For the last several months, we’ve been busy cataloging the incipits for the German missals from 1475-1550. The map below is our historical reconstruction of the diocese boundaries from that time period. We didn’t originally set out to include every German diocese in our pool of sources. But after putting this map together, we realized…
As you may have read elsewhere, the Sunday lectionary and propers are the central axis around which the temporal calendar revolves. The lectionary of the temporal calendar, however, is not limited to Sundays, but provides Epistles and Gospels for Wednesdays and Fridays throughout the year, as well as a full mass for every single day…
About two weeks ago, Fr. Stefan suggested that we start a blog for The Lutheran Missal. This was an excellent idea, but rather than starting in the middle of the project, we felt it necessary to give the history and impetus of the project from its inception. The posts before this date have actually been…
The missals of the late 15th and early 16th centuries present several difficulties to the curious but otherwise typical 21st-century reader. First, they are written in Latin, a language with no native speakers. Second, printing technology was still in its infancy, making the early manuscripts with their Gothic script and lack of white space difficult…
The first Sanctorale (Augsburg 1510) was entered into Excel as a simple spreadsheet containing 2,279 records. But when I began work on Bamberg 1490, it was immediately clear that we needed more than a spreadsheet to handle the data. With each new entry, I found myself scrolling up to reference existing records. “What is the…
The second major phase of our research involves the entry of the sanctoral calendars into the Missal database. This is no easy task, since the average Sanctorale contains about 2,200 entries. (Multiplied by 34+ sources, this means over 75,000 records.) So far Augsburg, Bamberg, and Brandenburg have been completed, but the task took nearly 6…
The first phase of our research is complete with the incorporation of all thirty-four temporal calendars into the missal database. The bulk of the 58,000+ records was previously cataloged by the Usuarium team from Hungary, saving us roughly six months of intensive effort. Allow me to explain what this means. The image above from the…
Americans love options, and that’s not always a good thing. With regard to the lectionary, I find a slew of optional readings to be less than helpful. One of the chief benefits of using the Historic Lectionary is catechetical, derived from the yearly repetition of a core body of texts. This benefit is diluted by…
“Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.” (Proverbs 11:14) The Church’s lectionary is not the product of a committee. It did not originate in response to a synodical resolution or a papal directive. Rather, it was created and refined by an organic process that spanned generations…
Yesterday Monsignor Alan Detscher and I drove down to New Jersey for a meeting with Catholic Book Publishing. The Monsignor, recently retired, has been editing and publishing liturgical resources for decades. I met him by chance at a clergy association lunch, and he is very interested in The Lutheran Missal project. (His collection of Lutheran…
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