The Bible and the Divine Office

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While the Epistle reading was one opportunity where the use of a Giant Bible equipped with navigational reading aids makes sense, upon closer examination of other aspects of the daily worship schedule at Fécamp, it becomes clear that there may have also been further opportunities – such as the celebration of the Divine Office – that may have required the use of a similarly-designed Bible manuscript. The Divine Office was the second major component of the daily liturgical worship cycle, though in contrast to the Mass, it was more oriented towards the performance of ‘prayers and praise’.¹⁸ The Office was divided over the course of eight prayer services that took place throughout the day and into the night: ‘Vespers in the late afternoon before dusk, Compline after dark and before retiring to bed, Matins in the middle of the night between midnight and dawn, Lauds around daybreak, Prime in the early morning followed by Terce later in the morning, Sext at midday, and None in the mid-afternoon’.¹⁹ The primary focus during each Office was the recitation of the Psalms (all 150 Psalms were supposed to be recited over the course of each week),

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conclusions remain in the realm of speculation, it does not seem reasonable that the scribes of Fécamp would go to such lengths to copy a large and decorated Bible, only to serve as an exemplar for later copies.

18 Lampe et al., ‘The Exposition and Exegesis of Scripture’, 220 and 189; Susan Boynton, ‘The Bible and the Liturgy’, in Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly, eds., The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages:

Production, Reception, and Performance in Western Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 10-33, at 11.

19 Boynton, ‘The Bible and the Liturgy’, 11. In addition to these daily services, there were also various celebrations to commemorate Holy Week, Lent, Christmas, and various Feast Days. For a breakdown of the Divine Office with modern hours, see Lila Collamore, ‘Prelude: Charting the Divine Office’, in The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography, eds.

Margot E. Fassler, and Rebecca A. Baltzer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3-11, at 5. For a general discussion of the Divine Office in the Middle Ages, see J. D. Crichton, ‘The Office in the West:

the Early Middle Ages’, in Cheslyn Jones et al., eds., The Study of Liturgy, Revised Edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1992), 420-429; and John Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century: A Historical Introduction and Guide for Students and Musicians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

although the community would also perform prayers and scriptural readings.²⁰ While most of these meetings were relatively brief, the night office known as Matins (beginning usually around 2:00 am), was substantially longer than the rest, and involved a set of scriptural readings known as ‘lessons’ or lectiones.²¹ It is during this Office of Matins, I argue, that another potential use-context for a Bible equipped with navigational reading aids can be identified.

To explain, during regular weekdays (known as ‘ferial days’), Matins at Fécamp consisted of one to three lectiones, divided into a subdivision called a ‘nocturn’.

On Sundays and major Feast Days, the Matins reading programme was expanded to include twelve readings, divided into three nocturns (with four lectiones in each).²² Like the Epistle reading of the Mass, the choice of what to read for each nocturn depended on the cycle of the liturgical calendar, which changed on a daily basis throughout the year.²³ Most scholars agree that the first nocturn of the Matins Office, however, always involved a reading taken from the Bible.²⁴ To get a sense of the range of biblical material read during the first nocturn, we can look to a collection of documents known as the Ordines romani, which contain the rubrics for all of the various liturgical services of the Roman rite, and which provide a general outline of a typical Matins reading programme.²⁵ One of the earliest surviving Ordo librorum from the eighth century, known as the Ordo XIIIA, provides an overview of the first nocturn readings for each month of the year:²⁶

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20 Originally, the reading-list of the Divine Office comprised solely of the Psalms and prayers.By the fifth century, scriptural readings were added to the service, followed later by the addition of hagiographical texts, patristic works and sermons.Lampe et al. note that ‘reading from patristic homilies and sermons seems to be of monastic origin and is attested by the rule of St Benedict’ (‘The Exposition and Exegesis of Scripture’, 233).

21 Matins were also known as ‘Vigils’ or the ‘Office of Readings’; Collamore, ‘Prelude: Charting the Divine Office’, 3-11. ‘Both chapters and lessons were recited to one of a small group of designated tones (melodic formulas), in a manner comparable to the Epistle and Gospel at Mass’ (Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy, 81).

22 Boynton, ‘The Bible and the Liturgy’, 23.

23 Boynton notes that by the end of the seventh century, the scriptural lessons for the first nocturn ‘had been organized into an annual cycle’ that followed the liturgical calendar (‘The Bible and the Liturgy’, 23-24).

