Dom Prosper Guéranger (1805–1875), who restored the Benedictine life in France at the Abbey of Solesmes, gave the last thirty years of his life to L’Année liturgique: a commentary on every season, feast and day of the Church’s year, built around the Church’s own prayers. Dom Laurence Shepherd (1825–1885), a monk of the English Benedictine Congregation, made it English. This volume completes the season of Christmas: the Epiphany of Our Lord and its octave, the Holy Name of Jesus, the saints of January, from St. Hilary and St. Agnes to St. Francis de Sales, and the Purification of the Blessed Virgin on February 2, with the Sundays after the Epiphany. Its opening chapters on the season are those of the first Christmas volume, as Guéranger printed them in both.
This edition is a light restoration of Shepherd’s English, not a new translation. The text was transcribed from the first edition (Dublin: James Duffy, 1868) and checked page by page against it. Every prayer of the Mass and Office is given as the book gives it: the English first, then the Latin. It has been modernized only so far as a present-day reader needs: American spelling, Scripture references in the modern form, the printer’s errors corrected (in the Latin as in the English), and the occasional word whose meaning has shifted. The prayers keep thee and thou, as the Church’s liturgy did in English. Guéranger wrote for the Roman calendar of his day, and some feasts have since moved or been changed; the calendar here is his. Scripture is quoted in the Douay-Rheims.