CHAPTER 8
The Roman Liturgical Year and the Early Liturgy of St. Peter’s
Peter Jeffery
1. The basilicas and their monasteries
The medieval phase of the Western Christian liturgy began in 754, when Pope
Stephen II travelled north of the Alps—the first pope ever to do so—to anoint Pepin the Short
as King of the Franks and appoint him Patrician of the Romans. Pepin, to emphasize his
special relationship to the papacy, decided that the liturgy of his own private chapel would be
conformed to Roman practice, and that this in turn would set the standard for the rest of the
kingdom.1 Liturgical texts from Rome had been drifting across the Alps for some time, many
of them on their way to Anglo-Saxon England. But with Pepin, Romanization became official
policy. The traffic in Roman liturgical books, Roman singers, and Benedictine monastic texts
greatly increased.2 But adoption became adaptation: over the next three centuries, practices
from Rome interacted with the local Gallican customs to produce the hybrid that came to be
known as the “Roman” rite.
These facts are well known. What is less well understood is what happened prior to
the events of 754. Several bodies of evidence suggest that, within Rome itself, the process of
Romanizing the liturgy in northern Europe coincided with a shift of liturgical leadership,
from the monasteries serving St. Peter’s to the pope himself, headquartered at the Lateran.
Before the shift there was much decentralization: Each of the Constantintinian basilicas and
1
Yitzhak Hen, The Royal Patronage of Liturgy in Frankish Gaul to the Death of Charles the Bald (877), Henry
Bradshaw Society: Subsidia 3 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2001). On the political background, see Pierre
Riché, The Carolingians: A Family Who Forged Europe, transl. Michael Idomir Allen (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1993) 65-77. Thomas F. X. Noble, The Republic of St. Peter: The Birth of the Papal
State, 680-825 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984) 65-94.
2
For a detailed account of the liturgical developments, see Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to
the Sources, rev. and trans. William G. Storey et al., N[ational Association of] P[astoral] M[usicians] Studies in
Church Music and Liturgy (Washington, D.C.: The Pastoral Press, 1986) 61-106, 135-247.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Department of Music, 1995) 207-47.
170
other major churches was served by one or more monastic communities that took
responsibility for providing the liturgical services, particularly the daily round we now call
the Divine Office, from the personal obligation (officium) that obliged every medieval
clergyman to participate in it. These basilican communities were not yet Benedictine, though
one or more of them provided the matrix from which the Benedictine Rule emerged.3
Liturgical practices were not strictly uniform from one community to another, but there was a
tendency to view St. Peter’s as the model, and it was at St. Peter’s that some important
features of the familiar Roman liturgy took shape. The origins of this arrangement are not
easy to trace, but it came to an abrupt end toward the middle of the ninth century, as we shall
see.
The sixth-century Liber Pontificalis tells us that Pope Leo the Great (440-61) founded a
monastery “apud beatum Petrum apostolum.”4 Some late manuscripts identify this monastery
as SS. John and Paul,5 one of the three (later four) communities that provided personnel to
carry out the services in the Vatican basilica. But the earliest clear evidence we have is from
the Venerable Bede, who says that, when Benedict Biscop sought to Romanize the worship of
the Anglo-Saxons, Pope Agatho (678-81) permitted “John the Archchanter of the church of
St. Peter, and abbot of the monastery of blessed Martin,” to accompany Benedict Biscop to
Wearmouth, where he would teach
the yearly course of singing, as it was done in St. Peter’s at Rome, … both teaching
orally (viva voce) … the order and rite of singing and reading, and also mandating
in writing (literis) those things which the cycle of the whole year called for in the
Peter Jeffery, “Monastic Reading and the Emerging Roman Chant Repertory,” Western Plainchant in the First
Millenium: Studies of the Medieval Liturgy and its Music in Memory of James W. McKinnon, ed. Sean
Gallagher et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) 45-104.
4
Liber Pontificalis 47.7. Theodor Mommsen, ed., Libri Pontificalis pars prior, MGH: Gestorum Pontificum
Romanorum 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1898) 105. Louis Duchesne, ed., Le Liber pontificalis: texte, introduction et
commentaire, 2nd ed. in 3 vols. (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1955-1957) 1, pp. 239, 241 n. 11.
5
Demolished during the reign of Pope Paul V (1605-21) to make way for the north apse of the present basilica.
L. H. Cottineau and Grégoire Poras, Répertoire topo-bibliographique des abbayes et prieurés 3 vols. (1930,
1970 ; repr. Turnhout : Brepols, 1995) 2:2514.
