sacramentaries

A sacramentary is a liturgical book in the Western Christian tradition that contains the prayers and rubrics used by the celebrant, typically the priest, during the celebration of the Eucharist and certain related rites. It does not include the readings of the Mass, which are found in the lectionary, nor the full range of responses of the congregation, which appear in other service books. The sacramentary thus functions as the core book for the priest’s prayers and actions at the rite.

In the early and medieval Western Church, the prayers spoken by the celebrant—such as the preface, the words of consecration, and the various petitions and felicitous prayers—were gathered in a single volume separate from the readings. Over time, several Latin sacramentaries circulated, and they form an important source for the history of the Roman Rite. Notable examples include the Gelasian Sacramentary (late 6th or early 7th century), one of the oldest substantial Latin sacramentaries, and the Gregorian Sacramentary (8th–9th century), a later form associated with Roman customary development. Other regional or later medieval versions also circulated, sometimes evolving into or being incorporated into fuller missals.

With the consolidation of the Mass into a single missal, which began to standardize contents and include readings, the term sacramentary became less common. In modern scholarship, it is used to refer to the older Latin collections that served as the priest’s book of Eucharistic prayers and rubrics, distinct from lectionaries and the fuller missals that later supplanted them.