The Shape of the Liturgy

Gregory Dix was a Church of England monk and liturgical scholar, and this Dacre Press book is his classic academic study of how the Christian Eucharistic rite historically developed, from its earliest attested forms through the major liturgical families that grew from them. Its strength, and the reason it remains cited decades after publication, is Dix's close working from the earliest surviving liturgical texts and patristic descriptions of the rite, building an influential account of the underlying fourfold shape, taking, blessing, breaking and giving, he argued runs through the tradition's diverse historical forms. Its limit is that later liturgical scholarship has revised some of Dix's specific historical claims about the earliest rite's exact form, so a contested reading benefits from checking against more recent liturgical scholarship alongside this still influential study.