Liturgical Introduction

You will encounter on these folios two other technical terms related to the dates for various feasts.  These are (i) “in vigilia” (on the vigil [of]; thus folios. 2r2; 2v6; 2v18; 3r6-7), which simply refers to the evening prior to and anticipatory of an important day in the church calendar; and (ii) “infra octauas” (through the “octave” of, i.e. through the week [8 days inclusive] following; thus folios 3r19 ff; 3v1-2 and 10-11); this term refers to the practice whereby elements of liturgies on the holiest days of the church calendar—such as Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, and Pentecost—would be repeated daily for the full week after those feasts.

 

 

(3) By the end of late antiquity (i.e., the 5th/6th centuries C.E.), there is evidence that Christian liturgies in both the East and West involved two fundamental components.

 

(a) the liturgy of the Eucharist (called “the Mass” in the Latin West), i.e. a commemoration of Jesus’s Last Supper with the disciples;

 

(b) the “liturgy of the hours” (also called the “Divine Office” or simply “the Office”), i.e. a series of seven (or eight) prayer-services distributed regularly through the course of every day and night.   These services consisted mainly of singing the Psalms, reading passages from Old and New Testaments, and reciting certain prayers.

      We call these individual services of the Western Divine Office by names adapted from their Latin ones:

 

the “day hours”:

            Lauds (Latin laudes, or matutinae) before daybreak

            Prime (Latin prima (hora)) “the first hour,” i.e. 6am*

            Terce (Latin tertia (hora)) “the third hour,” i.e. 9am*

            Sext (Latin sexta (hora)) “the “sixth hour,” i.e. 12 noon*

            None (Latin nona (hora)) “the “ninth hour,” i.e. 3pm*

 

the “night hours”

            Vespers (Latin vespera(e)) evening

            Compline (Latin ad completum, completorium) before bed)

Nocturns (Latin nocturnale officium, or vigiliae) starting as early as 2am, depending of time of year

 

* these times “6am”are only very approximate; the medieval day and night were divided into 12 hours each (like our own),but their “hour” differed from ours in that it had no absolute duration but rather lengthened or shortened depending on the time of year.  In winter, for example, when northern European nights are very long, one “hour” would have been longer than 60 of our minutes; conversely, in summer, one nighttime “hour” could be less than 60 of our minutes.

 

Such is the daily round (or horarium) of the Divine Office in its simplest form.  In actuality, both the organization and terminology of the Office liturgy in medieval manuscripts are often more complicated, owing to the fact that this daily schedule tended to become crowded with extra devotional obligations as well as a daily celebration of one or often two Masses.

 

(4) Medieval manuscripts for the liturgy tend to keep the components for the Mass separate from those for the Divine Office.  By the twelfth century, moreover, it was increasingly common for all the various readings and chants for the Mass to be gathered into a single book called the “missal,” while the readings and chants relevant to the Divine Office might be gathered into a single (often multi-volume) work called the “breviary.”

 

Despite the tendency to group the texts in those ways, some monastic and clerical communities retained a more old-fashioned division of the various texts and chants for the Divine Office among several different books—each book containing only the material needed by one particular participant in the Office.  Thus the “lectionary” would contain the biblical readings to be recited by the lector (reader); the “antiphoner” would contain the music and text of chants to be led by the precentor (choir-master); and so on.  Another such specific book was the “collectar,” containing two short items that the presider at the Divine Office would have been responsible for reciting.  These two items are known as:

 

(i) the “chapter”—Latin capitulum (singular), capitula (plural)—was a short reading  from scripture recited by the person presiding at the various hours of the Divine Office.  (At Nocturns, however, where the biblical and other readings were much longer, they tended to be included in a different book.) 

 

(ii) the “collect”—Latin collecta (singular), collectae (plural)—was a short prayer, usually summing up the major theme(s) of a particular liturgical day or season.  The collects so used in the Offices were often the same as those used in the liturgy of the Mass (where a collect occurs near the beginning of that service).

 

These two types of items—chapters and collects—are what fill the manuscript leaves 1r-30v, and their presence is what identifies this part of the book as a “collectar.”

 

You may note, in addition, that the collectar is in two successive parts, each following the liturgical calendar from Advent to the 25^th Sunday after Pentecost: