This book is a study of a group of early medieval texts, known today as the ordines romani (Roman Orders), and of the manuscripts which carry them, written across the Carolingian realms between the years 750 and 900. Though often categorised straightforwardly as ‘liturgical’ texts, the ordines reveal plainly the limitations of this modern category, and they have a great deal more historical value than this categorisation might, from our modern perspective, immediately suggest. First and foremost, these manuscripts reflect the sophistication of early medieval book culture: complex scribal practices of compilation and formatting, choices of individual texts and accessory material, deployment of varied scripts and languages. Evident in the manuscripts are also diverse practices of reading and ‘use’ of manuscripts once they lay in the possession of individuals and communities, which strict terms such as ‘liturgical’ limit our ability to fully grasp.Footnote ¹ The categorisations which modern scholars have used to understand such manuscripts, including the category of ‘liturgical’ itself, are in many respects anachronistic. A ‘liturgical’ manuscript might have had many potential uses, both those conceived by its original compilers and those reenvisaged by later owners and users.Footnote ²

Additionally, the manuscripts of the ordines romani are themselves products of widely felt imperatives to improve ecclesiastical practice and the education of clergy in the Carolingian era. They are an important source for understanding how these impulses were promulgated and shared. Initially, the texts expressed the ideals and purposes of certain circles of high-ranking and highly educated clergymen of the Carolingian Church, above all bishops who were personally familiar with Rome, accustomed to reading and using liturgy in highly sophisticated ways, and eager to raise the quality of practice and understanding of ritual. The gathering of ordines in collections, copied in surviving manuscripts, was an important innovation accomplished by such men, a kind of liturgical book which was entirely new, and reflected their ambitious goals for their own churches and devotional lives, as well as for those whom they guided and taught. The text type ordo and books containing collections of ordines are both distinctive achievements of these Carolingian churchmen. They are expressions of genuine creativity and dynamism in an age that is often seen as derivative, and within a genre of text, the medieval liturgy, often presented as entirely uncreative.

Widespread reception and copying of these new collections, which took place in monastic communities as well as episcopal churches, demonstrate to us that the complex resonances of these texts could then be further reframed to shape ritual comprehension in new, local settings. The flexible ordines romani were thus perfectly suited to accomplishing such positive change in distinctly Carolingian ways, and they give us an invaluable view of the methods and results of this process. This guides us beyond the previous understanding of the texts as primarily the tool and expression of a straightforward top-down ‘liturgical reform’.Footnote ³ According to the traditional understanding, the monarchs of the Carolingian dynasty, principally Pippin III and Charlemagne, had taken the initiative in appealing to Rome for authoritative books and texts.Footnote ⁴ The monarchs aimed for uniformity in the cultural life of the Empire, and liturgy was an important means to achieve this. They thus imposed authoritative Roman books upon their subjects in order to eliminate the diversity previously characteristic of the Western liturgy. This narrative was built upon predetermined understandings of how liturgical reform worked, through which the scanty evidence available was interpreted. It has also sometimes been argued that the ordines romani were, in some sense, imposed by Pippin III, though there exists no evidence of this.Footnote ⁵

Despite important critiques, reform in the sense of uniformity according to the Roman model has remained the principal means of understanding and evaluating the Carolingian period’s effects on liturgy. When the actual fact of continued or even increased manuscript diversity in this period is confronted, it has led to the assumption that Carolingian liturgical reform must have failed, or even that they inaugurated a period of ‘liturgical anxiety and confusion’.Footnote ⁶ But treatments of ‘reform’ or ‘Romanisation’ can be demonstrated to have the matter the wrong way round in their belief that the drive to improve liturgy was the product of, and strictly limited by, imperial and conciliar directives on the subject.Footnote ⁷

