may imply that ribald French motets were sometimes sung in liturgical contexts. The
most important uses of French, particularly in the later Middle Ages, were in the two
areas where laypeople had extensive contact with the liturgy: in preaching, though
written sermon texts circulated more often in Latin, and in books of hours and other
prayerbooks, in which the public liturgy was adapted for use in private prayer and
personal devotion.
Peter Jeffery
[See also: BOOK OF HOURS; DEDICATION OF THE CHURCH; DIVINE
OFFICE; MASS, CHANTS AND TEXTS]
Duffin, Ross W. “National Pronunciations of Latin ca. 1490–1600.” Journal of Musicology 4
(1985–86):217–26.
Le Vot, Gérard. “La tradition musicale des épîtres farcies de la Saint-Étienne en langues romanes.”
Revue de musicologie 73 (1987):61–82.
Liebman, Charles J. The Old French Psalter Commentary: Contribution to a Critical Study of the
Text Attributed to Simon of Tournai. N.p.: By the author, 1982.
Ottosen, Knud. “Le problématique de l’édition des textes liturgiques latins.” In Classica et
mediaevalia Francisco Blatt septuagenario dedicata, ed. O.S.Due et al. Copenhagen:
Gyldendal, 1973, pp. 541–56.
Rézeau, Pierre. Les prières aux saints en français a la fin du moyen âge. 2 vols. Geneva: Droz,
1982–83.
Sinclair, Keith Val. Prières en ancien français. Hamden: Archon, 1978.
——. French Devotional Texts of the Middle Ages: A Bibliographic Manuscript Guide. Westport:
Greenwood, 1979; first supplement, 1982; second supplement, 1988.
LITURGICAL YEAR
. The Christian liturgical year consists of two interacting cycles. Most feasts of the
sanctoral cycle fall upon fixed dates, commemorating either the date of a saint’s death
(dies natalis—the “birthday” into heaven) or the anniversary of some other event, such as
the dedication of a church or the reburial (translation) of relics. The more important
temporal cycle contains mostly movable feasts, which fall on a different date each year,
commemorating events in the life of Jesus or in salvation history. As it was celebrated in
the Latin Middle Ages, the temporal cycle can be subdivided into several smaller cycles:
(1) The Paschal cycle
a. Easter, Ascension, Pentecost. The core of the Paschal cycle is the fifty-day period
from Easter Sunday to Pentecost, the only part of the Christian liturgical year that is
undeniably descended from a Jewish antecedent—the fifty days from Passover to the
Feast of Weeks. Because the Resurrection was also commemorated every Sunday,
Christians early felt the need to abandon the linkage between Easter and the Jewish date
of Passover, so that the annual feast of the Resurrection could always be celebrated on
Sunday. By the 3rd century, those few Christians who still celebrated Easter on the
Jewish Passover were ostracized as heretics. Even among the majority, however, there
was much disagreement on the question of how to calculate the date of Easter Sunday,
and to this day the Eastern Orthodox churches differ with Catholics and Protestants on
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