APPENDIX 4:
FRIAR JOHN'S BREVIARY, AND OTHERS

One reason that critics have tended to identify Quaresmeprenant with Lent is Friar John's protest that he has found him following the moveable feasts. But this statement, as indicated in chapter 6, is fraught with ambiguity, not least of all because of the contents and arrangement of breviaries, which were standardized in 1568 by an ordinance of Pope Pius V and have not essentially varied since then. In what follows I shall compare modern breviaries with one made in Paris about 1450 for Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy.

The modern breviary begins with a table of moveable feasts that lists the varying dates at which church celebrations occur during a thirty- or forty-year period. Tables in two breviaries I consulted, published one hundred years apart,^[1] include the same list of seven moveable feasts, printed in columns from left to right across the page: Septuagesima (the Sunday ten weeks before Easter; the beginning of Lent for many orders of the clergy today and the beginning of the liturgical drama culminating in Easter since the Middle Ages),^[2] Ash Wednesday, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Corpus Christi, and the first Sunday of Advent. To the left of the column concerning Septuagesima are columns providing means to calculate the dates of moveable feasts by extrapolation for

[1] See, e.g., Breviarium romanum ex decreto sacrosancti concilii tridentini, 4 volumes (Regensburg, 1863), and The Hours of the Divine Office in English and Latin, 3 volumes (Collegeville, Minn., 1963).

[2] For Jacobus de Varagine (also sometimes spelled Voragine), The Golden Legend (written ca. 1280), ed. Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger (New York, 1941), 133, the drama beginning with Septuagesima extends from this Sunday to the week following Easter. "Septuagesima designates the time of the Fall, Sextagesima the time of the abandonment, Quinquagesima the time of forgiveness, and Quadragesima the time of spiritual penance. Septuagesima begins with the Sunday on which during the mass we sing 'Circumdederunt me ' — 'the sorrows of death surround me' — and lasts until the first Saturday after Easter."

years other than those in the table (golden number, dominical letters, epact number). To the right is a column giving the number of Sundays between the last moveable feast in late spring (Trinity Sunday following Pentecost) and the first moveable feast in late fall (Advent, beginning the new church year). Quadragesima, from which the French word for Lent is derived (Quaresme or Carême ) is not a word included in the tables of moveable feasts; it is found further on, when the liturgy is given for Quadragesima. A table of moveable feasts like these is thus not where Friar John would have found Quaresmeprenant-as-Lent, at least not after the breviary was standardized by Pope Pius.

When we examine the breviary made for Philip the Good, we realize that Friar John could not have found Quaresmeprenant indicated in a calendrical way here either. In this manuscript breviary, published with a valuable commentary in 1929, there is no table of moveable feasts. Instead, the manuscript volume for the "winter season," extending from Advent to the end of May, begins with an ordo officii for Advent.^[3] This "order of [divine] service" explains the liturgical alterations to be made in daily services, depending on the annually shifting relation between the date of Advent and the date of Christmas. After this section, which occupies the first thirteen folios, comes the liturgy to be used from day to day from the eve of Advent to that of Trinity Sunday, which occupies more than two hundred folios. The third section is a calendar of saints' days and other celebrations, occupying six folios; each month is given a separate page. The calendar for the entire year is given, and it follows a lay sequence, perhaps reflecting its destiny for a secular patron: the calendar begins with January 1, not Advent. After the calendar come three other sections dealing with liturgical use of the psalms and with saints' days.

Placing the calendar at the middle rather than at the beginning of the breviary was unusual but by no means unique, according to the editor of this manuscript. Other breviaries from Rome, Coutances,

[3] See Le breviaire de Philippe le Bon, un breviaire parisien du quinzième siècle, ed. Victor Leroquais (Brussels, 1929), 1: 18–42, where the main divisions of the breviary are described. As indicated in the subtitle, this breviary seems to have been written and illuminated at or near Paris sometime around 1450. The breviary was made in two volumes: one for the winter and the other for the summer of the liturgical year. The calendar for the entire year is given in each of the two halves, and in each case follows a lay sequence; the calendar begins with January 1, not with Advent.

Limoges, Le Mans, Paris, and Tours (a town not far from where Rabelais served in a monastery) also place it in the middle.^[4] Where Friar John thinks that he found Quaresmeprenant in his breviary, therefore, would depend on his monastery's customary way of ordering this book. In the 1550s there was no authoritative rule to follow; each ecclesiastical body followed regional tradition, which is why information about those monastic customs with which Rabelais might have been familiar — as at Tours — is pertinent.