3
171
celebration of feast days. These things have been observed in the same monastery
up to now, and have now been transcribed by many [people] all over…6
The title of ‘archchanter’ suggests that John was the liturgical leader in the basilica, or at least
the leader of the singers. But he was also the abbot of St. Martin’s, another one of the four
monasteries serving St. Peter’s.7 Since John taught both orally and by writing down texts, it
would seem that liturgical books of some sort already existed in Rome, though we do not
have them, any more than we have whatever John himself “mandated in writing” while in
England.
Because we have neither the Roman nor the English written sources, there is little we
can say about the liturgy John himself used and taught. For example, the medieval Western
church knew two different but related ways of structuring the Divine Office, based
principally on how the 150 psalms were distributed across the hours and days of the week: (1)
the ‘monastic cursus’ outlined in the sixth-century Benedictine Rule but probably not strictly
followed before the ninth century,8 and (2) the ‘Roman cursus,’ first spelled out by the ninthcentury liturgical commentator Amalar of Metz,9 and generally used by all non-Benedictine
clergy. Both were descended from the usages of the great Roman basilicas, but by processes
that can no longer be fully traced.10 The most we can say is that the cursus used in St. Peter’s
Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum 4.18, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) p. 388. J.
M. Wallace-Hadrill, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary, Oxford
Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) 158-59. J. Robert Wright, A Companion to Bede: A Reader’s
Commentary on The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B.
Eerdmans, 2008) 101-2.
7
Demolished under Pope Nicholas V (1447-55) during the building of the present basilica. Cottineau,
Répertoire 2:2520.
8
[Claude Peifer,] “The Rule in History,” Timothy Fry, et al., RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict in Latin and
English with Notes (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 1981) 113-51, especially 113-25.
9
Liber de ordine antiphonarii I.I-VII, ed. Jean Michel Hanssens, Amalarii Episcopi Opera Liturgica Omnia 3,
Studi e Testi 140 (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1950) 19-37. Compare in the same volume
Pseudo-Amalarius (Adhémar of Chabannes?), De regula sancti Benedicti praecipui abbatis, pp. 272-95.
10
Joseph Dyer, “Observations on the Divine Office in the Rule of the Master,” The Divine Office in the Latin
Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography: Written in Honor of
Professor Ruth Steiner, ed. Margot E. Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
74-98, especially 79-81. Adalbert de Vogüé, ed., La Règle de Saint Benoit 5 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1971)
487-91, 495-97, 504, 545-54.
6
172
by the monks of St. Martin’s, and brought by John to Wearmouth, probably had relationships
to both.
In any case, references to the monastic communities serving the Roman basilicas
become much more common in writings of the eighth century, when this arrangement
probably reached its peak. According to the Liber Pontificalis, Pope Gregory II (715-31)
restored monasteries near the basilica of St. Paul which had been reduced to
solitude, and, founding a congregation after a long time, having
established/ordained (ordinatis) monks as servants of God, so that three times per
day and at night they would say Matins.
This description seems to be missing something: Since Matins was the Roman term for the
night hours (not the morning hours), the text may once have said something like “so that
three times per day and at night they would say Matins [and the other hours].” Whoever
wrote the second recension of Gregory’s vita must have seen the problem, for he eliminated it
by simplifying the description: Gregory established or ordained monks at St. Paul’s ‘so that
there they would render praises to God day and night’.11
The next pope, Gregory III (731-41), was particularly activist; among other things he
constructed the monastery of the holy martyrs Stephen, Lawrence and
Chrysogonus next to the titular church of St. Chrysogonus, founding there an abbot
and a congregation of monks for carrying out praises to God in the same titular
church, ordered by daily and nightly hours according to the standard (instar) of the
offices of the church of blessed Peter the apostle,
and thus exempt from the authority of the titular priest of St. Chrysogonus.12 The future Pope
Stephen III (768-72) was a founding member of this community.13 Gregory III seems to have
regarded St. Peter’s as setting the standard for all of Rome, even the Lateran, for the Liber
11
Liber Pontificalis 91.3, ed. Duchesne 1, p. 397.
Liber Pontificalis 92.9, ed. Duchesne 1, p. 418. Cottineau, Répertoire 2:2508.
13
Liber Pontificalis 96.1, ed. Duchesne 1, p. 468.
12
173
Pontificalis states that he renovated the monastery of SS John Evangelist, John Baptist and
Pancras,14
anciently founded near the church of the Savior, which was found to have been
abandoned by every monastic order due to extreme neglect . . . . There he also
founded a congregation of monks and an abbot for carrying out daily the sacred
offices of divine praise in the basilica of the Savior our lord Jesus Christ, which is
also called the Constantinian [basilica], near the Lateran [complex], ordered by
daily and nightly hours according to the standard of the offices of the church of
blessed Peter the apostle.15
[**Note to editors: Plate 1 near here**]
Plate 1. Last part of the inscription of Pope Gregory III. Photo by the author.
