This book attempts what has never been tried before and what no other scholar, living or dead, could achieve: a history of “regular, formal public worship [that is, the Mass and daily offices] in England between about 600 and 1535” (1). Long and without a single illustrative image, it is nevertheless carefully pruned and disciplined. Based on a mastery of the manuscript and archaeological evidence and the vast secondary literature, it begins with an introduction that lays out the method and rationale of the book and defines precisely “what the reader is presumed to know” (5–8): that is, this is not the textbook for Liturgics 101; the reader needs to be prepared on the organization of the liturgical year, the basic structure of the Mass and offices, and the major genres of liturgical books.

Pfaff leads the primed reader chronologically through the Anglo-Saxon period. But from the twelfth century, when the evidence is more abundant and the organization of the church far more complex, he “switch[es] from a single to a double track” (17). First come the orders: monastic, canonical, mendicant; then come the secular uses: Sarum and the more regional uses of York, Hereford, London, Lincoln, and Wells, as well as parochial rites. The survey ends with the monastic dissolution and the beginning of a different order of things in the 1530s, with some gentle doubt cast on the conclusion of Eamon Duffy that the observance of liturgy remained vibrant on the eve of the Reformation; but the author resolutely avoids looking beyond that date. Interspersed throughout the book are five “excursuses” dealing with historiographical or methodological issues. The reader should be disabused of any presumption that an excursus is digressive.

It is not possible in a short review to do comprehensive justice to so dense and lengthy a book. I will offer only comments on a few of the most important and striking aspects of Pfaff's study.

The long Anglo-Saxon period is surveyed in three chapters, covering roughly the seventh and eighth centuries, the ninth and tenth, and the eleventh (which includes, of course, the Conquest). Pfaff is forthright about the paucity of evidence for the earliest period. He strikes a characteristic note in solution of James Mearns's “puzzlement” that the Nunc dimittis is lacking among the canticles in the Vespasian Psalter: “The answer is clear and instructive: that since the canticle has never been part of the monastic form of compline, its absence here shows that the Canterbury monks' office c. 725 is the monastic, not the secular, one. That so apparently obvious a point is worth making is an indication of how rudimentary our knowledge still is” (53). Evidence for the earliest period centers on the accounts of Bede, the eighth-century canons of Clofesho, and York in the time of archbishop Egbert and Alcuin. Although Pfaff barely mentions the devastation wrought by the Vikings, it seems clear that evidence for a fairly settled liturgical life and practice was nearly eradicated. He wonders, however, beyond Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, “how fully can we suppose a fully developed monastic office was observed. . ?” (52). The minster—an “ecclesiastical center for an area,” with “rights of baptism and burial,” and with “clergy . . . who cannot be defined primarily as monks” (64) became the focal center. Two aspects of the discussion of the later Anglo-Saxon period are particularly striking. The first is that there is little evidence for the observance of the offices by secular clergy—and none for the secular cathedrals. “A burden of proof lies with the assumption that the office was regularly performed” in secular cathedrals, as with lesser churches (98). The second (actually in the bridging chapter on the Conquest) is the depiction of the liturgy at Exeter under Leofric (bishop 1050–1072), where there are strong signs of the development of the full office for a secular church and careful arrangement for the celebration of the Mass.

The next section of the book (five chapters) deals with the liturgies of the religious orders: undifferentiated to 1215, thereafter the Benedictine and other monastic orders (Cluniac, Cistercian, Carthusian), the non-monastic orders of canons, and the several orders of friars. All of these are treated in considerable detail. Here it must suffice to note two recurrent motifs. The first is that, whatever the claims of reform and the division of monasticism into orders, there is more continuity than discontinuity between the earlier and later forms of liturgy. The second is that there was less uniformity of liturgical practice within orders than one has usually assumed. The chapter on the canons regular, which (as the late R. W. Southern said) “performed modest services for men of moderate means and moderate needs” (272), has much information that will be new to most readers and puts these neglected groups into new perspective.

The last six chapters treat the secular liturgy. The Sarum use, of course, gets the lion's share of attention. The most original part of the discussion of Sarum is chapter 10 on “the beginnings of Sarum Use,” in which Pfaff demonstrates that the Sarum liturgy does not begin with the move to Salisbury in the thirteenth century or even with the period at “Old Sarum,” to which the ancient monastic see of Sherborne, united in 1058 with Ramsbury, was moved in 1075. Influenced perhaps by Leofric of Exeter, there grew here “a self-conscious Sarum liturgical tradition” (264) that long antedated what emanated from “new” Sarum and spread throughout the realm. Pfaff painstakingly and extensively traces the development of the old and new ordinals (if the latter can be said to have existed) and the excruciating difficulty of understanding and using the breviary. He concludes with cautions about assuming a uniformity within the Sarum Use and the difficulties that the highly detailed and prescriptive use would have entailed for small churches: one might “discern, or at least suspect, a certain casualness about some of the less important, or less exciting, provisions of early sixteenth-century liturgy” (444). Tucked between chapters on the first New Sarum years and the final flowering is a chapter that returns to Exeter, this time to reveal the remarkable articulation of the liturgy under John de Grandisson (1328–1369), a man obsessed with detail.

Cautious and learned throughout, the author is by no means without a distinctive voice and a peculiar (in the quasi-liturgical sense of uniqueness) sense of humor: for example, a number of churches “were dedicated to Kenelm, including at a village with Wodehouseian name of Upton Snodsbury” (174n57). He presumes an audience with a fairly high Latin literacy. When he helps us with dossarium, some might rightly have guessed dossal; but few would have deciphered pugilare Zachariae (which Pfaff says may be “evidence for communion in both kinds”) or found the early nineteenth-century Latin/French dictionary of liturgical terminology that suggests an article carried before the priest when there was communion in two species (179).

Magisterial is a word often debased by overuse; but one can think of no other characterization for this book, despite its remarkable modesty of tone. It will be teaching medievalists interested in the liturgy for many, many years.