Richard W. Pfaff’s The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History presents its readers with the fruits of over fifty years of experience with the liturgical manuscripts of medieval England. Its aim is to provide a comprehensive survey of what can be known about liturgical observance in England from the earliest evidence that can be projected back onto the sixth century up to the second quarter of the sixteenth. Such a broad historical scope requires some principle of selection, and Pfaff is quite clear about what the book does and does not cover: the focus is on the conduct of the Mass and Office, as celebrated in the monastery, cathedral, minster, parish church—wherever evidence remains to bear witness to the presence of formal celebration.

Pfaff’s main source of evidence is service books themselves, and he is primarily interested in their verbal, rather than musical, texts. Second, he deals with the physical evidence of the sites where liturgy was performed as well as with “rules” or texts that discuss services in a more generally prescriptive manner than do the service texts themselves. The book proceeds more or less chronologically, beginning, essentially, with the arrival of St. Augustine in 597, proceeding through the Anglo-Saxon period, and on to considering the influence of such Norman churchmen as Lanfranc in the eleventh century. At this point the book treats monastic liturgy from 1100–1215 and beyond separately, devoting chapters also to the celebrations of canons regular and friars as well, before turning to the development of secular uses as they were elaborated and standardized (or not) at the secular cathedrals and in the parishes. The book ends with a broader (yet in terms of sources, more selective) examination of fifteenth-century liturgical developments, such as the founding of the high-profile Bridgettine monastery, Syon Abbey, as well as the impact of printing technology, in order to assess the claims of liturgical decay or vitality that have been offered for the pre-Reformation period.

Readers expecting a more comprehensive version of Eamon Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars or a history of social practice like Miri Rubin’s Corpus Christi will not find it here: Pfaff pursues neither intellectual or social history as such and stays away from theological questions as well; the story he tells is primarily one of textual transmission in the broadest sense of that term—transmission that involves texts, human agents, and historical forces. The majority of the book is devoted to describing liturgical books and their peculiarities as well as some of the historical figures who shaped the forms of the liturgy. Pfaff proceeds with relentless integrity to discern what such sources can and cannot tell us. In this respect he provides a deeper understanding of the complexity and difficulty of the materials from which intellectual or social history might in part be made.

The Liturgy in Medieval England is, also unlike Duffy’s more popular history, geared toward specialist audiences. Concessions are made for the uninitiate: Pfaff clearly spells out the knowledge with which the reader is assumed to be familiar in his introduction (5–8)—the basic structure of the liturgical year and of the services of the Mass and Office, the terminology of service books. Here he does provide some working definitions and suggestions for further reading that might aid the unfamiliar. Yet, it is more than a question of knowing terms: readers from outside the field of liturgics—that is, readers who have not internalized the set of methodological concerns, historiographical questions, or textual matters that define the field—may find themselves somewhat daunted by the amount of detail they are asked to assimilate. Particularly in the treatment of the earlier periods, where the lack of surviving evidence prompts Pfaff to be particularly cautious of making unsupported claims, the narrative thread can be difficult to grasp hold of if one does not already know where to look.

Presumably, however, those readers will come with their own questions and expertise from their particular periods that will guide their reading. The book will serve for many as a standard reference; its self-contained chapters and ample cross-referencing are designed to facilitate this kind of use. Pfaff’s accounts of modern bibliographical aids (and their deficiencies) that have determined the very scope of the evidence on which scholarship is based give insight into the field. Readers will also learn much about the use of saints’ feasts in the dating and locating of liturgical manuscripts and gain insight into where and by whom they were promoted. Especially useful are his accounts of modern editions of the liturgical texts that so many use without question—Frere’s Use of Sarum, Procter and Wordsworth’s Sarum Breviary, Legg’s Sarum Missal—which will give even the dabbler in liturgy a much better sense of what these sources represent. Pfaff also provides the fullest and most detailed account to date of the formulation and expansion of Sarum Use from its inception to the dating and definition of the “new” ordinal. In several cases, some of the more seemingly arcane questions concerning sources are taken up in various excursuses between the chapters, yet several of these, such as the excursus defining the terms “Gregorian” and “Gelasian” (and “young Gelasian”) are extremely helpful and critical to understanding later descriptions in the book. As the first comprehensive survey of this sort, the book will be an invaluable resource to many scholars who will be able to avail themselves of Pfaff’s vast knowledge.