Some information about this Petrine standard is preserved in a conciliar decree that was
inscribed on stone plaques in an oratory that Gregory III built in 732, on the men’s (left) side
of the nave, near the principal arch of St. Peter’s. Gregory III was eventually buried in this
chapel, filled with relics of saints and later known as Santa Maria in Cancellis (see the plan of
St. Peter’s elsewhere in this volume [**note to editors: the chapel = number 21 in De
Blaauw’s Figura 25 and 26]. Fragments of the plaques still survive; one of them, now in the
chapel known as Madonna della Bocciata in the Vatican grottos, comes from near the end of
the inscription (Plate 1). The name Gregorius can be seen three times, as well as the
anathema sit (fifth line from bottom).
that the feasts of saints be celebrated in the oratory that was constructed by me in
honor of the Savior, of the holy mother of God and ever-virgin Mary our lady, and
14
15
Cottineau, Répertoire 2514.
Liber Pontificalis 92.10, ed. Duchesne 1, p. 419.
174
of the holy apostles, and also of the martyrs and confessors of Christ, [and] of the
perfect just ones, within the church of St. Peter prince of apostles, and so that those
three monasteries which have been founded near the basilica of the apostle—SS.
John and Paul, St. Stephen and St. Martin— should sing three psalms and the
morning gospels to God, that is, jointly (eorum congregatio), on all days when
they have completed Vespers before the Confessio, prostrating themselves
(declinantes) there.”16
Evidently the monks of the three monasteries would, on certain evenings, combine forces to
sing Vespers, with prostrations, before the Confessio, the underground space before the main
altar that led to St. Peter’s tomb. Whenever they did this, it seems, they were expected to
continue into the office of the next morning. The arrangement of “three psalms and the
morning gospels,” sounds like something that could have developed into the third nocturne of
Matins, in both the monastic and the Roman cursus.
We have already encountered two of the monasteries at St. Peter’s, namely SS. John
and Paul and St. Martin’s. The third one, first mentioned in the inscription of Gregory III,
was known as St. Stephen Major or “cata Barbara Patricia.” The only one of the four Vatican
monasteries that is still standing, it was given to a community of Ethiopians by Pope Eugene
IV (1431-47), and is now the church of Santo Stefano degli Abessini inside Vatican City, the
location of the Collegio Etiopico and the center of Ethiopic Rite Catholicism.17
Hubert Mordek, “Rom, Byzanz und die Franken im 8. Jahrhundert: Zur Überlieferung und kirchenpolitischen
Bedeutung der Synodus Romana Papst Gregors III. vom Jahre 732 (mit Edition),” Person und Gemeinschaft im
Mittelalter: Karl Schmid zum fünfundsechzigsten Geburtstag (Sigmarigen: Jan Thorbeke, 1988) 123-156, quote
from 149. See also Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis 1, p. 422, cf. Liber Pontificalis 92.6, 17, pp. 417, 421. Paul
Fridolin Kehr, ed., Italia Pontificia sive Repertorium Privilegiorum et Literarum a Romanis Pontificibus ante
Annum MCLXXXXVIII Italiae Ecclesiis, Monasteriis Civitatibus Singulisque Personis Concessorum 1: Roma, 2:
Latium, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum (Berlin: Weidmann 1906, 1907; repr. 1961) 137.
17
Cottineau, Répertoire 2:2511. Kay Kaufman Shelemay and Peter Jeffery, Ethiopian Christian Liturgical
Chant: An Anthology 3: History of Ethiopian Chant, Recent Researches in the Oral Traditions of Music 3
(Madison, Wisconsin: A-R Editions, 1997) p. 131.
