A term used in modern studies of medieval song and poetry to designate the repetition of a whole musical or formal section. It is found particularly in the sequence (see Sequence (i)), where the music and the poetic scheme of three or four stanzas are repeated with new text. Paul von Winterfeld coined the term in order to describe the form of the French 9th-century poem Buona pucella fut Eulalia in his article ‘Rhythmen und Sequenzenstudien, i: Die lateinische Eulaliasequenz und ihre Sippe’, Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, xlv (1901), 133–49.
See also Lai.