Legal and conciliar sources were highlighted because they conformed to expectations of what was perceived as top-down ‘reform’, but they really give only a narrow picture of Carolingian culture.Footnote ⁸ In fact these central directives were the response from above to a movement already flourishing at every level of society, which we are better able to recognise if we begin with the manuscripts. This cultural movement went further and in many more directions than the narrow and specific purview of the legal and political interventions. This is a much more collaborative model for sharing liturgy that potentially involved many rather different, but mostly harmonious, priorities and visions.Footnote ⁹ This would also mean seeing the ‘Carolingian effect’ on the liturgy playing out over the whole period in many different places in different ways, rather than confined to one decisive moment of exertion on the part of the monarchs. It is in the manuscripts that were produced through the whole period in response to these many divergences that we actually see the trajectories and horizons of how people understood the liturgy, the wealth of what was allowed and the boundaries of what was not.

Ordines and the ‘Arrangement’ of the Liturgy

The importance of the ordines romani for our comprehension of early medieval ritual life and the medieval understanding of what that ritual did and meant should not be underestimated. In many cases, they present the first and only detailed description of what might have occurred during the key rituals of the Christian tradition in the Early Middle Ages. But more fundamentally and perhaps more truthfully (since the translation of the written description to ritual practice remains obscure and was likely not straightforward), the ordines are an invaluable pointer to how those rituals were framed and understood by those who participated in them. Their setting in manuscripts is a vital part of the evidence they provide.

The texts categorised as ordines take many forms and appear in various contexts.Footnote ¹⁰ They differ hugely in their length and their detail, and, thus, in their exact relation to the performance of ritual. The common description of them as ‘stage directions’ for ritual is overly simplistic.Footnote ¹¹ It is not true that ordines described (even in their earliest form) only the gestures, actions and non-spoken elements of ritual, or properly dealt with only a single liturgical event each.Footnote ¹² They are not in any simple way the counterpart or inextricable accompaniment of a book of prayers like the Sacramentary, which equally does not ‘only’ or ‘merely’ contain the words said in ritual. A number of ordines interact with the spoken, sung or read elements of liturgical ceremony in various ways, and the Sacramentary is actually a significant presence in the transmission of some of the most important individual ordines.

The term ordo was applied by contemporaries to both individual texts and full books in this period. It is best to think of ordo in terms of an ‘arrangement’ of a liturgical rite. Indeed, the idea of ‘arrangement’ allows a better appreciation of the ambiguity of the relation of the written ordo to the performed ritual as it would be acted out. It is not at all clear that ordines were written as ‘scripts’, to be followed mechanically step by step. Many address preconditions of ritual, including the proper understanding of the ritual prior to the performance. When viewed in their manuscript context by their medieval users, they invited reflection and the participation of their readers in working out the potential of how the recorded text could guide the acted out liturgical ceremony. Thus, understanding any given ordo as the ‘standard’ guide to the performance of a ritual across the whole Carolingian Empire, or even the sufficient and complete account of how it would invariably be performed in a single church, misses the potential for a significant level of individual and dynamic involvement on the part of both compilers and readers in the use of such texts.

This is particularly visible in a subset of the texts which were edited as the ordines romani. Ordines romani are distinguished by a particular orientation towards the Roman Church, often in describing rituals as they were performed, or envisaged to be performed, by the hierarchy around the Pope and on the streets and sacred locations of the city. The terminology of ordo romanus goes back at least to the ninth century, and was applied then to individual texts as well as to complete books (or booklets), but was not used systematically. We can see this, for example, in ninth-century book lists from Reichenau and St Gall.Footnote ¹³ Individual texts are variously titled: Ordo Romanorum, Ordo Qualiter Romanae Ecclesiae and so on. The modern designation of this kind of text as the ordines romani stems from a long tradition of editorial selection. Jean Mabillon divided up and numbered a particularly influential set, and his designations were employed in some of the older treatments.Footnote ¹⁴ Other liturgists and historians followed suit in identifying and editing various texts from some early manuscripts, Gerbert and Duchesne among them.Footnote ¹⁵ When presented in this way, the conviction was held that such texts were the accurate representations of Roman norms, and had been created by Roman pens for the purposes of putting the liturgical rites so described into practice in Rome itself. Their presence and purposeful configuration in Frankish manuscripts copied from the ninth century onward were not therefore discussed in any depth.