16
175
The fourth Vatican monastery, St. Stephen Minor,18 was added by Pope Stephen II
(752-57), who
made the offices, which for a long time had been celebrated laxly at night, to be
completed during the night hours, and similarly he restored the daily office as it
had been from antiquity. And adjoining a fourth [monastery] to the three
monasteries that from early times had carried out the same office in the church of
blessed Peter the apostle, he founded [a community] in that place with monks who
still join in the same office, and placed an abbot over them. And he lavished many
gifts there, both the things which are necessary for monks in every monastery, as
well as fixed places outside. He constituted [them] in the psalmody of the blessed
prince of apostles Peter, with the three aforesaid monasteries, even up to today.”19
Not much later, the older monastery of Stephen Major seems to have been in need of
reform. According to the Liber Pontificalis Pope Hadrian I (772-95)
founded in the monastery of St. Stephen cata Barbara Patricia, situated at blessed
Peter the apostle, a congregation of monks, and established a suitable person as
abbot there. He decreed that they carry out sedulous praises in the church of
blessed Peter, just as the other three monasteries do, so that two monasteries
[positioned] at the [two] sides of this church sing praises to our God [in
alternation], since this same monastery was placed in great idleness and was
neglected by lack of care, and no office of divine worship was practiced there20
The practice of singing psalms in alternation, or antiphonally, was not universally
known in the old local liturgies of the West, but seems to have been regarded as a
18
Demolished under Pope Pius VI (1775-99) to make way for the sacristy of the present basilica. Cottineau,
Répertoire 2:2511.
19
Liber Pontificalis 94.40 interpolation. Compare the text of the bull in Giovan Domenico Mansi, Sacrorum
Conciliorum nova et amplissima Collectio, 54 vols. in 58 (Florence: A. Zatti, 1759-98; repr. Paris: H. Welter,
1901-1927) vol. 12, p. 552, top.
20
Liber Pontificalis 97.53. ed. Duchesne 1, p. 501.
176
distinctively Roman and Benedictine feature. Thus the life of St. Wilfrid of York, probably
written soon after his death about 709, shows him fulminating against the Celtic monasticism
in which he had been raised:
Was I not the first to convert the entire nation of Northumbria in accord with the
mind of the Apostolic See . . . ? Did I not teach the manner of singing according to
the practice of the primitive church, with two choirs singing in harmony and
alternating the responsories and antiphons? Did I not establish monastic life
according to the Rule of Our Holy Father Benedict, which no one had introduced
there before?21
Decades later, Hadrian I seems to have had a similar program: when he refounded the
monastery of SS. Andrew and Bartholomew at the Lateran, originally founded by Pope
Honorius I (625-38),22 he placed it under an unspecified monastic rule, mandated an office
that resembles the medieval monastic cursus, and directed that the monks alternate the psalms
with the monks of the Lateran monastery of St. Pancras which had been restored by Gregory
III. Hadrian, that is,
discovered that a certain monastery of Pope Honorius had come into extreme
desolation through a certain amount of negligence. Moved by divine inspiration, he
built it anew and enriched it, and established an abbot with other monks there, to
carry on with life under a rule (regulariter ibidem vita degentes). And he
established them in the basilica of the Savior, which is also the Constantinian
[basilica] located near the Lateran patriarchium, to celebrate the office, that is the
morning [hour], the first and third hour, the sixth and ninth hour, and also the
evening [hour]—by one choir, which previously sang psalms alone on both sides
(singulariter in utrosque psallebant), the monks of the monastery of St. Pancras
21
22
Clinton Albertson, Anglo-Saxon Saints and Heroes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1967) 143.
Cottineau, Répertoire 2:2504.
177
being positioned there, and by the other choir, the monks of the aforesaid
monastery of St. Andrew and Bartholomew, which is called [the monastery] of
Pope Honorius—since, singing (psallentes) with pious praises and diligently, they
would resound with joyful songs and hymn-bearing choruses of God, rendering to
the Lord glorious melodies time and again for the name of the remembered,
venerable pontiff , evidently declaring in poems his memorial forever.23
The enumeration of hours in Hadrian’s reform, from morning to evening, is consistent with
both the Roman and monastic cursus of medieval times. But if the mention of “hymn-bearing
choruses” and “poems” is to be taken literally, that could imply that these monks were
following the monastic cursus of the Benedictine rule, which had an explicit place for
“Ambrosian hymns” during the Office.24 Unfortunately, the Liber Pontificalis is much less
explicit about the monastery Hadrian refounded at St. Mary Major. There he
newly dedicated and founded the monastery of SS. Hadrian and Lawrence which,
decaying in ruins from early times, was inhabited by worldly people [who were
living] as if in a crypt. But the excellent bishop himself, newly restoring it, built it
in the name of the aforementioned saints, namely Hadrian and Lawrence. He also
gave it many gifts, . . . and he founded it to carry on the customary praises in the
basilica of the holy mother of God and ever-virgin Mary ad Praesepem, among the
other monasteries founded there, singing to God day and night.25
Hadrian’s successor Pope Leo III (795-816) rebuilt St. Martin and St. Stephen
Major,26 and appointed the future Paschal I (817-24) to rule (ad regendum) the latter
monastery.27 After Paschal succeeded Leo as pope, he
23
Liber Pontificalis 97.68, ed. Duchesne 1, p. 506.
