The Calendar of St Willibrord is one of the most important manuscripts to have survived from the early middle ages. The personal liturgical calendar of Willibrord, the English missionary from Yorkshire who, with papal authority, became in 695 the apostle of Frisia and the first bishop of Utrecht, it is one of the earliest surviving examples of this type of liturgical book, and certainly the earliest to have survived from Anglo-Saxon England. The book is elegantly written in a high grade of script, but has been annotated by members of Willibrord's household (and possibly by Willibrord himself). As such, the manuscript provides a lucid index to those saints who were worshipped in Willibrord's own household; strikingly, in addition to commemorations of saints who were widely culted in early eighth-century Europe, the `Calendar' includes little-known saints who were culted in places as far away as Constantinople and Syria, and is thus a crucial witness to an important early phase of English Christianity.
A full facsimile of the manuscript itself is accompanied by a detailed introduction and commentary on the saints commemorated by H.A. WILSON (d. 1927), one of the country's outstanding liturgical scholars.
Reviews
Opens up the interconnected worlds of England, Ireland, Gaul and Frisia in the early middle ages... an indispensable tool, enabling liturgists and historians to penetrate the sacramental thought-world of an early medieval religious community. HISTORYImportant edition...timely reissue... Reminds us that it is all to easy to seal hermetically the worlds of Irish and Northumbrian Christian culture. Reality, as always, was far more complex. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW
Details
First Published: 01 Jan 1918
13 Digit ISBN: 9781870252119
Pages: 87
Size: 27.6 x 21.9
Binding: Hardback
Imprint: Henry Bradshaw Society
Series:
Henry Bradshaw SocietySubject: History of Religion
BIC Class: HRAX
Details updated on 08 Feb 2012
