The Old Hispanic Liturgy

Before Spain was Roman in its worship it had a liturgy of its own, and a distinguished one. The Old Hispanic rite matured in the Visigothic kingdom of the sixth and seventh centuries, when the peninsula's church was led by scholars of European stature: Leander and Isidore of Seville, Ildephonsus and Julian of Toledo. The councils of Toledo legislated for worship as for doctrine, and the rite's prayer books grew into a corpus of remarkable richness, with long, theologically dense prayers that change with the calendar far more than the fixed Roman Canon does. Its eucharistic prayer is built of variable elements, so that the great prayer of one feast differs from another's, and the rite keeps distinctive usages such as the breaking of the consecrated bread into nine particles named for mysteries of the life of Christ.

Around the texts stands a chant repertory, the Old Hispanic chant, preserved in manuscripts whose musical notation records the melodic gestures but not exact pitches; because the tradition of singing it was broken, most of that music can no longer be transcribed, and it stands as one of the great sealed archives of medieval European music. The rite's name is a memorial of endurance: the Mozarabs were the Christians who lived under al-Andalus and kept this liturgy for three centuries when most of the peninsula's political map had changed around them.