LITURGICAL LANGUAGES
. The most important liturgical language in medieval France was Latin. This was true in
the Gallican liturgy of the Merovingian period, and it remained true when the Roman
liturgy was imported and adapted by the Carolingians. Ecclesiastical Latin was in many
respects different from the language of Cicero and other classical writers, yet the literary
culture of ecclesiastical Latin was relatively uniform throughout western Europe, from
Ireland, Spain, and northern Africa to Poland and Hungary. Spoken Latin, however,
differed in pronunciation and vocabulary under the influence of local ver-nacular
languages. By the late Middle Ages, Latin speakers from different parts of Europe did not
always find it easy to understand each other. The diversity of pronunciations survived
into the early 20th century, when Pope Pius X mandated the use of the Italianate
“Roman” pronunciation in the entire Roman Catholic church.
There must have been a time when Christians in the area we now call France
worshiped in Greek, the language of the earliest Christian writers of the area, such as
Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon (r. ca. 178-ca. 200), who was born and raised in Asia Minor and
educated in Rome. But from the time of Hilary, bishop of Poitiers (r. 353-ca. 367), the
Gallican church seems to have been uniformly Latin-speaking, and little trace of its
earlier Greek period survives in the liturgical sources. The use of the Greek Kyrie eleison
in the Mass, Office, and processional litanies was widespread throughout the East and
West; the option of using Greek for the readings and Creed of the Easter Vigil is more
likely of Roman origin. In the rite for the dedication of churches, the ceremony in which
the bishop wrote the Latin and Greek alphabets on the floor is apparently of Gallican
origin.
In the Carolingian period, scholarly interest in Greek led to the limited introduction of
new Greek elements into the liturgy. Most notable was the Missa Graeca, the Ordinary of
the Mass sung in Greek. Greek words were also commonly used in the early tropes and
sequences, giving an impression of greater erudition than their authors actually
possessed.
Few early-medieval Christians knew Hebrew; most of the Hebrew words that survived
in the liturgy came by way of Latin translations of the Bible: Sabaoth (in the Sanctus; cf.
Isaiah 6:3, Romans 9:29), Adonai and Emmanuel (in the O antiphons of Advent; cf.
Exodus 6:3, Isaiah 7:14), Alleluia and Amen from the Psalms and other liturgical
passages (e.g., Deuteronomy 27:15–26). Some of Jesus’s own sayings, preserved in the
Gospels in the original Aramaic, were also quoted in the liturgy (notably Matthew 27:46
and Mark 15:34 in the Passion readings, Mark 7:34 at baptism). Only in the high Middle
Ages did such theologians as Andrew of Saint-Victor (d. 1175) and Nicolas of Lyra (d.
1340) learn enough Hebrew to study the Bible in the original language, though their work
had little impact on the liturgy.
French was little used in the medieval liturgy proper, though vernacular glosses on the
psalms and other texts doubtless played a role in the way the liturgy was experienced and
understood. On the feast of St. Stephen (De-cember 26), the day of the Christmas Octave
devoted to the deacons, it was customary to chant the Epistle of the Mass with farses, or
tropes, that paraphrased the Latin text in French. Ecclesiastical condemnations of
polyphonic music, most notably the Docta sanctorum patrum of Pope John XXII in 1322,
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