The Secular Liturgical Office in Late Medieval England

Until recently, research on the late medieval English Office liturgy has suggested that all manuscripts of the same liturgical Use, including those of the celebrated and widespread Uses of Sarum and York, are in large part interchangeable and uniform. This study demonstrates, through detailed analyses of the manuscript breviaries and antiphonals of each secular liturgical Use of medieval England, that such books do share a common textual core. But this is in large part restricted to a single genre of text--the responsory. Other features, even within manuscripts of the same Use, are subject to striking and significant variation, influenced by local customs and hagiographical and textual priorities, and also by varying reception to liturgical prescriptions from ecclesiastical authorities. The identification of the characteristic features of each Use and the differentiation of regional patterns have resulted from treating each manuscript as a unique witness, a practice which is not common in liturgical studies, but one which gives the manuscripts greater value as historical sources. The term 'Use', often employed as a descriptor of orthodoxy, may itself imply a greater uniformity than ever existed, for the ways that the 'Use of Sarum', a liturgical pattern originally designed for enactment in a single cathedral, was realised in countless other venues for worship were dependent on the times, places, and contexts in which the rites were celebrated.