Liturgical offices for the patron saints of particular dioceses or individual churches often deliberately emphasise the saint’s importance for the place where they were venerated. The sets of chants for their feast days frequently refer to episodes in their life on earth and the miracles worked after their rebirth in heaven and culminate with a call for the saint’s intercession on the day of judgement. These cycles of chants, for Vespers, Matins, and Lauds, usually two or three dozen in number, were commonly called historia and complemented the writings about the saint in the passio, vita, and miracula. The chapter surveys the topographical references in some forty saints’ offices, across England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, and also comments on some musical features of their new composed chants.

Introduction to the Gospel lectionary, its illustration and usage in the Divine Liturgy, and how a consideration of ritual and sound unsettles expectations from iconography.

In considering the uses of the lectionary by readers, this chapter focuses on the effect that the sound and acoustics of the readings’ chanting had in the space of a church like Hagia Sophia. By looking not only at ritual but also the architecture and decoration of the church, the chapter argues that the decoration of churches and the uses of the Gospel lectionaries responded to one another. Focusing on the plaque above the Imperial Doorway, for example, we see a place where an abridged lectionary is depicted, citing Gospel readings and also omitting key words, which the manuscripts show us were to be given sonic emphasis by chanters. Therefore, the argument is that architectural decorations in the church played with the impact and delivery of the chanted Gospels in order to reflect on the salvation that the readings conveyed and guaranteed to the faithful.