Matthew Cheung Salisbury has done a signal service to both instructors of European medieval history and scholars unfamiliar with its liturgy. He has produced a compact (120 pages) guide to the Western Latin liturgy (in the largest sense) that, if read through, provides a solid understanding of this large topic.
The book consists of four sections: a brief introduction to the place of liturgy in medieval daily life, followed by a two chapters devoted to the liturgy's major components, the Mass and Office; following this is a section on what one might call para-liturgical ceremonies and prayers: for example, the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin, the burial of the dead, consecration of a church and the like. This concluding section ends with a brief but enlightening section on late medieval private devotions.
A brief introduction to the place of the liturgy in daily life soon gives way to detailed discussion of the Mass and Office. The section on the Mass is particularly lucid, with a useful table of three parallel Canons: Roman, English (from Sarum) and the outlier Ambrosian liturgy of Milan. This table makes particularly clear a major theme that Salisbury (and other liturgical experts) are very sensitive to in our diversity-conscious age: the many local variations in the liturgy. The Ambrosian rite, for instance, honors different saints from the other two more Roman-influenced versions. Most striking, however, is the omission of the Agnus Dei from the Ambrosian liturgy, at least in the manuscript used here, a fundamental element of the Western liturgy. But the overall impression one takes away from this section is how very similar the Mass liturgies are, given the distances that separated them and the centuries of disorder and isolation in which they were developed. This table is followed by lengthy excerpts of source material: there are long selections of "Proper" texts for various feasts. Similarly generous and carefully selected source texts make up the bulk of the other sections, the most distinctive and useful feature of this book.
A concise explanation of the Divine Office, which follows, is a challenge, owing to its complexity and variability. There is some redundancy in exposition here and yet one needs to read through the entire volume to pick up all that Salisbury has to say on this topic. Indeed, this section opens without any introduction, unlike the preceding section on the Mass. One is needed. Also, a table outlining the structure of the Hours is a desideratum for a second edition. The abundance of texts provided, however, gives a good sense of the variability of the Office: proper texts for the entire Offices of the Annunciation and Epiphany are provided, including the full texts of Matins lessons; these are followed by Matins propers for Christmas and for St. Thomas Becket: the latter Office, composed by a single individual and thematically tight, is a particularly useful vehicle for demonstrating the variability and creativity of liturgical usages.
Salisbury largely eschews literary or historical commentary on the important variations evident in these Offices: for instance, the deviation of Matins lessons in various selections from the classical division: three lessons from Scripture, followed by three from patristic sources, ending with three from a homily on the Gospel of the day. Salisbury offers instead extended glosses, almost meditations, on the texts themselves. While this is useful, it precludes analyzing the texts closely for thematic programs or compositional unity, for instance within the antiphons of a given hour. Granted, this sort of investigation is a very in-progress undertaking currently, with much work still to be done.
For this reader, the most valuable section of this book is the final part, which offers generous selections of text from various church rituals and private devotions. Less well-known texts are on offer here, such as a rite for the profession of nuns and the blessing of acolytes. The latter in particular offers an impressive prayer which moves from the duty of acolytes to light the altar candles to a meditation on the divine light and its illumination of the world and the soul. Speaking of light, this section in fact illuminates the special structure of the Divine Office in the latter's concentration on psalmody and Scriptural and patristic readings. The rituals surveyed in this concluding section offer instead a rich variety of composed prayers, some of admirable creativity, which are largely eschewed in the conservative structure of the Office. Finally, at the end of this section, we are given a short but rich selection of private devotions taken from Books of Hours and other devotional texts which began to proliferate in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Here we are exposed to texts which, quite unlike the liturgy, overtly encouraged individual emotional and imaginative responses to, for example, the Passion of Christ: "O Lord Jesus Christ...accused by false witness, denied by Peter, plagued by taunts and vicious lashes, crowned with thorns, spattered with spit, struck with blows, struck with palms, beaten with rods, pierced with nails, lifted to the cross, regarded as equal to robbers, and wounded with a spear...save me, protect and lead me, a miserable sinner, to eternal life"(108). One sees here textual parallels to the bloody crucifixes and pathetic Pietàs of the later Middle Ages. This outpouring of emotion helps to emphasize the austerity and restraint of the liturgical texts in the preceding sections. It is a good example of the dramatic change in approaches to prayer over the medieval centuries.
This comment brings me to my most fundamental reservation about this book. While its structure and selections give an excellent sense of the geographical variations in liturgical texts and ceremonies, their temporal or historical developments (which underlie local differences) are largely ignored. While a short volume may rightly stay away from this large topic, the reader would be well-served, I think, to understand a few fundamental historical developments: for instance, that the Office of Lauds and Vespers are "twin" Hours, owing to an urban, popular history quite distinct from the rest of the Office; or that Matins was essentially developed in monasteries, which accounts for its length and complexity. The reader might profit from knowing that the invention of the breviary, a single book containing all the texts needed for the Office, developed out of several separate volumes, owing to the increased need and ability of monks and priests to travel; the need to fit the entire year's Office into a single volume was the cause of the very short Matins lessons offered in Salisbury's book, which were much longer, more varied and richer in their original monastic and cathedral settings.
Associated with this is Salisbury's decision to ignore the monastic variations from the secular Offices which he presents here. The student of medieval history and religion will soon encounter the monastic version of the Office and suffer confusion if Salisbury's presentation is taken as normative. At least the different and perennially confusing nomenclature of the Hours: monastic "Vigils" instead of secular "Matins" and "Matins" instead of "Lauds" should be presented; the significant variations in the number of psalms and lessons of monastic Matins and Vespers, and the invariable Compline of the monastic use rather than the changeable Hour of the secular tradition also deserve inclusion. Perhaps a table showing the major differences between the monastic and secular Office would do, along with a few explanatory historical comments.
I understand the desire to keep this brief introduction to a very large topic as clear and simple as possible. Still, it seems to me that these latter issues are ones which even beginning students are liable to encounter quickly with medieval liturgical sources. In light of these comments, I would suggest adding Robert Taft's classic, historically based, study of the Office, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1986, 2nd Revised Edition, 1993), to the brief but useful bibliography appended to Salisbury's useful handbook.