24 Boynton adds that in monastic usage, ‘the first four lessons were normally taken from the Bible, while those of the second nocturn were patristic or hagiographic in origin. The third nocturn began with the Gospel of the day’s Mass, followed by a homily by a church father or pope’ (‘The Bible and the Liturgy’, 14 and 23); cf. Crichton, ‘The Office in the West’, 420.

25 Boynton, ‘The Bible and the Liturgy’, 23-24.

26 The list of books is found in the Ordo XIIIA, presented in Reilly, ‘The Cluniac Giant Bible’, 166.

The same reading programme is outlined in Boynton, ‘The Bible and the Liturgy’, 23-24.

Table 7: First Nocturn Readings during the Office of Matins (On Sundays and Major Feast Days)

Part of the Year Reading

Septuagesima to Holy Week Heptateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges)

Holy Week Jeremiah

Easter to Sunday after Pentecost Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Epistles, Apocalypse

Sunday after Pentecost to first Sunday of August

Kings and Chronicles

Month of August Books of Wisdom

Month of September Job, Tobit, Judith, Esther, and Ezra

Month of October Maccabees

Month of November Ezechiel, Daniel, and Minor Prophets

Season of Advent Isaiah

After Christmas until Septuagesima Pauline Epistles

The reading programme laid out by the Ordo XIIIA suggests that the majority of the Bible would have been read over the course of the year, but Diane Reilly reminds us that the Gospels and the Psalter were not part of this schedule.²⁷ As the table above also demonstrates, the readings listed for the year do not follow the canonical sequence of the Bible; the ordo ‘breaks up the traditional sequence of books’, so that the reader was directed to different points of the Bible at different times of the year.²⁸ As a result, Reilly notes that ‘the sense of the Bible as a chronicle of humanity’s history from the Creation to the Last Judgment was lost as the reader flipped from the Octateuch to Jeremiah to Acts and Apocalypse, and then back in time to Kings and Chronicles’. ²⁹ This indicates that the readings for the first nocturn involved a non-sequential approach to the text, which is an important observation since this type of approach may have required the inclusion of navigational reading aids to help the reader find the appropriate books.

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27 Reilly, ‘The Cluniac Giant Bible’, 166.

28 Reilly, ‘The Cluniac Giant Bible’, 167. This perspective is countered by Hughes, who writes that ‘the first kind of reading is direct recitation of the Bible, lessons from which are begun immediately after the benediction, without reference to their specific origin. Certain books are appointed to various seasons of the year, each book to be read in the correct order in continuous sequence throughout the season’

(Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts for the Mass and Office, 60).

29 Reilly, ‘The Cluniac Giant Bible’, 167.

The sequence of books may have been ‘out of order’ textually-speaking, yet the readings provided by the ordo do not detail whether or not each book of the Bible was meant to be read comprehensively, or whether the community should read only selections of each text. At best, the ordo gives an indication of what books should be read throughout the year. Did the reader take a selective approach to the text as well?

Some have argued that during the early Middle Ages biblical books were read in lectio continua during the Night Office, ‘meaning that each day’s reading began where the previous day’s reading had ended’, with the aim of reading the entire Bible over the course of the year.³⁰ However, as Teresa Webber acknowledges, ‘the extent to which, in practice, individual communities implemented the cycle in full, and the various means by which the principle of continuous reading was fulfilled at least in spirit have yet to be fully explored’.³¹ She draws attention to some of the practical difficulties of reading the Bible continuously during the Night Office. For example, the length of time between ‘Epiphany and Septuagesima’ as well as ‘Pentecost and the beginning of August’, tended to vary each year depending on the date of Easter.³² During some years, there simply may not have been enough time to read through all of the designated material for that part of the year, and the readers may have opted to read only selected passages of the material. This suggests that the readers from Fécamp may have taken not only a non-sequential approach to the text, but also a selective one, which would have further warranted the inclusion of navigational reading aids in the books used for this service.

