themes, as this was regarded as the end of the liturgical year, with Advent marking the
beginning of the next year.
b. Ember days. The four seasons of the year were marked by Quatuor Tempora (the
“four times”), whose Latin name was corrupted in the vernaculars to Quatember or
Embertide. The Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday in each of these weeks was a fast day,
recalling an early Christian practice of fasting every Wednesday and Friday. At an early
date, the Friday fast was extended through Saturday, which was marked with a vigil Mass
during the night leading to Sunday morning, reminiscent of the vigil Masses of Easter
and Pentecost. The sermons of Pope Leo the Great tell us that each Ember week was
announced the preceding Sunday, and that the Saturday Mass was always celebrated at
St. Peter’s. It soon became common to schedule ordinations during these weeks: because
the ordaining bishop and the candidates were expected to fast, it was convenient to hold
the ceremony during a period when everyone was fasting anyway. The practice of
holding ordinations during a Saturday vigil Mass also paralleled the celebration of
baptism during the Easter and Pentecost vigils. For centuries, there was disagreement as
to exactly when to celebrate the Ember weeks, but by the Carolingian period three of
them had become linked to other periods that were characterized by fasting: the first
week of Lent (with readings recalling biblical personages who fasted forty days in the
desert), the Octave of Pentecost (marking the resumption of fasting after the rejoicing of
the fifty-day Paschal period), and the third week of Advent (picking up Annunciation
themes left over from the earliest form of this pre-Christmas period). The other Ember
Week, following the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, fell in September, picking up
themes of harvest, the Old Testament Fast of the Seventh Month (Leviticus 23:26–43),
and parallelling the fasts observed in the eastern church around the feast of the Holy
Cross (September 14).
c. Rogation days. In times of plague, earthquake, famine, and other hardships, it was a
common Christian practice to hold a penitential procession, complete with the chanting
of litanies, repetitive prayers invoking God and the saints. Such processions were
sometimes repeated on the anniversary of the original event and thus became annual
observances. Two such periods became established in the medieval calendar. The
Greater, or Roman, Rogations, held on April 25 (coincidentally the feast of St. Mark),
were first celebrated, according to a questionable report by Gregory of Tours, by Pope
Gregory the Great when a plague was devastating Rome. The Lesser, or Gallican,
Rogations, attributed by most sources to the 5th-century bishop Avitus of Vienne, was
authorized by a Council of Arles in 511 and thereafter spread throughout Europe. It was
celebrated on the three weekdays before Ascension Thursday, except at Milan, where it
was moved to after the Ascension (inspired by Matthew 9:14–15). The liturgical books
for these days preserve a great number of processional antiphons and litanies that may be
survivals of Gallican chant.
Peter Jeffery
Alexander, J.Neil, ed. Time and Community: In Honor of Thomas Julian Talley. Washington, D.C.:
Pastoral, 1990.
Farmer, Sharon. Communities of Saint Martin: Legend and Ritual in Medieval Tours. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1991.
Fassler, Margot. “The Feast of Fools and Danielis Ludus: Popular Tradition in a Medieval
Cathedral Play.” In Plainsong in the Age of Polyphony, ed. Thomas Forrest Kelly. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 65–92.
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