This book provides the first comprehensive history in English for eighty years of the origins and development of the Holy Week liturgy in the Roman Rite. Describing how the first apostles and disciples, and their immediate successors, came during the years following 33 AD to celebrate an annual feast of the Resurrection, and the form which this first-century celebration took, it goes on to explain in detail how the ceremonies with which we are familiar today began in fourth-century Jerusalem.

These ceremonies were then elaborated and developed during the early and late Middle Ages in Western Europe, particularly in the Frankish kingdom, and at Rome itself, down to the Tridentine reform of the 16th century, a reform which endured for some four hundred years with very little change. Looking at the two significant 20th century reforms of the rites, that of 1955 and that of 1970, Philip J Goddard then explains the various changes which were made, the sources from which innovations were introduced, and the reasons for the introduction of those changes and innovations, as given (so far as possible) by those involved in making them.

While accessible to the ordinary reader with no particular knowledge of liturgical history, this study will be if great interest to liturgical specialists and scholars, to those in seminaries and religious orders or to clergy interested in the history of the Roman liturgy. Comprehensive notes give full references to both primary and secondary sources.

Philip J Goddard is a graduate of the University of Oxford, and has had an interest in liturgical matters for many years. He is the author of 'The Plain Man's Guide to the Traditional Roman Rite of Holy Mass', and contributes articles and book reviews to the magazine 'Mass of Ages'.