A French word like Quaresmeprenant would not in any case be literally found in a Latin breviary either in the fifteenth century or in one of the ancestors of Pius V's model, which possibly used a table of moveable feasts rather than the clumsier calendrical form. Hence the first of the possibilities suggested above, Quaresmeprenant's written presence, could only have been true in an unusual and otherwise undocumented sense. Carnisprivium, that is, "cessation of meat," which seems to be the chief Latin word for Carnival in French medieval sources, might conceivably be found in some local breviary, but, if so, it has not been noted by scholars any more than the Latin equivalent of Fat Tuesday.

In fact the only word resembling Quaresmeprenant anywhere in either the fifteenth-century example or in modern breviaries is Quadragesima. In Duke Philip's breviary calendar, as in the modern breviaries' tables of moveable feasts, not Quadragesima but Septuagesima appears;^[5] Quadragesima appears in both kinds of breviary only in the section devoted to liturgy. It is the ordinal form of the Latin word for forty, and it names the Sunday following Ash Wednesday. Dominica Quadragesima, the "Fortieth Sunday," denoted the day on which in very early medieval times the six weeks and forty days of fasting before Easter were initiated; fasting was to begin after Quadragesima. Sunday and to end on Holy Saturday, the eve of Easter, thus making forty days.

[4] Ibid., 1: 20–21.

[5] See ibid., 2: Plate 74: The last date on which Septuagesima might fall, depending on the moveable date of Easter, is indicated for February 21 ("IX Kal. Mar. Ultima Septuagesima"). The inferiority of the calendrical system used here, compared to the modern table of moveable feasts, which offers a clear way of calculating how dates change as well as providing a thirty- or forty-year list of the changing dates, is shown in this calendar, which does not list the first possible dates of Septuagesima, Easter, Ascension, etc. However, dominical letters are provided before each day listed in the calendar, and presumably its users knew how to apply the other mathematical instruments necessary to calculate location of moveable feasts in other years.

Since the ninth century it was customary to exempt from fasting the other five Sundays in Lent and to add fasting on Holy Saturday. The beginning of Lent was thus moved to Ash Wednesday before Quadragesima Sunday in order to conserve the forty days. Thus the Latin word Quadragesima by Rabelais's time did not usually refer specifically to the beginning of Lent. "Dominica Quadragesima;" "Fortieth Sunday," as it appears in the liturgical section of Philip the Good's breviary, designates the first Sunday in Lent. (I should mention, however, that some locales, not accepting the church's revision that began Lent on Ash Wednesday, continued to begin Lent on Quadragesima Sunday.)

Duke Philip's breviary indicates the beginning of Lent not as Ash Wednesday (dies cinerum ) but simply as "the Wednesday on which fasting begins" (Feria IIII in capite ieiunii ). However, Quadragesima also occurs in other phrases which indicate that it means Lent in general (e.g., "Nota quod singulis diebus per totam quadragesimam XXV psalmi dicuntur ad Primam").^[6] Hence in Duke Philip's breviary the word Quadragesima is used to refer to both Lent in general and to the first Sunday in Lent.

If Friar John's words, "follows after," are interpreted loosely to mean an occasion that follows in the sense of being something observed in accordance with the general pattern of moveable feasts, and if Friar John makes the mistake most commentators have made by identifying Quaresmeprenant with Quadragesima as Lent in general, then, as mentioned in chapter 6, his words make sense, but they are redundant. Quadragesima follows the pattern of moveable feasts because it is a moveable feast. If Friar John instead takes Quaresmeprenant to mean, as Rabelais does, a personification of the inclination to move toward Lent, then when does this movement begin, and in what sense could such a movement "follow" the moveable feasts? Here we must introduce the fact that, while the fasting aspect of Lent was supposed to begin on Ash Wednesday for the laity, it was for many clerics supposed to begin on Quinquagesima Sunday preceding Ash Wednesday.^[7] In the

[6] Le breviaire, 1: 20, 187, from folio 113.

[7] De Varagine, The Golden Legend, 135: "Firstly we were to fast for 40 days  . . .  but in fact we fast for only 36 days, since the Sundays are not fast-days . . . . In compensation for these four days taken from the time of fasting the Church established the last four days of [the week preceding Quadragesima Sunday, called] Quinquagesima. Then the clergy, wishing to give the people an example of sanctity, resolved to fast during the two preceding days, and so was formed a whole week of fasting."

liturgical sense to which breviaries were devoted, Lent's themes began not on Quadragesima, Ash Wednesday, or Quinquagesima, but on Septuagesima.^[8] As I pointed out in chapter 6 in connection with this problem, the moveable feasts of the church year then and now begin in November, but those of the lay year normally began on either Septuagesima or Quinquagesima for clerics, and on either Ash Wednesday or Quadragesima for laity. To say that the occasion of Lent-taking-hold "followed after" any of the latter four occasions would be false because they indicate the beginning of Lent; to say that the occasion followed after Advent is true but would hardly locate it. One is hence inclined to choose the reading "flees" — but only inclined — because it makes the text a bit more interesting.

[8] Cf. the quotation in n. 2.