The breviary organizes a day of prayer. Its material is the Divine Office: the psalms, distributed so that the whole psalter is prayed over a set cycle, together with antiphons that frame them, hymns proper to each hour and season, readings from scripture and the church fathers, versicles, canticles and collects. The classical hours run from Matins in the night and Lauds at dawn through the little hours of Prime, Terce, Sext and None to Vespers in the evening and Compline before sleep, and the book must supply each of them for every day of the year, which is why breviaries historically ran to four volumes, one per season.
For Catholic clergy the office was not optional; from the later Middle Ages onward those in major orders were bound to its daily recitation, and the breviary was the constant companion that obligation produced, read in choir, in church, on journeys and in whatever fragments of the day a busy priest could find. The book's contents interlock two cycles, the temporal cycle of seasons and Sundays and the sanctoral cycle of saints' days, with rubrics to settle their frequent collisions.
Since the reform of 1971 the Roman book has been the Liturgy of the Hours, with a four-week psalter and a simplified structure of an Office of Readings, morning and evening prayer as the hinges of the day, daytime prayer and night prayer, but its purpose is unchanged: to put the church's daily prayer into a form one person can actually pray.