Rebecca Maloy

Biography

Rebecca Maloy comes to Notre Dame from the University of Colorado Boulder, where she taught from 2002-2023. A specialist in medieval liturgy and chant, she focuses on the Old Hispanic liturgy, practiced on the Iberian Peninsula between the seventh and eleventh centuries. Her approach to this tradition incorporates diverse perspectives, including musical analysis, notational paleography, the relationship between words and music, and the intersections between liturgical texts and patristic theology. Maloy seeks to understand how the Old Hispanic chant was integrated with other liturgical elements, how it relates to the traditions of biblical exegesis practiced on the Iberian Peninsula, and how it is connected to other Western chant traditions. Her recent book, Songs of Sacrifice: Chant, Identity, and Christian Formation in Early Medieval Iberia, situates the chant as part Visigothic Iberia’s intellectual and cultural renewal in the seventh century. She is also the author of Inside the Offertory: Aspects of Chronology and Transmission Music, the co-author, with Emma Hornby, of Meaning in Old Hispanic Lenten Chants, and the co-editor, with Daniel J. DiCenso, of Chant, Liturgy, and the Inheritance of Rome.

As an avid interdisciplinary collaborator, Maloy was a member of the EU-funded Old Hispanic Office Project at Bristol University (2013-2018). There she co-authored an introduction to methods of working with this distinctive liturgy, Understanding the Old Hispanic Office: Texts, Melodies, and Devotion in Early Medieval Iberia, with Emma Hornby, Kati Ihnat, and Raquel Rojo Carillo. Maloy currently collaborates with historians, art historians, and musicologists on the project Doctrine, Devotion, and Cultural Expression in the Cults of Medieval Iberian Saints, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her current and recent work has also been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the National Humanities Center.