Vogüé, ed., La Règle 5: 535-38.
25
Liber Pontificalis 97.86, ed. Duchesne p. 1, 511. Cottineau, Répertoire 2:2501.
26
Liber Pontificalis 98.90, ed. Duchesne 2, p. 28.
27
Liber Pontificalis 100.2, ed. Duchesne 2, p. 52.
24
178
discovered that the monastery of SS Sergius and Bacchus, located behind the
structure of the aqueduct of the Lateran patriarchium, was bereft of everything, so
that the congregation of handmaidens of the Lord that was in there were able to
chant (decantare) no praises to the almighty Lord and his saints, because of the
destitution and poverty. Moved to pity by this inquiry, the venerable pastor made
sure that the servantesses of God were able to exist well and religiously, and
gathering together he established a community of monks in it. He amply and
sufficiently increased it, enriching the same monastery with many endowments in
households, farmsteads, vineyards, houses, urban and rural properties. At which
point he decreed that the same resident congregation, having postponed every
necessity, should chant (decantent) praises and hymns melodiously, night and day,
to the only God and his saints in the venerable church of the Savior our lord Jesus
Christ situated near the Lateran [complex].28
By then the entire system may have been heading into a state of decline, for Paschal’s
successor Gregory IV (827-44) “decreed that monks who were established (constituti) to
carry out the office in the church of blessed Peter the apostle should not leave off singing
(canere non desistant) the praises to almighty God on all days there.”29 The next pope,
Sergius II (844-47), brought it all to an end, handing over the four Vatican monasteries to the
canons of St. Peter’s,30 which has been a collegiate church ever since, with its liturgy the
responsibility of the chapter. In time, St. Mary Major also became a collegiate church, while
St. Paul-Outside-the-Walls became a Cluniac Benedictine monastery,31 the Lateran a chapter
of Canons Regular with a rule and a rite derived from Lucca.32
28
Liber Pontificalis 100.22, ed. Duchesne 2, p. 58. Cottineau, Répertoire 2:2525.
Liber Pontificalis 103.7, ed. Duchesne 2, p. 74.
30
The text of this decree is not extant, but it was confirmed by Popes Leo IX (1053), Hadrian IV (1158), and
Urban III (1186); see Kehr, ed., Italia Pontificia 1: Roma, 2: Latium 138-144.
31
Cottineau, Répertoire 2:2521.
32
Pierre-Marie Gy, La Liturgie dans l’histoire (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1990) 127-39.
29
179
2. The monastic-basilican office at St. Peter’s
For the eighth-century Office celebrated by the monasteries serving St. Peter’s, the
evidence we have is focused largely on the cycles of readings during the night office of
Matins. In fact the medieval Roman liturgy had four different books of collected and assigned
readings. Three seem to have developed primarily at St. Peter’s: the homiliary, containing
patristic commentaries on the gospels,33 the passionary or legendary containing
hagiographical readings about the saints,34 and the lectionary, containing all the Biblical
readings that were not gospels. Only the evangeliary containing the cycle of gospel readings
seems to have a different origin, rooted in the calendar of stational masses that the pope
celebrated as he moved around the city each year.35
The legendary may have begun to take shape during the reign of Hadrian I (772-95), if
we can believe the report that he was the first to command the passions and gesta of the saints
to be read at St. Peter’s.
The Passions of the saints or their deeds up to Hadrian’s times were read only there
where the church of the same saint or the titular church was. But [Hadrian] himself
in his own time commanded <this custom> to be recognized (renovere), and
instituted that there be hagiographical readings (legendas esse) in the church of St.
Peter.36
Much earlier in the eighth century, Pope Zacharias (741-52) may also have had a role
in the formation of the legendary, since “in the church of the aforesaid prince of the apostles,
33
Réginald Grégoire, Homéliaires liturgiques médiévaux : Analyse de manuscrits, Biblioteca degli «Studi
Medievali» 12 (Spoleto : Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1980) 127-244.
34
See the paper by Carmela Vircillo Franklin in this volume.
35
Theodor Klauser, Das römische Capitulare Evangeliorum: Texte und Untersuchungen zu seiner ältesten
Geschichte 1: Typen, Liturgiegeschichtliche Quellen und Forschungen 28 (Münster: Aschendorff , 1935; 2nd ed.
1972).
36
Ordo Romanus 12.25, ed. in Michel Andrieu, Les Ordines Romani du haut moyen age 2 (Louvain:
Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 1948) p. 466.
