There are at least three principal challenges which must be faced by the student of historical liturgical sources. The first of these is the need for exhaustive and multidisciplinary coverage of different aspects of the codex, so that important information and clues are not omitted from analysis. The second is the assumption that the texts and music of service books are so inflexible as to be receptive to traditional editorial projects (for which see the many reductive and yet unavoidable printed editions of English missals and breviaries produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). The third challenge is that a coherent, argumentative narrative must shoot through the entire project so that the non-specialist reader, typically burdened with the need to refer to liturgical material for some reason, may understand the specific points being made and, even more desirably, may come to believe that meaningful and wide-ranging observations can be made on the basis of exacting analysis of these most complex but ubiquitous sources. This volume by William Smith, which proposes to examine all the extant sources of ‘a medieval English diocesan rite’, does its best to deal with these ever-present challenges. In setting out ‘to provide a survey and description of the extant Hereford sources, so far as they are known’ (p. 1), Smith has done an admirable job of surmounting the first two challenges, but struggles with the third. The result is a very impressive descriptive catalogue and a thoughtful discussion of the broader historical picture. Smith is less successful in showing what gave a possible Use of Hereford its distinctive and identifiable character (if the data do in fact yield a coherent picture of a well-defined rite), and the absence of a strong forward direction through the narrative is to be regretted, especially owing to the volume's compendious size.

Smith's eventual conclusion, based on discrepancies between the manuscript copies of missal and breviary and their later printed equivalents, is that there was a ‘protracted and irregular process of eclectic borrowing from different sources in the evolution of the later Hereford service-books’ (p. 693). This seems a very likely scenario, and one that does not hinge on the availability of source material to be believed: the same irregularities present themselves in the disparate contents and apparent customisation of most English liturgical manuscripts, even (and perhaps especially) those which are identified as belonging to the more ubiquitous Uses of Sarum and York. The evidence also helps to indicate a process of redaction which may have been part of the production of the printed editions, but insufficient evidence survives: the absence of anything like the Quellentexte for the early sixteenth-century printed books is regretted by Smith.

The historical introduction to the present investigation, which gives a conspectus of the institutional and textual history of the liturgy of medieval England after the Conquest, is detailed and thoughtful, drawing on a range of material including documentary sources relating to the foundation at Hereford. There is an apparently complete catalogue of manuscript and printed liturgical codices and fragments, and a discussion of what may be inferred about the production of the printed Hereford Missal of 1502 and Breviary of 1505. Smith then embarks on tabular comparisons of the texts for Mass and Office, the Lectionary, and other features including the Kalendar and the Litany, before several chapters dedicated to the hagiographical evidence and the cults of local and other important saints.

The present volume contributes, in its heavy detail, to a growing number of studies which recognise the differences among sources of the same liturgical ‘Use’ as a product of diverse influences on their redaction and production.Footnote ¹ In chapters 7 and 8, for instance, Mass and Office texts from the range of sources are methodically compared, with striking results. It is therefore surprising that Smith maintains that despite these differences, the ‘essential character of the liturgy of the church of Hereford’ (p. 694) was never diminished or altered, particularly in the high status accorded to the cults of Ethelbert and Thomas Cantilupe, together with various consuetudines of ceremonial and vesture. Precedence given to local saints is an uncontroversial part of most local liturgical practice in the later Middle Ages, and in the other English Uses the classification and the extent of proper material for saints can help to show affiliation between regional families of manuscripts otherwise purporting to be of the same ‘Use’. Customs relating to ceremonial may well help to point out particular proclivities of the cathedral church at Hereford at a particular time, but it is a matter of taste whether niceties of liturgical colour and ritual really illustrate meaningful distinctiveness any more than differences of text (and perhaps music) may do.Footnote ²

Smith's conclusions raise the question of what might be meant by the ‘Use’ of any particular locality, and his presentation of the primary material helps to establish some of the problems of using ‘Use’ as a falsely unitary construct. Even in the Preface Smith references Barbara Haggh's contention that, even in one cathedral foundation at one particular time, the term ‘Use’ implies a greater uniformity that may ever have existed.Footnote ³ The nature of a ‘Use’ in medieval England is complicated by the fact that such ‘Uses’, when viewed as normative in the two English ecclesiastical provinces, covered much more ground than for instance in France where, as in the case of Hereford, individual liturgical patterns emanating from a cathedral were often employed in a much smaller geographical territory. The adaptation on a large scale of what were presumably at one time the texts, music and ceremonial of the cathedral church must have been subject to a wide range of other influences, notably in Hereford's case from the growing ascendancy of Sarum as a ne plus ultra in the southern province, for which many more manuscripts must have existed.

This evidence alone should be enough to question the assumption that the contents of liturgical books associated with Hereford ‘Use’ were meaningfully uniform. Yet this point is not made, leaving space to indicate the ritual and hagiographical differences from the prescriptions in modern editions of the other secular English liturgical Uses. (In spite of careful work to discriminate between the individual sources associated with Hereford, Smith, like many before him, has no choice in his comparisons but to make reference to modern printed editions which he refers to as ‘dated [and] unsatisfactory’ (p. xiii), such as John Wickham Legg's Sarum Missal of 1916.) There are two problems with this approach, both exacerbated by the concept of ‘Use’. First, the use of the modern editions (despite recognising them as deficient) may be unavoidable, but it produces potentially false positives. Further, what is meant by a ‘Use’ must be queried: is it sufficient to detail the ritual differences? Or should contents of a more substantially textual nature be included? Whilst the kalendar may be subject to authoritative prescriptions, the adoption and liturgical promotion of local saints is a process which happens over and above the adoption of a ‘use’ and, in every location, is highly idiosyncratic.

This volume is, as the title suggests, a study of sources. For those who need to make reference to Hereford liturgica, it will be invaluable. The sheer scope of the source material is staggering, and these diverse witnesses help to suggest the variety of liturgical practice implied by textual differences and to challenge the orthodoxy of invariability within books of the same ‘Use’. More time and energy will be required to help overturn the methodological fallacy of comparative liturgical studies which, unlike The Use of Hereford, are founded on unrepresentative evidence, and to move beyond a simplistic, post-Tridentine, post-Vatican II understanding of the uniformity of liturgical books, but Smith's evidence may be fuel for the fire.