first monograph, Polyphony in Medieval Paris: The Art of Composing with Plainchant, Cambridge University Press, 2018), and the Music & Letters Westrup Prize (2012).
Catherine was formerly Professor at the University of Oslo (2017–24), Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (2014–17), and a Research Fellow at The Queen’s College, Oxford (2010–14). She completed her undergraduate and masters degrees at the University of Oxford and received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2011. She has held fellowships at the Fondation maison des sciences de l’homme (2023), the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters Centre for Advanced Study (2020–2022), the University of Chicago (Wigeland Fellow, 2020), the Paris Institute of Advanced Studies (EURIAS fellow 2017–18), and at St Catherine’s College, Oxford (2015).
Publications
BOOKS
Music and Liturgy for the Benedicamus Domino c.800–1650, ed., Épitome musical (Turnhout: Brepols, 2024)
Authorship and Identity in Late Thirteenth-Century Motets, Royal Musical Association Monographs 39 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022)
Polyphony in Medieval Paris: The Art of Composing with Plainchant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) [American Musicological Society Early Music Award]
The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle. Contents, Contexts, Chronologies, ed. with Karen Desmond (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018)
JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUE
‘Benedicamus Domino as Female Devotion’, ed., Early Music 50/4 (2022)
PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS
‘Singing in Stimmtausch c.1100–1350: Re-Positioning Polyphony in Medieval France’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 78/1 (2025): 123–94
‘The (Critical) Reception of Adam de la Halle’s Motets by Petrus de Cruce and His Circle’, in Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne and Gaël Saint-Cricq (eds.), Composers in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2024): 136–53
'Perspectives for Lost Polyphony and Red Notation Around 1300: Medieval Motet and Organum Fragments in Stockholm', Early Music History 41 (2023): 1–92
'Editorial: Benedicamus Domino as Female Devotion’, Early Music 50/4 (2022): 417–18
'Polyphony from and for Refrains in Dance-Song Motets', in Jared C. Hartt, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steele, and Benjamin Albritton (eds.), Manuscripts, Music, Machaut: Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022): 413–39
‘Choosing a Thirteenth-Century Motet Tenor: From the Magnus liber organi to Adam de la Halle’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 72/2 (2019): 431–92
'Origins and Interactions: Clausula, Motet, Conductus', in Jared C. Hartt (ed.), A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018): 43–60
‘Song and Quotation in Two-voice Motets for Saint Elizabeth of Hungary’, Speculum 92/3 (2017): 661–91
‘Re-workings and Chronological Dynamics in a Thirteenth-Century Latin Motet Family’, Journal of Musicology 32/2 (2015): 153–97
'Seeking the Sense of Sound’ [Review article of Emma Dillon, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (2012)], Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139/2 (2014): 405–20
‘Comparing Compositional Process in Two Thirteenth-Century Motets: Deus omnium/REGNAT and Ne m’oubliez mie/DOMINO, Music Analysis 33/3 (2014): 263–90
‘Contrafacta and Transcribed Motets: Vernacular Influences on Latin Motets and Clausulae in the Florence Manuscript’, Early Music History 32 (2013): 1–70
‘Ordering in the Motet Fascicles of the Florence Manuscript’, Plainsong and Medieval Music 22/1 (2013): 37–64
‘New Texts for Old Music: Three Early Thirteenth-Century Latin Motets’, Music & Letters 93/2 (2012): 149–69 [awarded the Westrup Prize]
ENCYCLOPAEDIA ENTRY
‘Motet §1, Middle Ages: Thirteenth-Century Origins’, Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2020)
BOOK REVIEWS
Review of Jennifer Saltzstein ed., Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle, Revue de Musicologie 106/2 (2020): 491–4
Review of Anna Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet (2015), Journal of the American Musicological Society 70/2 (2017): 528–32
Review of Yolanda Plumley, The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut (2013), Music & Letters 96/1 (2015): 113–15
Review of Jennifer Saltzstein, The Refrain and The Rise of the Vernacular (2013), Early Music 42/2 (2014): 291–3
Review of Fred Büttner, Das Klauselrepertoire der Handschrift St-Victor (Paris, BN, lat. 15139): Eine Studie zur mehrstimmigen Komposition im 13. Jahrhundert (2011), Plainsong and Medieval Music 22/1 (2013): 98–101
Review of David J. Rothenberg, The Flower of Paradise: Marian Devotion and Secular Song in Medieval and Renaissance Music (Oxford, 2011), Early Music 40/3 (2012): 498–500