180
[he] arranged in a library, with effort (armarium opere ordinavit), his own codices from his
house, which are read in the cycle of the year at Matins.”37 If “armarium opere ordinavit”
means that he arranged it “with effort,” then I suspect non-Biblical readings were involved,
since the questions of what to include and in what order would have been a lot more
complicated than for the canon of scripture alone.
[Table 1 near here]
Nevertheless it is the Biblical, non-Gospel, lectionary that is the subject of this paper.
The extant texts, though varied, can be grouped into two basic recensions: the earlier one,
which Michel Andrieu designated Ordo Romanus XIV, and the later one, which he
designated Ordo Romanus XIII (See Table 1).38 The counterintuitive numbering was intended
to keep each text closer to the other tractates with which it is transmitted in the MS tradition.
The earliest MS of OR XIV (eighth century) bears a title that clearly states “All the scripture
of the holy canon, from the beginning to the end of the year, is read in this order in the church
of St. Peter.” Four MSS change the verbs from “read” to “sing,” and the latest MS combines
the two.
As OR XIV circulated outside Rome, it was incorporated into Ordo Romanus XVI,
which comes from some southern French or north Italian monastery of double rule—that is,
one that attempted to combine Irish traditions associated with St. Columban with Roman
traditions associated with St. Benedict.39 However another text, which I identified in an
insular MS that was at Murbach about the year 800, no longer mentions Rome or St. Peter’s. I
call it Ordo Romanus XIV B*.40
37
Liber Pontificalis 93.19, ed. Duchesne 1, p. 432.
Michel Andrieu, Les Ordines Romani du haut moyen age 3 (Louvain: Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 1951)
37-41; Andrieu, Ordine Romani 2 (1948,) 479-526.
39
Andrieu, Ordines Romani 3:147-48. On the continental Irish background of this text, see Peter Jeffery,
“Eastern and Western Elements in the Irish Monastic Prayer of the Hours,” The Divine Office in the Latin
Middle Ages 99-43, esp. 128-30.
40
St. Paul in Kärnten 2.1, front pastedown. See E. A. Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores 10 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1963) no. 1451 p. 5. I discussed this text some in: Peter Jeffery, “A Window on the Formation of the
Medieval Chant Repertories: The Greek Palimpsest Fragments in Princeton University MS Garrett 24,” The
38
181
A similar pattern of decreasing specificity can be seen in the second recension, Ordo
Romanus XIII. The earlier forms of the text, XIII A, XIII B, and XIII E*, present it as “the
order of Catholic books which are placed in the cycle of the year in the Roman church,”
without specifying St. Peter’s, while the later forms XIII C and XIII D have more general
titles that do not mention Rome at all.41 Thus Ordo Romanus XIV appears to represent a time
when St. Peter’s was the model for other churches, even in Rome. The somewhat later Ordo
Romanus XIII sesems to present a unified Roman system to serve as a model for churches
throughout the world. That, in turn, suggests, that Ordo Romanus XIII may have been
intended for use outside of Rome, for example in the mission of St. Boniface or as part of
Pepin’s Romanization program.42 One is therefore particularly curious to see how the
liturgical prescriptions of Ordo XIV differ from those of Ordo XIII.
[Table 2 near here]
As shown in Table 2, OR XIV is arranged by liturgical season, but underlying the
liturgical periods are the four seasons of the year. It begins with the first books of the Old
Testament in Spring, it says, or more exactly 7 days before the beginning of Lent—what
would later be called Quinquagesima. Seven days before Easter it switches to prophecies of
Jesus’s sufferings, the period that would later be called Passiontide. The Easter-Pentecost
season favors New Testament writings by and about the apostles. After Pentecost comes the
second season of the year, summer, when the Old Testament histories are read. This
Past in the Present: Papers Read at the IMS Intercongressional Symposium and the 10th Meeting of the
CANTUS PLANUS, Budapest & Visegrád, 2000 (Budapest: Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, 2003) 2:1-21,
especially. Asterisks indicate numbers I have assigned to texts that should be added to those numbered by
Andrieu.
41
Andrieu originally assigned two numbers (Ordo Romanus XIII A and Ordo Romanus XIII B) to the two
recensions that were eventually published as Ordo Romanus XIII A. The texts that were were originally
numbered XIII C, D, and E, therefore, ultimately were published as XIII B, C, and D. See Michel Andrieu, Les
Ordines Romani du haut moyen age 1 (Louvain: Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 1931) pp. 9-10, and Ordines
Romani 2: 469. Hence the text published by Eric George Millar can now be known as Ordo Romanus XIII E*.
Andrieu knew that the manuscript of XIII E* existed, but he was unable to locate it and did not know the text
had been published. Cf. Andrieu, Ordines Romani 2: 469 n. 2.