Perhaps the greatest disruption to this reading schedule, however, was the variable nature of the liturgical calendar, which required the monks to observe an ever-changing cycle of over-lapping feasts, most of which came with ‘specially-designated readings’.³³ On these special days (which permeated the entire calendar year), the regular reading schedule would be disrupted to accommodate the reading of texts related to the day. We can see an example of this kind of textual transition by looking to the surviving Ordinal of the Abbey of Fécamp. This book (which now survives as Fécamp, Musée de Bénédictine 186) acted as a ‘directory of the texts

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30 Gyug, ‘Early Medieval Bibles’, 38.

31 Teresa Webber, ‘Reading in the Refectory: Monastic Practice in England, c. 1000 – c. 1300’, London University Annual John Coffin Memorial Palaeography Lecture 2010, revised 2013, 1-49, at 21. This article was composed as part of a larger project titled, lectio publica, to be delivered at the J. P.

R. Lyell Lectures, University of Oxford, 2016.

32 Webber, ‘Reading in the Refectory’, 21-22.

33 Webber, ‘Reading in the Refectory’, 21-22.

(prayers, chants, lessons and so on) contained in the various service-books’ of the community.³⁴ It has been suggested that the Fécamp Ordinal was produced in the early thirteenth century during the abbacy of Roger d’Argences.³⁵ Despite a production date that is later than the scope of this present study, David Chadd suspects that the Ordinal was largely designed to codify current practice at Fécamp, and as such, it reflects general traditions of liturgical practice that had been exercised at Fécamp in the preceding centuries as well.³⁶ Fortunately for this present investigation, the Fécamp Ordinal provides the general Office readings for the regular Temporale calendar, as well as many of the special readings assigned on Saints’ Days, Feast Days, and other celebrations (presented in the Sanctorale). For example, we are able to see that while the first nocturn readings for the month of November were typically taken from Ezechiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets, on the Feast of All Saints (November 1), the Ordinal directs the readers to a different set of readings.

These include: a reading from the Historia ecclesiastica, a reading about Holy Mary, a reading on the Angels (listed as ‘de angelis’, possibly by Cyprian of Carthage), and a reading on the Holy Fathers of the Old Testament.³⁷ On a practical level, these temporary transitions to alternative textual material would have required the reader to close one book and open another; it would also have required the reader to access material from multiple books. This process of switching from one book to another could have motivated the inclusion of navigational reading aids in the books regularly used for this service.!

To sum up the findings thus far, the first nocturn of the Matins Office typically involved a reading from the Bible. While most of the Bible was meant to be read over the course of the year, the books were often read ‘out of order’, which would have required the reader to move backward and forward in the original sequence of texts.

Moreover, the continuous integration of different texts into the nocturn schedule (to accommodate special events of the liturgical calendar) would have resulted in the reader closing the Bible, temporarily moving to a different text, and then returning to the Bible. Given these observations, a Bible book designed to supply the first nocturn

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34 David Chadd, ed., The Ordinal of the Abbey of the Holy Trinity Fécamp (Fécamp, Musée de la Bénédictine, Ms 186), 2 vols. (London: Boydell Press, 2000), Vol. 1, 6-7; Vol. 2, 391.

35 The Ordinal was originally catalogued as a product of the sixteenth century, which was later revised to the thirteenth century, which has since been refined to the ‘early’ thirteenth century (based on palaeographical grounds). See Chadd, ed., The Ordinal of the Abbey of the Holy Trinity Fécamp, Vol.1, 1.

36 Chadd, ed., The Ordinal of the Abbey of the Holy Trinity Fécamp, Vol. 1, 3.

37 Chadd, ed., The Ordinal of the Abbey of the Holy Trinity Fécamp, Vol. 2, 605-607.

readings of the Night Office would have greatly benefited from the inclusion of navigational support.

With the revelation that the Matins Office involved a mode of devotional reading that was selective and non-sequential, it now begins to make sense why the Fécamp scribes opted to add a combination of navigational reading aids to the two Giant Bibles of their collection – Rouen 1 and Rouen 7.³⁸ If one of these volumes was already stationed in the church to support the Epistle readings of the Mass (likely Rouen 1 given the suitable collection of texts for the Epistle reading), it makes sense that it might also be drafted into service during the nocturn readings of the Office, which took place in the same location.³⁹ If this were the case, that one Giant Bible was used to support both services in the church, it would further warrant the inclusion of navigational reading aids, as the lector would have had to jump between sections of the volume to find the designated readings for each service.

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