Welcome to the CANTUS Database!

CANTUS is a database that assembles indices of the Latin ecclesiastical chants found in early manuscript and printed sources for the liturgical Office, such as antiphoners and breviaries. This digital archive benefits scholars in a variety of fields including ecclesiastical monody, the sacred polyphony of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, liturgical drama, hagiography, paleography, philology, ecclesiastical history and the history of monasticism, as well as performers of this early music (including church musicians and directors of liturgy), librarians and archivists.

The manuscript inventories are available at no cost. They are fully searchable by textual incipit, keywords, saints’ names or liturgical occasion, and “chant identification numbers” (drawn from standard chant research resources). Begun at the Catholic University of America and maintained for over a decade at the University of Western Ontario, CANTUS has started a new phase at the University of Waterloo with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. CANTUS is affiliated at the University of Waterloo with MARGOT. This project is realized in cooperation with the Charles University in Prague.

Several new website applications are currently being developed which will increase the usefulness of CANTUS for both researchers and database contributors. Click here for details about the new tools:

• Browsing tools
• Analytical tools
• Data-entry tools

CANTUS Team

• Debra Lacoste, Ph.D. (University of Waterloo)

      Project Manager and Principal Researcher

• Jan Koláček, M.A. (Ph.D. in progress) (Charles University in Prague)

      Developer and Research Assistant

• Kate Helsen, Ph.D. (The University of Western Ontario)

      Research Assistant