By cataloguing the manuscripts which carried ordines, Michel Andrieu’s monumental edition made significant strides to making that discussion possible.Footnote ¹⁶ Andrieu identified and selected a particular selection of fifty ordo romanus texts. Each one was given a number, which this book will continue to use. His editions in five volumes have a lucid commentary that presents a pertinent ‘state of the question’ for liturgical research on the many different rituals which the texts address. In general, the focus is on Rome and what we can know about the Roman Church’s practices, from the ordines and complementary sources such as papal letters and councils. But Andrieu also made it clear for the first time how many of the texts that had been previously published as ordines romani showed a significant level of Frankish adaptation. Details in the language used and the rituals described reveal that, even where the rites ostensibly are depicted as taking place in Rome, they were still written by Frankish authors. Among these, a number still maintain accurate descriptions of real and historical Roman practice so far as Andrieu could tell.Footnote ¹⁷ But many others introduce rituals and elements of rituals that were not, or could not, have been undertaken in the Roman Church.Footnote ¹⁸ Andrieu made great efforts to distinguish one from another, but his method was to draw a sharp distinction between ‘authentically’ Roman elements and what he deemed to be ‘tendentious’ Frankish fraud in a way that does not seem to capture the roles which the texts can be shown to play in their complex manuscripts.Footnote ¹⁹ He based this on his particular conception of what receiving Roman liturgy would have meant. In his view, any adaptations of Roman liturgy had to be an unwilling compromise on the part of ‘reformers’ to the sensibilities of greater part of the people and clergy, rather than an intrinsic and valid response that was quite normal and expected in the period’s liturgical culture.Footnote ²⁰ He wrote, for example, of one ordo (Ordo 15) and of its author (the ‘zealous romaniser’):

Thus, the ‘reformers’ really wanted a complete adoption of the ‘Roman rite’ wholesale, exactly as the modern Catholic Church would require, but were forced to make compromises that were not in line with their real goals by the parlous state of clerical education. This was a common perspective on the reception of Roman liturgical forms in Francia, closely linked to the modern idea of ‘reform’: for example, Andrieu also viewed the Mass Book known as the Gelasian Sacramentary of the Eighth Century in the same terms, not as a real act of Frankish creativity and individuality but as an unsatisfactory compromise made out of necessity.Footnote ²² It is unclear, however, if Carolingian liturgists really understood the ‘Roman rite’ as unitary, in the way the printing press and centuries of consolidation have made it today.

It is also true that even more of the texts than Andrieu suspected were in fact created by Frankish hands, and his defence of their Roman origin does not in every case convince.Footnote ²³ His singular focus on the reconstruction of an ‘original’ form tended to allow less attention on the new forms they took in the surviving manuscripts, which were evidence of ongoing creativity in adaptation beyond the initial act of writing the ‘original’ text. Notably, such later adaptations also belie his presentation of much of the Carolingian Church as poorly educated, hopelessly traditional and unable to accept change. Seeing ‘anarchy’ in the so-called Gallican liturgy (the scholarly construction of an indigenous liturgical tradition of France) was another precondition for understanding the Carolingian age as one of reform, so that it had been necessary to correct a decadent past. The actual vitality of Merovingian liturgical life was a casualty to this understanding.Footnote ²⁴

