| The "rhymed office" consists of a series of versified antiphons and responsories sung at certain fixed hours of the day as part of the liturgical worship of the Christian church. A special variety of rhymed office is the office in acrostic form, in which the initials of the individual items when read in sequence form a secondary text. The forty-two known acrostic offices were composed throughout continental Europe from the eleventh to sixteenth centuries.;The acrostics themselves usually name the feast, the author, or both. Complex acrostics are generally prayers or assertions of authorship. The acrostic can travel through all items of the work in the sequence of their performance, or join together only parts of the office (antiphons only, responsories only, Vespers service only, etc.). Both kinds of acrostic strive to lend unity to the discrete poetic items of the office: the first method compiles the diverse elements into one; the second orders the work into parts reflective of larger liturgical units. The two tendencies towards unification are also seen in the treatment of the metre and of the narrative material.;The significance of the acrostic form is difficult to assess. The variety seen in the repertoire, and the virtual lack of interconnections between the various specimens, make it inappropriate to speak of a "tradition" of acrostic office composition. In the sources, the device is rarely evident to the eye. Moreover, the items have often been altered, rearranged and replaced, with the result that the acrostic is disrupted. No medieval account of the acrostic is known. The acrostic's focus on names (of author, saint, and feast) suggests that the hidden device is best understood as a prayer akin to the litany and the petition, whose essential movement is at once communal and inward.;Style and subject matter of these offices are various. Metres may be regular accentual stanza forms, variations of these, or a freer assemblage of lines. Saints from the Bible, the early church, and the entire middle ages up until the fifteenth century were so celebrated. The manuscript and early printed liturgical books which transmit the acrostic offices are in some cases extremely numerous and widespread, whereas other offices are known from a single extant source. |