42
Peter Jeffery, “Rome and Jerusalem: From Oral Tradition to Written Repertory in Two Ancient Liturgical
Centers,” Essays on Medieval Music in Honor of David Hughes, ed. Graeme M. Boone, Isham Library Papers 4
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Department of Music, 1995) 207-47, especially 235-41.
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continues into the third season, “the middle of Autumn,” November 16, which is the date for
beginning the Wisdom books, the books with female protagonists, Maccabees and Tobit.
From 1 December to 1 February, there is another season of reading prophecies, doubtless
emphasizing those that foretell the Incarnation and Nativity of the Savior, since this period
includes Christmas and Epiphany/Theophany. This would correspond to the winter season,
though it is not explicitly named. Only when the text is taken up in OR XVI is the preChristmas period called “Advent.”
The earlier MSS of OR XIV mention “Jerome, Ambrose and other fathers,” but only
in the later MSS do we have “passions of the saints” and “lives of the catholic fathers.” OR
XIVB*, which I have not yet published, can be seen as a new text, not a variant of OR XIV,
but an independent writing down of more or less the same practice. Hence its liturgical year
is slightly different, and it does not attribute this order to St. Peter’s or even to Rome. It
begins two weeks before Lent, on Sexagesima. It does not specify a particular date for
starting the books of Solomon, and it begins the pre-Christmas season (not called Advent)
only 15 days before. After Theophany or Epiphany, one picks up the prophets from wherever
one had left off.
[Table 3 near here]
Table 3 shows that the prescriptions of OR XIII are much more advanced. The Old
Testament now begins at Septuagesima, three weeks before Lent, the classic medieval date.
As in standard medieval practice, Passiontide begins fifteen days before Easter rather than
only seven, and Pentecost has an octave. After the Pentecost octave, however, the rest of the
Bible is assigned by month; there are no references to the four seasons. For a number of feast
days around Easter and Christmas-Epiphany, specific Biblical and homiletic passages are
assigned for reading, and this is taken even further in OR XIII B. In fact OR XIII, with its
greater development and specificity, is the basis of all known medieval antiphoners and
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breviaries, including the 12th-century liturgical sources from St. Peter’s.43 Thus the OR XIII
complex represents some sort of reform that replaced the arrangement prescribed in the OR
XIV complex. Based on the dates of the earliest extant manuscripts, OR XIII would have
begun to replace OR XIV at some time during the 8th century. Hence the compilation of OR
XIII may have been connected with the activities of Pope Zacharias.
3. Two ways of organizing the liturgical year
As we have seen, the liturgical year in OR XIV is structured by the four seasons. But
it is not the only source that associates such an arrangement with St. Peter’s basilica, for the
same is true of the Ember Weeks, celebrated four times per year, one of the most distinctive
features of the Roman liturgical calendar. According to sermons of Pope Leo the Great (44061), the ember weeks were already being celebrated in the mid-fifth century, each time with
fasting on Wednesday and Friday, then a Saturday vigil at St. Peter’s.
2. The usefulness of this observance, beloved, is founded especially in the fasts of
the church, which, following the Holy Spirit’s teaching, are so distributed over the
cycle of the whole year that the law of abstinence is appointed at all times.
Accordingly we celebrate the spring fast in Lent, the summer [fast] at Pentecost,
the autumn [fast] in the seventh month [i.e. September], and the winter [fast] in this
which is the tenth month [i.e. December], knowing that there is nothing void in the
Divine precepts, and that all the elements serve the word of God to our instruction,
so that from the hinges on which the world itself [turns], as if from the four
gospels, we learn from the ceaseless trumpet what we should preach and do. For
Benedictus Beati Petri Canonicus et Romanae Ecclesiae Cantor, “Liber Politicus,” ed. Paul Fabre, Le Liber
Censuum de l’église romaine 2 (Paris: Fontemoing, 1905) 141-70. Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, Archivio S.
Pietro B 79: Antifonario della Basilica di S. Pietro: sec. XII, ed. Bonifacio Giacomo Baroffio, Soo Jung Kim,
Leonard E. Boyle, 2 vols. (Roma: Torre d’Orfeo, 1995).
43
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when the prophet is saying, “The heavens are telling the glory of God . . . [Psalm
18:2-3]” . . . .