Andrieu gave a significant and pertinent presentation of the range of manuscripts in which the texts appear. He identified a number of ‘Collections’, which represented the self-conscious selection and juxtaposition of a number of different ordines together in a single book. Two of these collections, which Andrieu designated as Collection A the ‘Roman Collection’ and Collection B the ‘Frankish Collection’, are present in a number of different manuscripts; several other Collections are only found in a single manuscript (e.g. the Collection of St Amand, the Collection of St Gall and the Capitulare Collection).Footnote ²⁵ As the names he gave the first two imply, Andrieu read ideological function into the gathering and presentation of the sets of ordines. But this aspect was dealt with only cursorily in his editions. Describing the Collections as respectively ‘Roman’ and ‘Frankish’ identified these designations as wholly distinct; Andrieu saw the texts they contained as purely one or the other, when the relation to the Roman liturgy of both Collection A and B was much more ambiguous than this would suggest. Nor did Andrieu go into how the individual manuscripts of each of the Collections reinterpreted what he identified as the original content: each one contains additional ordines, and additional liturgical and non-liturgical texts. These additions bear witness to a complex and individualised phenomenon of individual Frankish writers using the Roman texts for their own purposes. Andrieu’s understanding of wholesale ‘liturgical reform’ based on the ordines was not principally aimed at recovering this nuance.

Likewise, Andrieu’s conception of what a ‘liturgical book’ was and how it was intended to be used meant that he imposed a further distinction between the manuscripts of the Collections. He differentiated between ‘real’ liturgical books, in particular an important set that were identified as precursors to the genre of the ‘pontifical’, and those that were not ‘really’ liturgical because they were not designed for use in church. In Andrieu’s presentation, only a manuscript whose entire content was orientated towards liturgical use could be properly deemed liturgical. Thus, they would be without any subsidiary content which precluded a manuscript from being considered ‘liturgical’ in the same way (most notably the addition of expositiones and study texts on liturgy).Footnote ²⁶ In practice, very few manuscripts obey these rules. This understanding plainly projected the characteristics of modern liturgical books back onto medieval liturgical manuscripts which have a much more complex relationship to practice. The ordines romani manuscripts, in fact, allow us to mount one of the more lucid challenges to a frame of interpretation which has been assumed for study of liturgical sources. ‘Using’ an ordo as a framework for the physical performance does not seem to have been the simple transaction that has hitherto been envisaged. Unlike Mass prayers, chants or lections, the principal utility of ordines did not lie in their being read and used during the ceremony itself. Since they describe an ‘arrangement’ of how the ceremony could proceed, we come closer to their utility if we imagine them being read beforehand, pondered and rehearsed, or consulted if ever questions arose. Such nuances are important when it comes to the question of what a ‘liturgical’ manuscript was originally designed to do and in what other ways it may have been used over time. Both the placement of ordines in manuscripts and the ongoing processing of them as they were copied show that copyists did not envisage that ‘using’ an ordo simply meant replicating its instructions. Instead, ‘using’ an ordo would have involved far more of the preconditions, understanding and intentions of the people involved in setting up and enacting it, individuals who are not really a presence at all in Andrieu’s reconstruction. What did they intend the rite described by a particular ordo to do, and what did it mean to them? Questions such as these would have strongly affected the shape the actual ritual took, with the ordo’s text certainly contributing but likely not having the final word. In the same way, the presentation of the ordo in the manuscript, with other material (whether that was non-liturgical or liturgical in these strict terms) was certainly intended to help guide how the ordo itself was interpreted, and thus what form the ‘use’ of the ordines would take. Such presentation likewise suggests a much greater role for the user and reader, who was expected to actively interpret the text, than was assumed in the more traditional analysis of Andrieu.

This is even more pertinent in the specific case of the ordines romani. It would not be simple to translate the narrative of a complex ceremonial in an ordo romanus set in Rome and practised by the Pope into a ceremony undertaken in a Frankish church or monastery. Rome’s abundance of churches and special hierarchy are often displayed in the ordines romani, which revel in their presentation of the exotic richness of Rome’s ecclesiastical resources. It would take a certain imaginative leap to see one’s own Frankish cathedral as St Peter’s Basilica, described in the ordo, for example. But rather than this being than an obstacle to the use and dissemination of the texts, the ordines romani seem to be designed to effect exactly such an imaginative leap. This appears to be key to understanding why the texts were widely shared and copied. The potential to see in one’s own liturgical ceremonies the precious and prized enactment of such an intimate mental link to Rome and the papacy allowed the ordines romani to act as both a framework for a ceremony and a guide to then seeing the ceremony in progress as a physical, dynamic expression of this desirable connection to Rome. Thus, the copying of ordines should be considered in tandem with the other methods the Franks employed to express and embody their link to Rome: the copying of Roman architectural forms in basilica churches, the fevered search for Roman relics to found their churches upon; pilgrimage to Rome to rest at the threshold of the apostles; and the presentation of Frankish history as continuous with the history of the papal church.Footnote ²⁷ As we will see, the churchmen who can be linked to the transmission of ordines can in almost every case also be seen to have undertaken initiatives of these other kinds. They integrated the ordines into their broader agendas, which made use of Rome for the sophisticated consolidation of their own authority and as a measure of their understanding of what was correct, orderly and right.

