Breviary

The breviary organizes a day of prayer. Its material is the Divine Office: the psalms, distributed so that the whole psalter is prayed over a set cycle, together with antiphons that frame them, hymns proper to each hour and season, readings from scripture and the church fathers, versicles, canticles and collects. The classical hours run from Matins in the night and Lauds at dawn through the little hours of Prime, Terce, Sext and None to Vespers in the evening and Compline before sleep, and the book must supply each of them for every day of the year, which is why breviaries historically ran to four volumes, one per season.

For Catholic clergy the office was not optional; from the later Middle Ages onward those in major orders were bound to its daily recitation, and the breviary was the constant companion that obligation produced, read in choir, in church, on journeys and in whatever fragments of the day a busy priest could find. The book's contents interlock two cycles, the temporal cycle of seasons and Sundays and the sanctoral cycle of saints' days, with rubrics to settle their frequent collisions.

Since the reform of 1971 the Roman book has been the Liturgy of the Hours, with a four-week psalter and a simplified structure of an Office of Readings, morning and evening prayer as the hinges of the day, daytime prayer and night prayer, but its purpose is unchanged: to put the church's daily prayer into a form one person can actually pray.

The breviary is the result of a long compression. The office was originally choral and communal, sung from a shelf of books: psalter, antiphonary, hymnal, lectionary, collectar, each held by different hands. The word breviarium, an abridgement, appears from around the eleventh century for compilations that drew the essentials into one volume, and the decisive push came in the thirteenth, when the friars of the new mendicant orders, always on the road, adopted the compact office of the papal curia and carried it across Europe. A portable office made a portable clergy possible. After Trent, Pius V issued the reformed Roman Breviary of 1568, suppressing recent accretions and imposing a single standard on the Latin Church with the same exceptions allowed to the missal.

Later centuries tinkered; the most consequential change came under Pius X in 1911, when the ancient arrangement of the psalter, which had loaded enormous blocks of psalmody onto certain hours, was redistributed so that the week's burden fell more evenly. The Second Vatican Council then authorized the deepest recasting since Trent: Prime was suppressed, the psalter spread over four weeks, the readings enriched, and the reformed book issued in 1971 under the name Liturgy of the Hours. Anglicanism had compressed further still in 1549, folding the monastic hours into the two offices of Morning and Evening Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, a reminder that the breviary's history is one long negotiation between the ideal of ceaseless prayer and the hours a human day actually contains.