What is the Cantus Database?

The Cantus Database is an open, online tool for plainchant research and discovery. It includes descriptions and curated, searchable inventories of manuscript and printed sources from the ninth to the twentieth centuries currently held in libraries, archives, and private ownership all over the world that contain the chant sung during the Middle Ages in Europe as well as sources deriving from that liturgical tradition in later periods and in other geographical regions.

As of February 2025, there are approximately half a million chant records in the Cantus Database representing the contents of over 500 indexed manuscripts, fragments, and printed chantbooks.

Many of the inventoried sources are antiphoners and breviaries, the main sources that record the music sung in the liturgical Offices. There is a growing collection of graduals and other sources for music of the Mass, and new directions include indexing processionals, pontificals, and sources that contain sequences. Recent infrastructure development has enabled the creation of ‘segments’ in the back-end of the Cantus Database: interoperable datasets, such as the Canadian Chant Database and Chinese Catholic Plainchant, are now stored alongside the core data but with separate project landing pages and search filters, thus allowing for a unique combination of data sustainability and independent front-end presentation for the user.

Source descriptions of the manuscripts, fragments, and printed books contained in the Cantus Database include information such as provenance, dating, physical description, size, and current scholarship. Although for certain types of books the liturgy is often similar from one to another, the ordering, selection, and placement of specific chants can differ substantially in each hand-copied manuscript. The searchable inventories, therefore, are a key component as they can also be sorted to provide tables of contents for each source. Each chant record includes the text as found in the source, the folio number and the location of the chant on the page, its context within the Mass or liturgical Offices, the medieval musical mode of its melody, and in some cases, a full melodic transcription.

The Cantus Database has transformed musicology in fields of medieval Latin chant, early polyphony, and related fields. Over multiple decades, the Cantus Database has expanded its reach beyond its original audience of medieval Latin chant researchers to cater also to singers, church musicians and choir leaders; art historians; librarians, cataloguers, museum curators; palaeographers; hagiographers; those interested in liturgical history, the Middle Ages, and monasticism; auction houses; as well as non-specialists in the general public. Professors report using this website in their classes, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and some have had their seminar classes create inventories as part of their coursework. According to Google Analytics, the Cantus Database averages around 7,000 ‘engaged sessions’ each month with users accessing it from six continents. Not only is usage widespread globally, but hundreds of researchers worldwide have contributed to the Cantus Database; all are acknowledged on the site with credit for their electronic publications.

Searching, sorting, and analytical tools are continuously being developed and redeveloped to mine this growing dataset and provide new insights for researchers. Benefits of data and metadata about chants and their manuscript or printed sources in a digital format include:

• Rapid results from searches for chant texts or melodies in the dataset;
• Locating saints’ feasts in sources from different parts of Europe and beyond;
• Comparing the ordering and/or usage of particular chants in different sources;
• Easily accessing images of manuscript sources in online archives, which may also lead to studying different scripts and notation types, as well as manuscript illuminations;
• Finding and comparing chant melodies, such as those that are used in later Renaissance works or as contrafacta;
• Comparing chant contents, scribal features, and/or liturgical usage to identify fragments that have been removed from their host bindings, such as might be inherited, purchased at auction, or dispersed globally in some other way.

The Cantus Database is a both a legacy project and a continually developing site. It is also an example of success in sustainability as one of the longest-running digital resources in musicology. It has lasted over three decades, been hosted at four different universities, and has had its data migrated through five operating systems and software rebuilds. The project was begun in the 1980s by Ruth Steiner at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. with the first indexes being distributed on floppy discs through the post. Coinciding with the burgeoning use of HTML and the Internet, the Cantus Database was brought to the University of Western Ontario by Terence Bailey in 1997 with funding from the Canadian government’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). It remained there through four granting periods and much growth. In 2011, Debra Lacoste moved it to the University of Waterloo in updated software with the assistance of a one-year Mellon Foundation grant and a subsequent SSHRC Insight grant, and in 2019, the Cantus Database began a new era at Dalhousie University through a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant within the “Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission” (DACT) project led by Jennifer Bain. In 2023, DACT was awarded a 7-year SSHRC Partnership Grant, and the Cantus Database and its main catalogue of texts and melodies, the Cantus Index, remain cornerstone projects.

Last updated: 11 Dec 2025 (DL) Link to PDF