A friend has brought to my attention the work of the website Caeremoniale Romanum, which is based in Poland, and also has a wonderful archive of films of old liturgies on its YouTube channel. They have recently made available scans of some important works for the study of the Roman liturgy, scans of critical editions of the Pontificale from two different periods, which may be accessed at this page: https://caeremonialeromanum.com/en/pontificalia-romana-andrieu-dykmans-vogel/. The first is in three volumes, and the second in four.
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| The ordination of a bishop, depicted in a Roman Pontifical of the later 15th or 16th century. |
The first of these is the theoretical reconstruction of the so-called Pontificale Romano-Germanicum, from the 10th century, a work begun by Cyrille Vogel and completed by Reinhard Elze, and based in no small part on the earlier research of Michel Andrieu. This work as reconstructed would represent the watershed transformation of the primitive Roman Pontifical, done at the abbey of St Alban in Mainz, Germany, around the year 960, which then became the basis for all future versions of the Pontificale, up until the definitive edition issued by Pope Clement VIII at the end of the 16th century. However, it must be noted that the validity of the reconstruction has been seriously questioned by Prof. Henry Parkes in his book The Making of Liturgy in the Ottonian Church (Cambridge, 2014); this is a topic largely outside my wheelhouse, but one of the wise men whom I consult on this sort of thing informs me that Parkes’ basic conclusion, that the PRG never really existed at all, has won broad acceptance.
