I.4. Songs of Praise

The medieval liturgical day revolved around eight services called “offices” and the daily Mass. While Mass was the dramatic centerpiece of the cycle, with the giving and receiving of communion at its heart, the rhythm of the day was set by the eight offices (at roughly three-hour intervals): matins (after midnight), lauds (before daybreak), prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, and compline (before retiring). The liturgy for these hours was recorded in two types of books: breviaries (used by those who recited the service) and antiphonals (used by those who sang). Both evolved from and around the central text that is woven throughout Catholic liturgy, the Psalter.

The Psalter, in its simplest form, is the text of the 150 psalms in the Bible, with the psalms varying in length from two to 176 verses (being psalms 116 and 118, the shortest and the longest psalms). The text of the psalms occurs during the Middle Ages in three possible formats: the Versio Romana, which was Jerome’s first revision of the text, composed by him in 384; the Versio Gallicana, which was Jeromes second version, and the one that is the most standard throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance; and the so-called Hebrew Psalter (but really, of course, in Latin), which was Jerome’s third translation that he compiled working directly from the Hebrew text. These Latin translations always add up to the “official” number at 150, but they do not follow the same internal divisions, so, in citing them, one needs to be aware of the numbering system followed: for the Middle Ages, one should always use the Vulgate numbers of the Gallicana translation (and not the Hebrew/Protestant psalm numbers). Once extracted from the Bible as a separate book, the Psalter often acquired a number of additional texts: a liturgical calendar, a litany of saints, canticles from the Old and the New Testament, and other prayers, such as those found in cat. no. 46, a mid-thirteenth-century psalter from Saint-Riquier. Psalters are often illustrated, sometimes with a prefatory series of full-page miniatures of, for example, the life of Christ (as in cat. no. 96) or, in a calendar, the labors of the months (cat. no. 46). More typical are smaller initials illustrating Ring David, highlighting the division of the Psalter into eight or ten sections, also as in cat. no. 46.

Like most psalters (and many liturgical books), cat. no. 46 begins with a liturgical calendar. Such calendars are perpetual, identifying the saint or feast commemorated on each day, many of which are of significance to a particular nation, region, city, church, or order. Calendars thus often contain hints to the identity of the first owners of the book. Some saints (e.g., Francis or Dominic) point to a particular religious order. The inclusion or absence of other saints can serve to provide a terminus post or ante quern for the production of the book. Some saints are universal, but others point to a particular place. For example, cat. no. 45, shown opposite, can be localized to England—in spite of its many Continental decorative elements—because of particular saints recorded in the calendar, such as Cuthbert, John of Beverley, and Thomas of Hereford. Calendars also include church dedications and obits (death days), which refer to locally important families.

The psalter was incorporated into the breviary and antiphonal, of which it forms the core text (as in cat. no. 44, a breviary for the use of St. Peter’s Blandinium). To a psalter, office books add the hymns, readings, antiphons, responses, versicles, and prayers necessary for the recitation of the Divine Office. In these books, the goal is to recite the entire book of psalms over the course of the week; the distribution of which psalms on which days and at which canonical hours varies somewhat from one religious community to another.

For Mass, the monks required different types of books such as missals (preserving the spoken texts recited by the celebrant, as in cat. no. 48), graduals (for the use of a choir), and lectionaries (preserving the extra-liturgical biblical or patristic readings, as in cat. no. 47). In the choir books (antiphonals for the office and graduals for the Mass), musical notation develops from the unheightened “St. Gall style” of the Gottschalk Antiphonal (cat. no. 43) to the more recognizable four- or five-line Gregorian notation of, for example, the Noyon Missal (cat. no. 48), some of it written in burnished gold. Although books of hours (such as cat. no. 45) are not liturgical books per se, their core text, the Hours of the Virgin Mary, is similarly structured to office books. Like some other English books of hours (cf. cat. no. 132), the fifteenth-century example included here is unusually large; its dimensions bring to mind the liturgical books to which it is related.