3. Hence we warn you, beloved, with the affection of fatherly charity, to make this
fast of the tenth month fruitful to yourselves by generous alms, rejoicing that
through you the Lord feeds and clothes his poor, to whom assuredly he could have
given the possessions which he has bestowed on you, had he not in his unspeakable
mercy wished to justify them from patient labor, and [justify] you from the work of
charity. Let us therefore fast on Wednesday and Friday, and on Saturday celebrate
vigils in the presence of (apud) the most blessed Apostle Peter, and he will deign
to assist with his own prayers our supplications and fastings and alms which our
Lord Jesus Christ presents [to the Father], [he] who with the Father and the Holy
Ghost lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.44
From the end of the same century, an epistle of Pope Gelasius (492-96) says that
ordinations may take place only during these Ember Weeks and on mid-Lent, another day
which in his time had a vigil.
Also, they should not dare to carry out ordinations of priests and deacons except in
certain seasons and days, that is: let them know that [ordinations] are to be
celebrated on the fast of the fourth month, [on the fasts] of the seven and tenth
[months], but also [on the fast] of the beginning of Lent, and on the day of midLent, on the fast of Saturday around [the time of ] Vespers.45
By “the day of mid-Lent,” Gelasius may have been referring to Dominica Mediana,
which in later sources became the fifth or Passion Sunday, with the stational Mass at St.
44
Leo the Great, Tractatus 19.2, 19.3, dated 14 December 452, ed. Antoine Chavasse in Sancti Leonis Magni
Romani Pontificis Tractatus Septem et Nonaginta, CCSL 138 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1973) pp. 77, 80.
45
Gelasius, Epistula 14.11, dated 11 March 494, ed. Andreas Thiel, Epistolae Romanorum Pontificum genuinae
et quae ad eos scriptae sunt a S. Hilaro usque ad Pelagium II (Braunsberg: Eduardi Peter, 1867; repr.
Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2004) pp. 368-69.
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Peter’s.46 That Ember Saturdays were in fact the traditional Roman times for ordinations
is confirmed from other sources.47 Though the Liber Pontificalis credits most early popes
with ordinations in December, from the eighth century all the way back to St. Peter
himself, there are a few who are said to have ordained at the other seasons.48
This early, fourfold liturgical year, centered on St. Peter’s, seems to underlie the
arrangement of readings in OR XIV, OR XVI, and OR XIVB*, representing the period
when the great Roman basilicas were staffed by monastic communities, and when St.
Peter’s seems to have been something of a model for the other churches of the city.
Hence it was the usage of St. Peter that John the Archchanter brought to Wearmouth, and
that Gregory III imposed on St. Chrysogonus and the monastery he renovated near the
Lateran.
But the four-seasoned-year of St. Peter’s began to be obscured with the
compilation of OR XIII, organized around the twelve months. Indeed the very title of OR
XIII, which claims to report the practice of the Roman Church rather than St. Peter’s,
implies that a much wider readership was foreseen, since churches all over Europe were
now seeking to imitate the usage of Rome. At the same time, liturgical leadership seems
to have been shifting away from the Vatican basilica, toward the person of the pope
himself, whose cathedra or chair was at the Lateran. This was not a mere substitution of
one building for another, for the pope’s most prominent role was as the leader of the
stational liturgies, for which he traveled to churches all over the city in his role as bishop
of Rome. Thus two of the most important books on which the Carolingian reform was
based, namely the Gregorian sacramentary and the Roman Graduale, seem to follow the
46
Though the historical origins of Lent and the Ember Weeks at Rome are not fully known, the conventional
views are summarized in Vogel, Medieval Liturgy 309-14, 404-6.
47
Leo Cunibert Mohlberg, ed., Liber Sacramentorum Romanae Aeclesiae Ordinis Anni Circuli 24-28. Michel
Andrieu, Les Ordines Romani du haut moyen age 4 (1956) 213-31.
48
Gelasius I (492-6) and Symmachus (498-514) are said to have ordained in December and February, Felix IV
(526-30) in February and March, Gregory I (590-604) in Lent and September, Leo II (682-83) in June, Sergius I
(687-701) in March. There are also many popes to whom ordinations are attributed but no date is given.
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pope’s own calendar of stational Masses rather than the calendar of any specific basilica.
Thus OR XIII takes a step toward the creation of a unified Roman rite, a process that was
not completed until the 13th century.49 And with the adoption and spread of OR XIII we
see the beginning of the end of the idea that the practice of St. Peter’s, with its fourseasoned calendar, should serve as the model for all other churches in Rome and
elsewhere.
49
Pierre Jounel, Le culte des saints dans les basiliques du Latran et du Vatican au douzième siècle, Collection
de l’école française de Rome 26 (Rome: École française de Rome, 1977). S. J. P. Van Dijk, Origins of the
Modern Roman Liturgy: The Liturgy of the Papal Court and the Franciscan Order in the Thirteenth Century
(Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press, 1960).
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