Abstract

The term ‘apologies’ describes prayers offered by Christians during Mass to express their sinfulness and unworthiness. In liturgical scholarship, these prayers have usually been regarded as early medieval priestly prayers, and it has been argued that they largely vanished after their peak of importance in the 11th century Order of Mass. In my article, I show that these prayers did not disappear but are transmitted in late medieval private prayer books. In light of this transmission, I propose to conjoin scholarly perspectives from liturgical studies and cultural history in order to understand apologies as expressions of devotional individuation.