Eighteenth-Century French Liturgical Manuscript for Local Use

Die XXVIII. Aprilis Festum S. Aphrodisii primi Episcopi Bilterrensis martyris & civitatis patroni.
[Béziers, France, ca. 1730].
Manuscript on paper. (BRMS 58)

Another liturgical manuscript that can be localized by internal evidence, this volume contains excerpts from the gradual and antiphonary used in the Diocese of Béziers in Languedoc, Southern France. It was presumably made for the Church of St. Aphrodisius in Béziers, named after the first Bishop of Béziers, an early Christian martyr about whom little is known. The offices included are for the feasts of St. Aphrodisius (April 28), St. Filippo Neri (May 27, canonized in 1622), the Sacred Heart of Jesus (June 18), the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel (July 16), the martyrs Nazarius and Celsus (July 28), the Veneration of the Holy Relics in the Church of St. Aphrodisius (September 1), St. Giraud (an eleventh-century Bishop of Béziers, November 5), St. Joseph (March 19), and the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary (Good Friday or September 15, made universal by Pope Benedict XIII in 1727). The Diocese of Béziers was suppressed in the wake of the French Revolution, but later became part of the Diocese of Montpellier.