The ordo romanus manuscript, by acting as the ‘guidebook’ for such processes, would also partake of and represent a special connection to the city of Rome in the same way as a manuscript of the Roman Gregorian Mass Book did, which, in addition to its obvious liturgical function carrying prayers of the Mass, also acted as a ‘book relic’ of the city.Footnote ²⁸ Like the ordines, the Gregorian Sacramentary (the most widely copied form of Mass Book in the Carolingian period) presented to its readers a ‘mental map’ of Rome, as also reading and pondering the influential history of the popes, the Liber Pontificalis, did.Footnote ²⁹ The Gregorian Mass Book was organised according to the stational liturgy of Rome, and it thus gave notice of the churches in which the Pope would celebrate on a given day, something consumed and pondered by the priests and celebrants who used the book.Footnote ³⁰ It allowed one to feel that one was celebrating ‘in the person of the Pope’, mapping out in one’s own church or city a similar sacred topography, just as the ordines described the Pope and his clergy’s gestures and movements in the course of a ritual event, which the same celebrant might also imitate.

Indeed, as we will see, a distinct number of ordines seem to have begun life as what we term travel documents, descriptions by a traveller of the exotic ceremonies of Rome and the urban stage on which they unfolded, for an audience at home. They thereby take place in a long history of Frankish ‘liturgical tourism’, going back to the Pilgrimage of Egeria in the fourth-century Holy Land, which described the Jerusalem liturgy at length and first-hand, as it existed at the time of her visit.Footnote ³¹ Such texts met the thirst of readers for descriptions of the sacred places, allowing them to envisage and imagine what they might not have been able to have seen for themselves, and trace the paths the pilgrim took in their minds. They might indeed inspire new ritual practices, but we should be clear that surviving Carolingian descriptions and itineraries of Rome were not entirely distinct texts from the ordines, and both furnish the same attempts to make Rome visible, in a way which isolating the ordines as purely ‘liturgical’ obscures.

Participation in these processes necessitated at least some acquaintance with Roman custom and norms. Certain ceremonies and elements of ceremonies described in the ordines romani were specifically restricted to the Pope alone, and the Franks were interested in understanding which ones they were, and why. In particular, the history of liturgical usages was plainly a subject of a very keen interest in the period, and compilers combed the records of papal letters, councils and histories to find the origin and meaning of the practices which animated their religious life. Walahfrid Strabo’s Libellus de exordiis, a particularly striking and thorough examination of liturgical history, is the most famous example, but, although Walahfrid is often presented as singular, the same preoccupation can be much more widely demonstrated, not least in the manuscripts of the ordines, which extract from historical documents the most useful and pertinent documents to give context to their liturgical descriptions.Footnote ³² Such texts helped make the image of Rome a dynamic, almost timeless one, in which the city’s sacred history, as much as its topographical present, was a resource on which the reader could draw.

The Creativity of the Carolingian Liturgy

The focus of much liturgical scholarship on recovering purer, more authentic originals (which could be linked to ‘reform’ movements, or to the purity of the antique liturgy of Rome) has meant that the techniques and priorities of individual, most often anonymous scribes and compilers were not generally interrogated, being obstacles to the kind of research such liturgists really wanted to do, that is, uncover the ‘pure’ original. The set ideas of what a liturgical book was for, and of the genres into which it was to be placed, also made it difficult to access Carolingian ingenuity.

