The Secular Liturgical Office in Late Medieval England by Matthew Cheung Salisbury (review)

Few medievalists pay much attention to liturgiology until the day that a precise answer to some tricky liturgical question is urgently required. If they are working on any aspect of later medieval English history or literature, this book is one that they may someday need.

Everyone has heard of the Use of Sarum, the version of the liturgy (the mass, the day and night offices, and the office of the Virgin) that was used in some religious communities and in the parish churches, collegiate chapels, cathedrals, and even the homes of England, Wales, and parts of Scotland. A source of national pride to some, it was the ancestor of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer. But what if a unitary Use of Sarum turns out to be an illusion, and there never was any such homogeneous entity? Essentially, this is Matthew Cheung Salisbury’s argument.

Part of his first chapter is devoted to an interesting summary of liturgical studies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the Oxford Movement to the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath. This demonstrates how a number of scholars were heavily invested in the concept of a single, authoritative Sarum Rite, and how this was accompanied by a valorisation of the printed editions that some of them produced and a neglect of the manuscript sources.

To remedy this imbalance, Salisbury has himself undertaken an intimidatingly thorough examination of the manuscript evidence: 177 manuscripts held in British and Irish libraries, mainly missals, breviaries, books of hours, and antiphonals, that have been claimed for the Uses of Sarum and York (and Hereford, definitely an also-run in these liturgical stakes). Their contents, texts, and textual detail have been rigorously compared, using computerised methods. They turn out to vary wildly, supporting the case for each surviving manuscript to be treated as a unique witness and not just lumped under one or other Use.

In his second chapter, however, Salisbury partially rehabilitates the idea of discrete and largely uniform Uses. He relies on the liturgical kalendars, which he finds fairly consistent, and on sets of responsories from Advent, Holy Week, and the Office of the Dead, which he considers the most stable part of the office, to distinguish between Sarum, York, and Hereford. Responsory series have long been used for that purpose, certainly since Falconer Madan and his notorious tests, but Salisbury sets out to apply this method more consistently.

Chapter 3 moves on to a detailed, word-for-word textual analysis of individual texts, including the Offices for Thomas Becket and William of York, and the Office of the Dead. A discussion of the possible reasons for the variations follows—textual drift, involuntary changes, and deliberate changes—that should interest anyone working in editing and textual studies. The final chapter addresses the questions, why and how does the liturgy change? This involves an excursion into the murky world of medieval ecclesiastical bureaucracy and includes a discussion of the technical mechanism for adding new feasts to regional church kalendars. This is an interesting supplementation to the usual treatment of new feasts as manifestations of trends in popular and learned devotion.

All Salisbury’s manuscripts are Insular, but it is worth noting that three Australian libraries possess manuscripts of Sarum service books, including an uncommon York horae in the State Library of Victoria. In various New Zealand libraries, there are several fragments from English missals, and a number of complete and fragmentary manuscript Sarum horae (as well as early printed copies). There is also one Sarum missal, in Wellington’s Alexander Turnbull Library. Using Salisbury’s book alongside that manuscript revealed the usefulness of his section on liturgical kalendars, but also made it clear that most of this book is more relevant to office books than to missals.

Unless you are a professional liturgiologist, passionately interested in liturgical studies, or maybe in computerised research in...