On the Historical Development of the Liturgy

In 1921, Anton Baumstark delivered two lectures on the development of the Roman Rite to a gathering at the Abbey of Maria Laach. Abbot Ildefons Herwegen offered to publish those lectures, but Baumstark decided to write a book on the topic instead, which was published two years later as On the Historical Development of the Liturgy. It would be another sixteen years before he produced Comparative Liturgy, for which he is better known. Together the two books lay out Baumstark's liturgical methodology. Comparative Liturgy presents his method; On the Historical Development of the Liturgy offers his model.

For nearly a century On the Historical Development of the Liturgy has been valued by specialists in the field of liturgical studies, both for its description of comparative liturgy and for the portrayal of patterns Baumstark discerns in liturgical development. Also significant are the hypotheses Baumstark proposes and the evidence he brings to bear on problems in liturgical history. In this annotated edition, Fritz West provides the first English translation of this work by Anton Baumstark.

Trained in classical and oriental philology, Anton Baumstark (1872--1948) was prodigious as a scholar studying the literature, art, and liturgy of the whole church---Oriental, Eastern, and Western. Comparative liturgy, his method for studying the historical development of the liturgy as an organism, has had a lasting influence, notably on the liturgical study of the Christian East.

Fritz West, a liturgical scholar ordained in the United Church of Christ, has written numerous articles on liturgical methodology, the three-year lectionary and worship in his Reformed tradition. He has published two books, The Comparative Liturgy of Anton Baumstark and Scripture and Memory: The Ecumenical Hermeneutic of the Three-Year Lectionaries.