Customer Reviews

The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century: A Historical Introduction and Guide for Students and Musicians (Clarendon Paperbacks)

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...for three classes of human beings: 1) musicians, including those who perform and those who listen knowingly, 2) historians of the Middle Ages and Early Modern, 3) Catholics interested in restoring the orders of worship and liturgy in Latin prior to the reforms of the 1960s. I cast my lot with classes 1&2, and I'm broadly sympathetic with those in class 3.

The volume contains a historical overview of the formation and evolution of liturgy in the Roman Catholic Church, concerning both parish and monastic practices. It also describes the liturgical calendar in careful detail, with the goal of re-attaching music and liturgy to their appropriate sacral contexts. Regional and national variations are examined, as are the most important manuscript sources for early liturgical material. The changes that followed the Tridentine Reforms are analyzed, as are the insular liturgical practices of the Church of England. Part IV focuses on the practical uses of published liturgical books for conducting liturgical events, with or without music; this is such a convenience for both liturgists and musicians that I consider it indispensible.

The volume also includes nearly 100 pages of appendices, addressing details of the liturgical calendar, the psalter and its incipits, the most common antiphonal texts with translations, and a various compendious glossary of words and phrases of importance to historians as well as musicians of the whole 2nd Millenium.

The author, John Harper, was a professor of music at the University of Wales, director of music at the Birmingham Metropolitan Cathedral, and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.

Harper's book is the best in-print general introduction to medieval Western Liturgy. Harper does an excellent job of explaining complex liturgical matters in the simplest way possible, but quite accurately. The tables showing the contents of the rites are particularly useful, as are the bibliographies and the glossary. The book is of special interest to those who generally like to ignore what happened to the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church in the 1960's and 1970's. And for Anglo-philes quite a bit of information is given about medieval English liturgy as well as the reformed English liturgies from 1549 to 1662. Overall, a fantastic introduction and an indispensable resource for those interested in traditional Western liturgies.