The 12th Century Missal of Limoges

Here is a beautiful thing I stumbled across in one of my favorite virtual libraries, the Bibliothèque nationale de France: a sacramentary produced in the 12th century for the cathedral of St Stephen in Limoges. (Département des manuscrits. Latin 9438) The current cathedral was begun in 1273, and so postdates the book. The manuscript contains 14 major illuminations (not full-page, although they will seem so here because of the way I have cropped the images), and a number of large illuminated letters. The decorations on this page are very typical of what is seen in the rest of the book. Following a very ancient arrangement, the first Mass of the year is that of the vigil of Christmas, and Advent is at the end of the liturgical year; note that the Mass also still has a proper preface.

The Nativity of Christ and the appearance of the angel to the shepherds, before the Day Mass of Christmas. Although the style is very far from the naturalism of the Renaissance, there is an elegance to the figures which is often seen in Gothic art, as opposed to the weirdly disproportionate figures so common in the Romanesque period. Here this is evidenced in things like the gesture of the Virgin Mary’s hand and those of the shepherds, and the drape of the cloth above Her.

Technically, a “sacramentary” is a book that includes only the priest’s parts of the Mass. However, the 12th century is the period when the “missal” properly so-called emerged, which includes the text of all the parts of the Mass. This particular book is transitional; the musical parts are very often indicated before the Masses, but not always, and only by their incipits, not the full text; the Scriptural readings are not indicated at all. (The website of the BnF calls it a missal in one place and a sacramentary in another.)

The stoning of St Stephen gets its own image, since he is the patron of the cathedral. The artist has made an admirable attempt at showing motion in the position of the figures casting the stones, which are hanging around in the air around Stephen.

The Baptism of Christ and the Miracle at Cana; note that in both cases, He is shown younger and beardless, perhaps an example of archaizing based on imitation of much older images.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

An Illustrated Sacramentary of the Late 11th Century

Here is another interesting discovery from the endless treasure trove of one of my favorite websites, that of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. This sacramentary was made for the Benedictine abbey of Saint Winnoc, in a town called Bergues in the northernmost part of the modern state of France (less than six miles south of Dunkirk, where the famous evacuation took place in 1940.) It dates to 1078-83, the time of the fifth abbot, who had the unusual name of Manasses; unusual, because it is the Latin form of “Manasseh”, the worst among the wicked kings of Judah. The abbey was a dependency of that of St Bertin, about 19 miles to the south, which in turn drew its liturgical use from the principality of Liège; this is why the patron of Liège, St Lambert, is named in the Communicantes.

What makes this manuscript particularly noteworthy is that it is a rare example of a sacramentary with illustrations for the major liturgical feasts. Both the writing and the illustrations were done by two different hands, one of which is very much finer than the other. I have here included all the images, and a few samples of the text. 

At the beginning of the manuscript, after the calendar, is portrait of Christ, young and beardless, following an archaic motif which may have been copied from the sacramentary which served as the prototype for this one, or its parent.

The Preface dialogue

The beginning of the Preface, with Christ, again beardless, amid the symbols of the four Evangelists.

The beginning of the Canon.

The Agnus Dei, with the words of Psalm 84 in the border, “Truth has arisen from the earth, and justice has looked down from heaven.”

The prayers of the First and Second Sundays of Advent: the decorated letters shown here are typical of those of the first illustrator.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Online Resources: Critical Editions of Two Ancient Manuscripts of the Roman Mass

I recently discovered that two very important resources for the study of the Roman liturgy are now available for free on the archive.org website. These are critical editions, both by Dom Leo Mohlberg OSB (1878-1963), of the oldest Sacramentary of the Roman Rite, known as the Old Gelasian Sacramentary, and of the so-called Leonine Sacramentary. The former was published in 1960, the latter posthumously in 1966; in both cases, Dom Mohlberg, a monk of the German abbey of Maria Laach, worked in collaboration with his Benedictine confreres Leo Eizenhöfer and Pietro Siffrin. The scans were made of the text, and not as pictures of the pages, so one can also do a word-search within them in the pdf format.

https://archive.org/details/mohlberg1960libersacramentorum
https://archive.org/details/mohlberg1966sacramentariumveronense

The end of the Preface, the Sanctus (written in Greek letters), and the beginning of the Canon, in the Gellone Sacramentary, which is only about 30 years later than the Old Gelasian Sacramentary. (Bibliothèque National de France, Département des Manuscrits, Latin 12048, folio 143v).

Unfortunately, Italian libraries generally are far behind their French, German and English counterparts in digitizing their holdings and making them available electronically. There do not appear to be any pictures at all of the Leonine manuscript on the internet, and the Capitular Library of the cathedral of Verona which holds it has no digital collection. The Old Gelasian Sacramentary is at the Vatican Library, and can be consulted online in a high quality scan, but is held under copyright, and each page is watermarked.

