At least an hour into the Night Office on the first night of Advent, the monks of the New Monastery at Cîteaux sang in unison a chant that quoted directly from the Vulgate's Psalm 94, verse 2. A standard responsory verse sung in cathedrals and Benedictine monasteries throughout Western Europe on the first night of the church year, it proclaimed the joy of the monks as they anticipated the arrival of their redeemer at Christmas, and described their means of celebration: singing the Psalms. Waiting in joyful anticipation of the advent of God, the monks proclaimed again and again in chants like this that the Lord's arrival was imminent, and that it was the responsibility of his people to announce it. Like their fellow monks and canons across the continent, the first Cistercians followed a liturgy that they had largely inherited from their predecessors. As Advent began in monastic and cathedral choirs dotting the landscape, monks and canons sang the same chants and heard many of the same readings. Yet an individual cantor could reorder the chants at will, set them to different melodies, and replace one reading with another, creating new emphases and different aural experiences of text so that each monastery's celebration of Advent was unique.

At Cîteaux in its first decades just such a reworking took place. In this chapter I will outline how the Night Office liturgy was practiced at twelfth-century Cîteaux, and what sources can help us to reconstruct it. A comparison between the Advent Night Office as it was celebrated at Cîteaux and the same Office celebrated at the cathedral of Chartres will reveal the distinctiveness of Cîteaux's newly reformed liturgy, which seems to have intentionally foregrounded the theme of spoken and sung words. Once the basic armature of the liturgy is in place we will be able to appreciate the unusually prominent role played by Jerome and his editorial work in the aural and visual heritage of Cîteaux, explained in the next chapter. First, we need to understand the liturgical context into which Jerome's words, and the images they inspired, were set.