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. He did not live to finish it; his monks of Solesmes completed the volumes on the Time after Pentecost. Dom Laurence Shepherd made the first volumes English, and after his death the nuns of Stanbrook Abbey, his spiritual daughters, translated the rest. This last volume carries the Church’s year through November, from All Saints and All Souls to St. Andrew, whose feast closes the cycle: the Dedication of Churches and of the great Roman basilicas, St. Martin, St. Gertrude, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, the Presentation of Our Lady, St. Cecilia, St. Clement, St. John of the Cross and St. Catharine, with the Mass, Vespers and Compline of the season. Its Preface, signed at Solesmes in November 1900 by Dom Lucien Fromage, who completed the work, announces that The Liturgical Year is at last finished.
This edition is a light restoration of the Stanbrook translation, not a new translation. The text was transcribed from the printing of 1903 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 and his continuators wrote for the Roman calendar of their day, and some feasts have since moved or been changed; the calendar here is theirs. Scripture is quoted in the Douay-Rheims.