The so-called Leonine Sacramentary is not actually a sacramentary at all, which is to say, a book which contains the priest’s parts of the Mass, the Canon, and the variable prayers and prefaces of individual Masses. (All sacramentaries also include other materials such as blessings and catechumenal rites, which vary according to the context in which they were made to be used.) Before the creation of such books, the prayers and prefaces were written down in booklets called “libelli Missarum”, which might well vary from one church to another even within the same city. The manuscript in question is a privately made and highly irregular collection of these libelli, generally dated on internal evidence to the mid-6th century. The collection was certainly made in Rome itself, since it contains numerous specific references to the city. Its traditional name “Leonine”, in reference to Pope St Leo I, is no more than a fancy of its discoverer, Fr Giuseppe Bianchini (1704-64), a canon of Verona who later joined the Roman Oratory, and in his time, was a well-respected scholar of Christian antiquity.

The manuscript is very damaged, and begins with the sixth of a group of 43 different Masses for several martyrs. (The group is numbered within the manuscript itself.) The only parts of the Temporal cycle which are included are the Ascension, Pentecost and the following Ember Days, “daily prayers” for Mass, Vespers and Matins (without any indication of specific days), the Ember Days of September and December, Christmas, St John the Evangelist, and the Holy Innocents. One of the many things that demonstrates the collection’s wildly irregular nature is the placement of eight Masses for St Stephen the First Martyr on August 2nd, the feast of Pope St Stephen I, even though there can be no doubt that the feast of the former was kept on December 26th long before the collection was made.

Most of the remaining Masses are those of feast days; five for the Nativity of St John the Baptist, eight for Ss John and Paul, twenty-eight for Ss Peter and Paul, etc. Despite the complete irregularity of the collection, a considerable number of its texts passed into the regularized books properly known as sacramentaries, and in one form or another, some are still used to this very day. Many of the prefaces added to the Roman Rite in the post-Conciliar reform are derived from it, including two of those recently made optional for use in the Extraordinary Form, those of the Angels and of the Martyrs. The traditional Offertory prayer said when water is added to the chalice “Deus qui humanae substantiae” is first attested as the Collect of the first Leonine Mass of Christmas.

A great deal has been written and discussed about the second book, the Old Gelasian Sacramentary, which is the first known actual sacramentary of the Roman Rite. Broadly speaking, the scholarly consensus seems to be that the manuscript is physically from about 750 AD. It includes the Masses of the four great Marian feasts (Nativity, Annunciation, Purification and Assumption), which were added to the Roman Rite by Pope St Sergius I (687-701) at the very end of the 7th century, but does not include Masses for the Thursdays of Lent, which were instituted in the reign of Pope St Gregory II, 715-31; the text from which it was copied can therefore be dated fairly narrowly to about 700 AD.

The liturgical texts are divided into three books. The first contains the Masses of the Temporal cycle, from the vigil of Christmas to the octave of Pentecost; there are no Masses at all for the time after Epiphany. After the octave of Pentecost, there is a large group of Masses and prayers for particular occasions, including ordinations and church dedications. The second book mostly contains the Masses of Saints, including a few commons, but also the Ember Days of September and December, and the Masses of Advent. The third book begins with 16 Masses labelled simply “for Sundays”, all of whose contents are found in later manuscripts on the Sundays after Pentecost, followed by the Canon, a group of a “daily Masses” then a large number of votive Masses and prayers for special occasions, including the Masses for the Dead.

Although there are any number of differences between this Sacramentary and the Missal of St Pius V, there can be no mistake whatsoever that the former is the predecessor of the latter, and even the most casual perusal of the text of this manuscript will immediately impress the reader with the extraordinary degree of continuity between them.

The Prayers of the Season after Pentecost

Since Dr Foley has been walking us through the collects of the season after Pentecost in his Lost in Translation series, I thought I would share some research which I have been doing on them. This is similar to what I did last year with the Sunday Gospels and Epistles of the same season, and with similar results. The earliest sources show a system which is very disorganized, but unmistakably the ancestor of the traditional Roman Rite as we know it today; the material they contain is very quickly organized into something which is almost identical to what we find in the Missal of St Pius V.

Folio 106v of the Gellone Sacramentary. ca 780-800 AD, with the Mass prayers of the current liturgical week assigned to the “14th Sunday after Pentecost”, where the Missal of St Pius V has them on the 13th Sunday. In sacramentaries of the Gelasian type, most Masses, but not all, have two collects; the precise reason for this, and for the fact that many Masses have one, and some have three, is a subject of debate. In the Gregorian Sacramentary, they are reduced to one, and it is almost always the first one that is kept. The Mass also has its own Preface, as was generally the case in the Roman Rite until the end of the 11th century.

