Since its inception just after Christ's earthly ministry, the Christian Church has memorialized His sacrifice and atonement in the Eucharistic celebration of the mass. This ritual, central to the life and teaching of the Church, creates a sacred moment of communion between God and His people. The mass was not the first Catholic rite to attract musical polyphony, but as early as the fourteenth century, the unchanging words of the Mass Ordinary began to receive more elaborate musical settings. To solemnify major feasts, scribes collected musically linked pairs of mass movements, as well as larger groups such as the Tournai Mass, the Toulouse Mass, the Sorbonne Mass, and the Barcelona Mass (probably written for the Papal court at Avignon). One other complete polyphonic Mass Ordinary survives as the first composed by one individual: the Messe de Notre Dame of Guillaume de Machaut.

Frustratingly little historical evidence exists regarding the composition of Machaut's Mass. Some commentators have even doubted that Machaut composed its six movements as a single unit, though he included them as a unit in some of the earliest manuscripts of his collected works. From the dates of these manuscripts, and from musical similarities to other later works of his, the Messe de Notre Dame appears to date from the early 1360s. The attractive suggestion that Machaut composed the mass to celebrate the coronation of King Charles V in Reims Cathedral (where Machaut was serving as canon) in May 1364 unfortunately has no historical basis; similarly groundless is the suggestion that he wrote the mass as a prayer for peace during the English siege of Reims in 1359-1360. A moderately more plausible hypothesis comes from text in Machaut's will that suggests he provided music for a Saturday Ladymass sung at the Cathedral weekly on behalf of the faithful departed.

Musically, Machaut's Mass shows signs both of unity and of disjunction. Three movements (Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo) are in the Dorian mode, while the final three (Sanctus, Agnus, and Ite Missa est) take the F mode. He sets the wordiest pair of movements, the Gloria/Credo, in a terse, homophonic style, only becoming more expansive in their concluding "Amens." All four other movements follow the conventions of the isorhythmic motet, applying rigorously repetitive rhythmic structures to their plainchant tenor melodies, and frequently to other voices. Complex contrapuntal devices of hocket, syncopation, and sequence further vivify these movements.

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