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Chapter 1 analyzes the liturgical experience of time. It begins with brief reviews of how liturgical theologians and phenomenologists respectively explore time. It then examines in more detail the temporality of Orthodox liturgy: its tension between anamnesis and eschaton, the liturgical present, the cyclical back-and-forth between penitence and celebration, and its emphasis on repetition.

This chapter presents an overview of the centrality of the cult of the martyrs in the Christianity of the Cappadocian Fathers. Regardless of social status, all Christians were enthusiastic for the frequent celebrations of the local martyrs, even after the Constantinian settlement. The chapter gives a detailed analysis of the ways in which the Cappadocian Fathers not only were personally devoted to the martyrs but also regularized the cults through close attention to the the panegyris, the festival for the martyr. Their writings reveal the rituals of the martyr panegyris and the laity’s behavior, expectations, and attitudes. The chapter examines how rudimentary the cult of the martyrs was for the Cappadocians as bishops: as organizational principle, as a dominant hermeneutic of Scripture, as promoter of doctrine, as catechetical example for liturgy. The chapter ends with the analysis of the most popular martyrs of Cappadocia and Pontus and their calendrical cycle.

This chapter demonstrates how Jacopo de Varagine drew upon a complex collection of sources in compiling and writing his book of saints' lives and other feasts of the liturgical calendar. In learning about how Jacopo's mind worked, the chapter extracts what he reprocessed from the writings of others, such as Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, Bartholomew of Trent, and Alain Boureau, as well as what was truly original about his book. It focuses on the themes—feasts and sanctity, suicide and martyrdom, Jews and pagans—Jacopo chose to emphasize in the entries, giving him the widest scope for originality. This conception of human and sacred history informed his thinking about topics as diverse as the cult of the saints, natural disasters, ancient Rome and the end of pagan rites, and family life.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio has six parts that Bach performed on six days from Christmas to Epiphany. We usually experience it as a unified work, and Bach considered it one, but in some ways, its designation as a single oratorio was more conceptual than real. Our best tool for understanding the Oratorio’s original context might be a calendar. The work’s place in the church year helps us understand its construction and scoring, stimulates our thinking about the independence of its parts, and aids in examining the musical elements that make it a unified work. Despite modern attempts to invent a tradition of multiday Christmas pieces stretching back to the seventeenth century, there was no such tradition. Bach’s model was a central German practice of Passion settings spread over days or weeks. Bach could not present a Passion this way, but that was evidently his inspiration for the Christmas Oratorio.

This chapter examines the book of purchases kept by Santa Trinità's camerlengo, or fiscal administrator, Dom Lorenzo di Guidotto Martini, to better understand the alimentary habits and consumption patterns of the monastery of Santa Trinità. Through the use of intermediaries like lay brothers and hired servants, the monks were able to maintain their strict enclosure, while easily and affordably provisioning their monastery to support the full-time congregation as well as visiting guests and friends. Dom Lorenzo's record reveals the dependence of monks on the markets and shops of Florence. The monks ate the same food as their secular Florentine counterparts, since the neighboring families shopped at the same markets and vendors that they frequented. However, they honored the Rule of Saint Benedict that regulated life at Santa Trinità by eating these same foodstuffs in a different manner from their neighbors, and by using appropriate foods at the correct times of the year according to the liturgical calendar.

There was no single tradition about the deaths of Peter and Paul. Instead, there existed a cluster of traditions with some overlap on basic points, but much variety on other details. This chapter explores the options presented in attempting to date the deaths. The first part of the chapter treats the question of the date(s) of the deaths of Peter and Paul. It argues that the liturgical date of June 29 appears to control the narratives of many accounts and thus represents a functional and literary date more than an historical one. The second part of the chapter examines reckonings of the year(s) of the martyrdoms. Some authors describe the events at an undetermined time during Nero’s reign, while others provide a specific year—and the years provided vary by more than a decade.

This afterword uses the Episcopalian Church’s Gody Play story “The Circle of Time” to survey the essays in the volume. It discusses the color scheme for time in Anglican theology, linking the synaesthesia of temporalized hues to queer eroticism and focusing especially on the red “heat” of Pentecost, incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Using the work of José Esteban Muñoz, the essay links the incarnational to the performative in queer theory, suggesting that the transmittal of affect may be divine in the theological sense, whether or not participants believe in God. It asks whether the incarnational, the performative, and the queer might be linked by transfers of being and becoming of the sort epitomized by the Pentecostal Holy Spirit and described in many of the essays.

Part III discusses prosulas according to their placement in the liturgical calendar. It is structured into three chapters, the first providing a general discussion of prosulas as glosses and a complete liturgical table of all Beneventan prosulas, the second examining the prosulas of the Temporal (the feasts connected with the life and mission of Jesus), and the third analyzing those of the Sanctoral (the feasts of the Saints). Prosulas of the Temporal were particularly abundant in manuscripts copied in female establishments, possibly as a reflection of the special devotion to Jesus as the nuns’ spiritual spouse; those of the Sanctoral tend to favor saints from Africa or West Asia, the perceived cradles of Christianity, to emphasize the prestige of the local Church.

This chapter summarizes Jacopo de Varagine's late habits of thought by examining the Marian Sermons—a collection of 161 model exegetical sermons of varying lengths. His “late style” is a return to his roots, model sermons, with the benefit of a lifetime of experience as a reader and writer. As Jacopo chose his themes, he showed what he valued about religious imagery. Unlike in his previous sermons where the topics suggested themselves (saints' days) or were dictated by the demands of the liturgical calendar, Jacopo was in theological and artistic control of the Marian sermons. Aside from the creative labor of gathering the wisdom of his time to help preachers, Jacopo also showed enough originality to justify attention to himself. Jacopo's primary audience absorbed his thought, and through them his influence helped shape the development of Christianity.