Once identified as the best representatives of what reform movements aimed to accomplish, official ‘types’ were edited and presented in grand synthetic editions, like that of Andrieu. Since these editions were much more accessible and usable than a diverse and diffuse manuscript tradition, they tended to accrue ever more authority as the ‘truer’ representation of how liturgy was understood in the given period. Therefore, such reconstructions have tended to deemphasise the possibility of any significant individual or local input into the process of liturgical change. A sense of how creative individual scribes could be with liturgical material has not always reached the broader treatments of medieval culture. Liturgy is not often permitted to contribute to broader discussions of medieval practices of compiling and presenting knowledge, or of manuscript organisation. A manuscript might organise and present liturgical material in a way that is not easily recognisable in the modern ‘type’. It might seem to have never been copied afterwards or to have had any lasting observable impact. But it is still an equally valuable expression of how scribes were able to experiment with organising a form of knowledge that had a particular malleability. Examined as a particular product of a particular milieu, manuscripts can reveal ‘human stories’ of how individuals responded to the liturgy and made use of it.Footnote ³³

Under the Carolingians, a new liturgical synthesis was certainly achieved.Footnote ³⁴ We cannot understand the appearance and copying of the ordines without taking into account the simultaneous appearance of new ways of representing and sharing liturgical knowledge. New types of books were placed in circulation, and new types of texts were incorporated in them. New techniques of organisation and compilation appeared. We find in this period the earliest examples of gatherings of liturgical material into books that would later become standard elements of the liturgical arsenal, such as what we call today the ‘pontifical’, the book for a bishop’s liturgical usage.Footnote ³⁵ By looking to individual manuscripts as the products of specific local needs, we can get closer to the picture of a creative liturgical culture capable of making such innovations at every level, rather than one which simply copied what it was given by rote.Footnote ³⁶

The Franks also began the large-scale interpretation of the liturgy as a form of knowledge which presented and continually re-enacted the truths of the Christian faith. Texts that we term expositiones and which explain the meaning and history of various ritual acts, most notably Mass and baptism, flourish in this period.Footnote ³⁷ The proliferation of this genre in the ninth century caused an efflorescence of different interpretations, taking different methods to different conclusions. They address people at all levels of society and with every conceivable level of sophistication. Among the vast stock of the anonymous texts, the popular synthetic treatment by Amalarius of Metz in the Liber Officialis is noteworthy. In the manuscript tradition, it has a particularly close relation to the ordines romani.Footnote ³⁸ In the majority of such explanations, the ritual that is explained is not identical to any surviving liturgical description at all. The expositiones challenge our assumptions by revealing even more diversity in how rituals could be put into practice, far beyond what the liturgical books tell us. When seeking the meaning of rites, expositiones go far beyond liturgical texts themselves. They described rituals before these were ever actually openly recorded in liturgical texts. They show the wide range of possible ideas that could enter into thinking about the liturgy, and into putting it into practice. Such texts would form part of the mental foundations with which readers would approach the translation of a liturgical text into a performance, and how they understood the latter. It is therefore important that the manuscripts which carry such expositiones (and which often transmit them alongside liturgical texts like ordines) do not offer only one example each as the only ‘correct’ way to understand rituals like the Mass or baptism, but, as a matter of course, offer several different versions for the reader to compare and contrast. Such manuscripts should be understood as the principal way that thinking about the liturgy was disseminated to clergy at every level. They show how the Carolingian Church saw in the liturgy a potential for a broad range of understandings and uses.Footnote ³⁹

We see in these texts how the Frankish idea of Rome acted as the spur to innovation, and that Frankish compilers and liturgists at every level thought deeply and acted resourcefully in ways that made their model work for them. Because the ordines romani appear as something entirely new in the Carolingian era, and because their organisation into discrete manuscripts represents a real innovation in book formatting, this corpus of texts allows us to examine the techniques of compilation and presentation in a judicious way. They simultaneously allow us to discuss the broader liturgical context, and how liturgy really changed in the Early Middle Ages. Likewise, because of their relation to the ‘arrangement’ of liturgical feasts, ‘ordines lent themselves to conscious propagandizing’ more than most kinds of liturgical texts, as Bullough has observed.Footnote ⁴⁰ We thus have a particularly direct access to the thought and agendas of individual compilers who were working on the ground, enacting their own visions of appropriating Roman liturgical actions and Rome itself.