The very earliest collection of Roman Mass prayers is the so-called Leonine Sacramentary, a document preserved in a single mutilated manuscript in the library of the cathedral chapter of Verona. The terms “Leonine” and “Sacramentary” are both misnomers. It is not actually a sacramentary, the ancient predecessor of the missal which contains only the priest’s parts of the Mass, namely, the prayers, prefaces and Canon. It is rather a collection of the texts of a large number of “libelli missarum”, small booklets which contained the prayers and prefaces of Masses for specific occasions; it was privately complied in Rome itself around the mid-6th century. Its traditional name “Leonine”, in reference to Pope St Leo I, is no more than a fancy of its discoverer, Fr Giuseppe Bianchini (1704-64), a canon of Verona who later joined the Roman Oratory, and in his time, a well-respected scholar of Christian antiquity.

Four of the Collects of the Sundays after Pentecost in the Roman Missal are found within the Leonine Sacramentary, those of 4th, 8th, 12th and 13th Sundays. It should be noted that the Leonine does not contain any Masses specifically assigned to Sundays, apart from Pentecost itself.

The oldest proper sacramentary, known as the Old Gelasian Sacramentary, is preserved in a single manuscript now in the Vatican Library (Reginensis 316); the book itself dates to about 750AD, but its contents are to be dated about 50 years earlier. The attribution of the type of liturgical book it represents to Pope St Gelasius I (492-6) apparently dates to the 9th century, but rests on no known basis in fact. It is divided into three books, the first of which covers the liturgical year from Christmas Eve to the Octave of Pentecost, with various baptismal rites, blessings and ordinations, and the second the feasts of the Saints. The third book begins with 16 Masses for Sundays, followed by the Canon, daily Masses, votive Masses, and various blessings.

The 16 Sundays Masses at the beginning of the third book are not labelled “after Pentecost”, but their placement and the subsequent use of the material which they contain leave no room for doubt that they were in fact said in that period. (The time after Pentecost ranges from 23 to 28 Sundays in length, but there is nothing in the book itself that explains how the material was arranged relative to this difference.) Of the twenty-four Collects for the Sundays after Pentecost in the Missal of St Pius V, fifteen are found in this group, and two others in Old Gelasian Masses of Eastertide. Relative to each other, the fifteen are said in the same sequential order as in the Missal of St Pius V, and in most cases, they are said with the same Secret and Post-Communion as in the Missal of St Pius V.

By the later part of the 8th century, the gaps in the liturgical year in the Old Gelasian had been filled in, as we find in the Gellone Sacramentary, ca. 780-800, which has 26 Sundays after Pentecost. All twenty-four of the Collects for the Sundays after Pentecost in the Missal of St Pius V appear within it, and in every case, with the same Secret and Post-Communion as in the Missal of St Pius V. The order in which these Masses are arranged is also mostly the same, but not exactly so, and two of the Gellone Masses do not appear in the Missal of St Pius V. This same material then passes into the Gregorian Sacramentary, the redaction of the Roman Mass which carries over through the Middle Ages and into modern times, with almost complete unformity. [note]

The 2002 edition of the post-Conciliar Missal includes all twenty-four of the traditional Collects for the Sundays after Pentecost, although two of them appear in an edited form, and some others with minor variations. (As I have noted before, at least one of these was not in the original edition, but subsequently restored.) Fourteen have been retained on the Sundays which are now called “per annum” or “ of ordinary time.” Six have been moved into Lent, one of which is no longer said as a Collect, but rather as the optional “prayer over the people” at the end of Mass. One is used for a votive Mass, one as a concluding prayer for the Prayers of the Faithful, and two others as optional “prayers over the people.” Not one of them is any longer said with the Secret and Post-Communion that are joined to it in the Gellone and Gregorian Sacramentaries; although many of these latters prayers are retained in the new Missal, not a single one of the Masses after Pentecost remains intact.

[note] The most common variation in the Middle Ages was as follows. In the tradition represented by the Missal of St Pius V, there was originally no Trinity Sunday or octave day of Pentecost. The sequence of Sundays “after Pentecost” therefore began right away on the first Sunday after Pentecost, starting with the Mass whose Collect begins “Deus in te sperantium fortitudo.” In the north of Europe, however, Pentecost had a proper octave day, and the sequence of Sundays “after Pentecost” therefore began a week later; every Mass formula was therefore bumped forward a week, but the group of Mass formulae for these Sundays continued to be said in the same sequential order.

