Paul’s Reviews > The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development > Status Update

Vol. II p. 384, note 71 (!): "Even today, as everyone knows, the pope uses such a siphon in the solemn papal Mass for his own Communion."

This is not the first time the author has dropped such an outrageously obscure detail with the formula, "as everyone knows." I cannot imagine who constituted his mental image of "everyone"...

This is the end of Volume I. The initial overview history of the Mass is engrossing; the history of each individual piece can get long and rambling. This is one of those scholarly works where the footnotes regularly take up more than half the page, and one wonders if the author was hoping to save space by putting that much of the text in a smaller font. A lot of that material belongs in the main text.