The effectiveness of digital cataloguing of historical musical sources depends to a large extent on the existence of standardised descriptors that allow information to be retrieved and cross-referenced. In the field of music for Catholic liturgy, one of the most important organisational elements is the ‘feast’, in the translatable sense of a celebratory event, such as the feast of Christmas or Easter, of St Vincent or St Elizabeth of Portugal.

The Litugical Feasts and Rites database provides free and universal access to a list of feasts - and related rites - with standardised terminology, and is searchable through various search filters, namely the celebratory ‘cycles’: temporal (following the order of the liturgical calendar) and sanctoral (alphabetically ordered); through specific dates or the interval between dates.
The list is presented in a double repository: with the standardised term in Latin and a brief description in English; and with the standardised term and description in Portuguese.
The taxonomies essentially follow the structure and principles of the Cantus Index platform, retaining their feast identification codes [CI code], the connector element that allows information to be cross-referenced, as well as a substantial part of the nomenclature, although with adjustments, e.g. the inclusion of feasts from Portuguese sources not yet included in the Cantus Index.

With this database, CESEM aims to increase the interoperability of the various digital catalogues (Portuguese Early Music database, Musical Archive from the Museum-Library of the House of Bragança, Vila Viçosa; Musical Archive from the National Palace of Mafra; Cistercian Books and Libraries).

This website and its contents are protected under the legal terms of intellectual property. Users may print, distribute, and download content for personal research, teaching, and non-commercial artistic use. Users may not distribute or exploit the contents for commercial purposes. Liturgical Feasts and Rites contents are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Liturgical Feasts and Rites is a work in progress. If you notice any errors, inconsistencies or malfunctions, please do not hesitate to contact us (lfri.cesem@gmail.com). Thank you.