Introduction to This Volume

How this book is arranged

This is the ninety-eighth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church. The first volumes of the series follow the writers in order of date; this volume belongs to the later part of the series, which gathers the liturgies, the church orders and the decisions of the councils that do not belong to any one author. This volume holds the daily services of the Church of the East, the liturgies of the Syrian Jacobites, of India and of Ethiopia, and the liturgies and prayers of the Latin West.

Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section numbers.

The translations

The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation. In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. The modern English version prepared for SermonIndex is used for The Roman Canon of the Mass in Modern English (Gelasian Sacramentary); the other works are printed in older public-domain translations. Most of the liturgies in this volume were read by machine from scans of nineteenth-century books and have not been proofread against the printed pages, so a misreading may remain. Where a liturgy appears in more than one translation, each is printed in full under its own title.

In this volume

This volume continues the liturgies of the East and turns to the West. The Church of the East is represented by its daily offices and by its services for baptism and for the burial of priests; the Syrian Jacobites and the Christians of Malabar by their liturgies of James; and Ethiopia by the Ethiopic liturgy in two versions, with the Ethiopic form of the prayer at the ordination of a bishop.

The last part belongs to the Latin West: the Roman Canon of the Mass, put into modern English for this series from the Latin of the Gelasian Sacramentary; the Mozarabic collects of the old Spanish church; Frederick Warren’s account of the Celtic Church and its worship; and the Stowe Missal, an Irish Mass-book of about AD 800, with George Warner’s introduction and the Old Irish treatise on the Mass that is written into it.

Dates and authorship

The rites printed here are older than the books that carry them, and the dates given for their origin are the estimates of the translators and are debated. Each work begins with a short introduction that says what is known of its text and its date, and what is uncertain.