The 12th Century Missal of Limoges

Research on some recent (and hopefully future) articles has had me spending even more time than usual in one of my favorite virtual libraries, the Bibliothèque nationale de France; here is a nice thing I stumbled across, a sacramentary produced in the 12th century for the cathedral of St Stephen in Limoges. (Département des manuscrits. Latin 9438) The current cathedral was begun in 1273, and so postdates the book. The manuscript contains 14 major illuminations (not full-page, although they will seem so here because of the way I have cropped the images), and a number of large illuminated letters. The decorations on this page are very typical of what is seen in the rest of the book. Following a very ancient arrangement, the first Mass of the year is that of the vigil of Christmas, and Advent is at the end of the liturgical year; note that the Mass also still has a proper preface.

The Nativity of Christ and the appearance of the angel to the shepherds, before the Day Mass of Christmas. Although the style is very far from the naturalism of the Renaissance, there is an elegance to the figures which is often seen in Gothic art, as opposed to the weirdly disproportionate figures so common in the Romanesque period. Here this is evidenced in things like the gesture of the Virgin Mary’s hand and those of the shepherds, and the drape of the cloth above Her.

Technically, a “sacramentary” is a book that includes only the priest’s parts of the Mass. However, the 12th century is the period when the “missal” properly so-called emerged, which includes the text of all the parts of the Mass. This particular book is transitional; the musical parts are very often indicated before the Masses, but not always, and only by their incipits, not the full text; the Scriptural readings are not indicated at all. (The website of the BnF calls it a missal in one place and a sacramentary in another.)

The stoning of St Stephen gets its own image, since he is the patron of the cathedral. The artist has made an admirable attempt at showing motion in the position of the figures casting the stones, which are hanging around in the air around Stephen.

The Baptism of Christ and the Miracle at Cana; note that in both cases, He is shown younger and beardless, perhaps an example of archaizing based on imitation of much older images.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The 11th-Century Verdun Sacramentary

Among the many precious liturgical manuscripts kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France is a sacramentary of the 11th century, originally produced for use at the cathedral of Verdun. Several of the most important feasts are accompanied by an illustration, with an illuminated letter on a violet background for the beginning of the Collect. The use of a whole page for just a letter or two, in an age in which paper and parchment were quite expensive, indicates that the manuscript was a bit of a luxury item. Here are all of its illustrations, and a small selection of the decorative letters, which can be found on basically every page; the entire manuscript can be seen and downloaded for free from the BnF website (Département des manuscrits. Latin 18005.)

Folio 20v, the beginning of the Preface; the decorative ligature of V and D for the words “Vere dignum” was extremely common, and still being used when the first printed Missals were made in the later 15th century.

Folio 21r, the end of the Preface, and the Cross used as the T of “Te” at beginning of the Canon.

Folio 27v, the Nativity.

Folio 28r, a very complex ligature for “Concede”, the first word of the collect for the Third Mass of Christmas. (The other major feasts have a very similar letter or word after the picture.)

Folio 34v, the Epiphany

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The Gellone Sacramentary

One of my favorite manuscripts for illustrating articles on liturgical history is the Gellone Sacramentary, a work of the end of the 8th century; its precise origin is unknown, but many scholars think it was copied out in a monastery in the vicinity of Meaux in northern France. The title “Gellone” comes from St William of Gellone, who may have received the manuscript from his cousin Charlemagne, and later donated it to an abbey which he founded, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert. From there it passed to the abbey of St Germain-des-Prés in Paris, and is now in the Bibliothèque National de France, (Département des Manuscrits, Latin 12048); it can be seen and downloaded for free from their website. The first half of the manuscript has an enormous number of decorations, which show an extraordinary degree of variety and inventiveness; there are far fewer in the second half. Here is just a selection of some of the more interesting ones.

The title page (folio 1v): “In the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, here begins the Sacramentary. On the vigil of Christmas, at the hour of None, the station at St Mary Major,” followed by the collect of the vigil of Christmas. In this period, Christmas Eve was considered the beginning of the liturgical year, and Advent comes at the end of the book. The Virgin Mary is shown holding a cross and a thurible.

The prayers of the feasts of St Stephan and St John (folio 6v). Very often, there is no obvious connection between the decorations and the liturgical text.

Most of the Mass of the Purification, and that of St Agatha, who is shown at the lower left. (folio 17v)

The prayers of Ash Wednesday and the following Thursday; the station of the latter is at the church of St George, whose name is spelled as “Iorgium” (folio 23v).

Tuesday and Wednesday of the First Week of Lent. (folio 26v)

Prayers over the catechumens during the baptismal scrutinies of Lent. (folio 34r)

Continue Reading this Article. . .