century, notably in the hands of Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart, authors of dits
amoureux, combining elements of romance, allegory, and lyric.
Wendy E.Pfeffer
[See also: CONDÉ, JEAN DE; COUVIN, WATRIQUET BRASSENIEX DE;
FROISSART, JEAN; MACHAUT, GUILLAUME DE; RUTEBEUF]
Cerquiglini, Jacqueline. “Le clerc et l’écriture: le Voir Dit de Guillaume de Machaut et la definition
du dit,” and Poirion, Daniel. “Traditions et fonctions du dit poétique au XIVe et au XVe siècle.”
In Literatur in der Gesellschaft des Spätmittelalters, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Heidelberg:
Winter, 1980, pp. 151–68 and 147–50.
Ribémont, Bernard, ed. Écrire pour dire: études sur le dit médiéval. Paris: Klincksieck, 1990.
DIVINE OFFICE
. In the Middle Ages, the word “office” had more or less the same connotations as the
modern word “liturgy.” Since the Middle Ages, however, the meaning of “office” has
contracted to refer only to the daily cycle of services marking the chief hours of the day,
excluding the Mass and the other sacramental celebrations, such as baptism or ordination.
The content of these daily services included a great deal of psalmody, which included
the singing of the psalms, canticles (psalmlike poems from the other books of the Old and
New Testaments), and nonscriptural hymns. There were also readings from the Bible and
other holy books, prayers and blessings, and processions to different parts of the church
(e.g., altars, the main cross, the baptistery) or other sites of religious significance, such as
shrines or cemeteries. The methods of singing the psalms varied. In what may have been
the oldest method, responsorial psalmody, a soloist (an ordained reader or cantor) sang
the verses alone or perhaps with one or a few other soloists. After each verse, the
congregation or a choir responded with an unvarying refrain, often but not always a verse
from the same psalm. This type of psalmody, common by the 4th century, may have
given rise to more complex types of psalmody that still survive in the eastern rites, which
can involve alternation between two choirs, each with its own soloist and refrain. In the
West, by the early Middle Ages, such methods gave way to the simpler one known as
antiphonal psalmody: two choirs sang the verses in alternation, ending with the Gloria
patri, and then joined together on the refrain or antiphon at the very end. On a high feast,
the antiphon would also be sung at the beginning, but on an average day only its
intonation or opening words would be sung by a soloist. Even simpler was direct
psalmody, when the entire psalm was simply chanted straight through, without
alternation or refrain, either by a soloist or by the entire choir.
The actual number of services per day varied much from one liturgical tradition to
another, but it was often influenced by symbolic or allegorical considerations, based on
mystical numbers (cf. Psalm 119:164), themes of light and darkness, prayer times
mentioned in the Bible (e.g., Daniel 6:10; Acts 2:15, 3:1, 10:3–9), and the chronology of
the Passion of Jesus—the third hour, when he was crucified; the sixth hour, when “there
was darkness over the whole land”; the ninth hour, when he died; the evening, when he
was buried; early Sunday morning, when he rose from the dead (cf. Mark 15:25–16:9).
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