The lost Missal of Alcuin and the Carolingian sacramentaries of Tours

Abstract

Letters of Alcuin of York attest that he composed a liturgical book he called a ‘missal’ while he was abbot of St Martin's basilica in Tours. No manuscripts of this missal survive. It has to be recovered from much later sacramentaries copied in Tours, which have been subject to significant subsequent reworking. This article makes a new attempt to draw out the contents of the missal from these later sources, assuming that the later adjustments by others are an equally valid attempt to improve the usability and comprehensiveness of the book as Alcuin's original endeavour. The discovery of fragments of a much earlier sacramentary from Tours in Solothurn Staatsarchiv also makes a significant contribution to the process.