Some liturgical scholars focused exclusively or overwhelmingly on the ‘Roman rite’ and its history. Yet we must stress the extent to which what we categorise today as ‘Roman’ liturgy was for the first time written down and organised in recognisable forms by Frankish copyists. Given the confessional orientation of liturgical studies, the question of the Roman-ness of ordines, and what form a Roman original would have taken, has been the paramount concern. Frankish adaptations were noted principally as a way ‘through’ the texts to the supposed purer and more valuable Roman original. In scholarship, the role of the Carolingian Church in liturgical history has been consistently downplayed by the focus on the authority and purity of Rome’s tradition, and on the presentation of ‘reform’ as the almost unthinking reception and replication of that tradition. This study aims to redress the balance, by making known how vital and lasting this Carolingian contribution was.

Part I establishes how compilers were not overly concerned with ‘pure’ presentations of only the verifiable Roman usages, but rather allowed Roman and Frankish rituals to coexist in a single manuscript. Chapter 1 discusses a Collection of ordines visible in multiple manuscripts that Andrieu designated as ‘Roman’, showing that it developed much more gradually within Frankish monasteries and that compilers had numerous interests at work as they copied. The same is true in the ‘Frankish collection’, the subject of Chapter 2, which also contains many examples of the first manuscripts designated as ‘pontificals’, or books supposedly for the use of a bishop. Some of these manuscripts intensify their reference to Rome, others add Frankish rituals and customs, but all show an active and continual reinterpretation and recontextualisation of the ordines. Chapter 3 is concerned with even more unique collections, that survive in only one manuscript, and often seem to represent the project and interests of an individual even more clearly than in other cases. Finally, Chapter 4 considers how ordines were read in all these cases, presenting the evidence that liturgical usefulness and the abstract study of liturgy were not diametrically opposed visions, but coexist easily and seamlessly in ordines manuscripts. This chapter argues that projecting liturgical genres of the later period onto these manuscripts has obscured the individual character of each.

Part II probes the representation of individual rituals in the ordines romani. Chapter 5 discusses the Mass, showing how the Franks made use of the Roman stational Mass, and were deeply invested in understanding its peculiarities. Chapter 6 concerns itself with a single case study, demonstrating how a text hitherto taken as a Roman original, Ordo 11, concerned with baptism, was in fact a Frankish development taken out of the Sacramentary. Chapter 7 discusses the rites of ordination and Holy Week. Finally, Part III with its single Chapter 8 deals with the physicality and composition of the corpus of manuscripts, as representations of Carolingian innovations in format and presentation, discussing palaeography, layout and structure, what the use of these manuscripts could have been and by whom they were used. In the Conclusion, the ordines are placed within a circle of elite Carolingian churchmen who venerated Rome’s sacredness and understood how to harnass and use the textual and ritual reference to the city, and linked to various other efforts to import Rome to a new context.

Given the manuscript-focused nature of the study, where relevant, I will indicate those manuscripts I was able to examine in person. Unfortunately, due to the impact of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, not all planned research trips could take place. In these cases, I have availed myself of the excellent digitisations, particularly those provided by the St Gallen Stiftsbibliothek, St Gallen and the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, as well as the Bibliotheca Laureshamensis digital project.

Note on the Text

When making quotations from Latin texts, italics indicate words that are spoken, while bold text indicates text that is highlighted in the manuscript, or to which the author wishes to draw attention as the feature of an individual manuscript.