Agenda (book for divine service)

The name Agenda (“Things to be Done”; Germ. Agende or Kirchenagende) is given, particularly in the Lutheran Church, to the official books dealing with the forms and ceremonies of divine service.

Term Agenda occurs twice in the ninth canon of the Second Synod of Carthage (390; Bruns, Canones, i., Berlin, 1839, p. 121), and in a letter of Innocent I. (d. 417; MPL, xx. 552). The name was frequently employed in a more specific sense, as Agenda missarum, for the celebration of the mass; agenda diei, for the office of the day; agenda mortuórum, for the service for the dead; agenda matutina, and agenda vespertina, for morning and evening prayers. As the designation of a book of liturgical formulas it is stated by Ducange to have been used by Johannes de Janua, but in the only published work of Johannes (c. 1287) the name does not occur. There is no doubt, however, that with the development of the ritual of the Church the classification of liturgical formulas for the use of the parochial clergy became common. Such books of procedure were known by various names; e.g., manuale, obsequiale, benedictionale, rituale, and agenda. The last title was given especially to the church books of particular dioceses wherein the general ritual of the Church was supplemented by ceremonial features of local origin, as the agenda for Magdeburg of 1497, or the Liber agendarum secundum ritum ecclesiæ et diocesis Sleswicensis of 1512. The use of the term in the Roman Catholic Church, however, practically ceases with the Reformation, though a few instances occur in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the Evangelical Churches, on the contrary, with the title Kirchenbuch, it speedily came to be the accepted designation for authoritative books of ritual. In the early days of the Reformation the agenda not infrequently constituted part of the Kirchenordnung or general church constitutions of a state; but in the course of time the separation of the formulas of worship from the legal and administrative codes of the Church was effected.

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