Thousands of Ancient Sacramentaries

 In one of the Prefaces for the Henry Bradshaw Society's print edition of the Sacramentary of Echternacht [which is from the late 800s], Dr. Michale Lapidge says the following about the sheer number of Sacramentary manuscripts:

"For the period before the eleventh century, which saw the emergence of the plenary missal, the sacramentary was the mass-book par excellence: it was a type of book of which every church, indeed every priest, needed to have a copy. Inevitably, thousands of manuscript sacramentaries survive from the period before c. 1100; and since each church venerated its own local saints, and often preserved its own local liturgical traditions, it is not surprising that no two early medieval sacramentaries are identical. On the other hand, following the liturgical reforms associated with Charlemagne, a text-type broadly described as 'Gregorian' emerged as dominant, with the result that most manuscript sacramentaries of the later ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries have a common and stable core, although they also normally exhibit local and individual variations. Given this common ‘Gregorian’ core, however, and given the fact that the principal ‘Gregorian’ types are available in excellent modern editions, the question is frequently posed to the HBS Council of whether there is any merit in printing individual sacramentaries in extenso. The Council’s deliberations on this question may be summarized approximately as follows. In spite of the common ‘Gregorian’ core shared by many sacramentaries, the local and individual variation found in many of them justifies printing in extenso, particularly in cases where the sacramentary in question has a substantial number of variations, or is eccentric in some important respect. Furthermore, it has become the Council’s policy in recent years to provide each edition with (what we call) ‘collation tables’, so that the individual variation in a sacramentary –indeed in any liturgical book – can be seen at a glance, and the unique elements in its composition quickly grasped. It must also be said, finally, that individual ‘Gregorian’ prayers were seldom reproduced verbatim by scribes, and it is only by having access to the printed text that such variation can be seen and studied.” [Publication Secretary’s Preface from the 1996 HBS print edition of the 8th century Echternacht Sacramentary]