I came to liturgical retellings of saints’ legends many years ago by way of a lucky accident. I was in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, examining manuscripts of the Latin Passio of St Cecilia (BHL 1495) in search of variants that might account for some small details in Chaucer’s ‘Second Nun’s Tale,’ when I suddenly realized that one of the manuscripts did not give the usual Passio text at all, but an abridged version that neatly paralleled the whole second half of Chaucer’s tale. The manuscript in question was BnF MS latin 3278, a thirteenth-century Roman lectionary for the daily Office. Once I refocused my research on Office manuscripts, I found more copies of this previously unrecognized Chaucerian source in Franciscan and ‘Roman curia’ breviaries. The fact that Chaucer had chosen this particular abridgement of the Cecilia legend also raised the obvious question of how it differed from the abridgements in British daily Office manuscripts. So began my comparative study of the mostly unpublished proper lessons for Cecilia and other saints in British breviaries – and especially the Sarum ones, which turned out to be far more diverse and interesting than I would have imagined.

Since I had no formal training in the study of liturgical manuscripts, I can empathize with the trepidation of other beginners in this field. But I can reassure them that there are many helpful resources to get them started, and the manuscripts themselves tend to follow a set of conventions that greatly simplify the tasks of locating particular services and identifying particular items within those services.

In general, breviary manuscripts fall into five distinct sections, each easily recognized from its format or headings, or both. Most obvious is the Kalendar (K), which usually devotes a full page to each month and looks very much like a modern calendar. The Psalter (P) stands out because its pages of text are written primarily in a uniform hand, with nothing between most blocks of text except decorated initials and very brief headings (sometimes just a single letter); the litany, at or near the end of the P, changes to a list format.