The liturgical year is a relatively modern invention. The term itself only came into use in the late sixteenth century. In antiquity, Christians did not view the various festivals and fasts that they experienced as a unified whole. Instead, the different seasons formed a number of completely unrelated cycles and tended to overlap and conflict with one another. Drawing upon the latest research, the authors track the development of the Church's feasts, fasts and seasons, including the Sabbath and Sunday, Holy Week and Easter, Christmas and Epiphany, and the feasts of the Virgin Mary, the martyrs and other saints.

Paul Bradshaw

Cover

About the Alcuin Club

Title page

Imprint

Memorial

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

Sabbath and Sunday

1. The Lord's day in the Apostolic age?

2. Continuing traces of the Sabbath in later Christian practice

3. Sunday in the fourth century

4. The Christian week: Wednesday and Friday

Easter and Pentecost

5. The Quartodeciman celebration

6. The date of the festival

7. The development of the triduum

8. Pentecost: the great fifty days

9. Initiation at Easter

Lent and Holy Week

10. The emergence of Lent and Holy Week

11. Three weeks and forty days

12. The development of Lent

13. Calculating the forty days

14. Holy Week in Jerusalem

Christmas and Epiphany

15. 25 December: two competing theories

16. 6 January in the East

17. 6 January in the West

18. Advent

Martyrs and other saints

19. The first martyrs and saints

20. Mary: devotion and feasts

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Bradshaw, Paul

The book deals with the origins of the liturgical year - the feasts, fasts and seasons. It is accessible to the general reader and to students, while being a serious academic text.

The Good Book Stall

This book is a tough read for non academics but immensely rewarding and well worth the effort. The distinguished authors offer a scholarly overview of the development of the Christian seasons and the way in which they were seen in the early Church – a very different perspective from that of today’s Christian. The concept of a liturgical year stems only from the sixteenth century. Early Christian worship centred on “the Lord’s Day” with the fledgling Church struggling to establish its own identity in contradistinction to Judaism. This is a fascinating resource for anyone wishing to discover the roots of Christian worship

The Origins of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons in Early Christianity

The Origins of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons

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The Origins of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons

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