[4] Founded in 1888, the PMMS primarily researches, promotes and produces publications on medieval music, particularly the liturgical chant from that time to the present.

Musicologists associated with the PMMS include H. B. Briggs, Anselm Hughes, G. H. Palmer, and George Ratcliffe Woodward, and more recently Gustave Reese, D. H. Turner, John Stevens, Christopher Page and Margaret Bent.

has been compiled, it is intended to reproduce those of importance in facsmile, to publisher music which has not before been printed, to arrange for lectures by competent musicians, to correspond with similar socieites on the Continent, and in other ways to carry out the objects of the Society.An early 1896 PMMS publication gives the President as the 'Bishop of Salisbury',[7] which would have been John Wordsworth at the time.

[3] Since its inception, the society has aimed to be a central resource its disciplines, publishing facsimile manuscripts, translating non-English documents, and creating a comprehensive catalogue of all pre-Reformation plainsong and measured music composed in England.

[9] Among the more notable publications was a partial translation of Peter Wagner's Einführung in die gregorianischen Melodien,[13] Frere's Graduale Sarisburiense (1892–1894), the Antiphonale Sarisburiense (1901–1924), the Bibliotheca Musico-Liturgica (1894–1901) catalogue, Early English Harmony by Harry Ellis Wooldridge and Hughes, an Old Hall Manuscript edition, Worcester Mediaeval Harmony by Hughes and Polyphonia Sacra by Van den Borren.

[5] It is published by Cambridge University Press, with a scope that covers medieval music, and plainchant from the Middle Ages to the present.