PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

Those planning to attend the seminar are asked to register before Tuesday 13 October with the Institute Registrar: allan.smith@utoronto.ca

Alcuin of York (c.735–804), English councillor to Charlemagne, applied himself personally to the improvement of nearly every form of knowledge and devotion. He was one guiding light in a broader culture that was constantly experimenting at every level with the drive to change for the better, including in the liturgy, the ritual practice of the Church and the books that facilitated it. Among his varied accomplishments, Alcuin’s specifically liturgical endeavours have not received much attention. We know that, while he was abbot of St Martin’s Basilica in Tours, Alcuin created what he called a ‘Missal’, a book of masses (also known as a Sacramentary). Unfortunately, no manuscript of this Missal survives. Alcuin was not extraordinary in undertaking this enterprise. His peers at all levels were also experimenting with the available Sacramentary traditions, and exchanging the various versions of the book freely through the entire Carolingian period. Therefore, three surviving Sacramentaries from ninth-century Tours display several layers of revision and reorganisation. These are all much later books, of the closing decades of the ninth century: one in Tours and two in Paris. However, the three manuscripts display some extraordinary features that permit us to recover what Alcuin’s missal would have looked like. In this paper, I present these books within the historical and cultural context of ninth-century Tours, and, with the aid of newly discovered fragments, present my reconstruction of this fascinating lost liturgical book.