The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History. Ed. by RICHARD W. PFAFF.

Abstract

There was no liturgical uniformity in the Middle Ages; instead a hundred uses co-existed, drawn up by local churches, regular or secular, to suit their own needs. Faced with a plethora of ‘liturgies’ purists have argued tiresomely against the definite article, but it stands proudly on the title-page of Richard Pfaff's magisterial overview, proclaiming the continuum of effort that underlies the varieties of liturgical practice across two Christian millennia. This is the book that it has been Richard Pfaff's to write, and it has grown out of forty years of work on the primary manuscripts. It should find a hungry audience since liturgy is often seen as a difficult subject for the non-specialist to dig into, reliant hitherto on A. A. King's now outdated Liturgies of the Religious Orders (1955) supplemented by Andrew Hughes's erudite but opaque handbook Medieval Manuscripts For Mass and Office (1982). Pfaff's history is truly an evidence-based approach, its conclusions drawn at all points from the surviving manuscripts, buttressed by architectural evidence, and by the documentary witness of councils and synods, visitation records and the statutes of collegiate churches and secular cathedrals.