History of the Roman Martyrology
A martyrology is the Church's register of the saints, arranged by the days of the year. For each day it names the saints whose memory falls on it, says where they died or are honoured, and, in the later martyrologies, adds a short eulogy (elogium) recalling who they were. The Roman Martyrology is the martyrology of the Roman Rite. Its present form is the editio typica altera of 2004, but it is the heir of a tradition more than fifteen centuries old.
Before the Roman Martyrology
The oldest lists of saints were local calendars: the dates on which a Church kept the anniversary, the dies natalis or "birthday" into heaven, of its own martyrs. In the fifth century these local calendars, Roman, African and Syriac among them, were merged into one great list. That list circulated under the name of Saint Jerome and is still called the Hieronymian Martyrology. It grew as copyists added saints from other regions, and in the process it gathered duplicates, confusions and other errors (decree of 29 June 2001).
The Hieronymian is a list of names. From the eighth century on, a new kind of book appeared: the "historical" martyrology, which gives each saint a few lines drawn from their acts or legends. Bede (†735) wrote the first; Florus of Lyon, Ado of Vienne and, around 875, Usuard, a monk of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, followed him. Usuard's martyrology spread across the Latin West and was read in Rome itself.
When Caesar Baronius came to write the history of these books, he started from the Roman Martyrology, as the spring from which, in his view, all the others flow:
cum præsertim eadem omnia ab ipso ducant originem, ab eoque, veluti e fonte riui, dimanent.
"since they all take their origin from it, and flow from it as streams from a spring." (Baronius, Tractatio de Martyrologio Romano)
Gregory XIII and Baronius (1584–1589)
The reform of the liturgical books that followed the Council of Trent reached the martyrology under Gregory XIII, the pope of the calendar reform. A commission revised the text on the basis of Usuard and the older sources, and the first edition of the Martyrologium Romanum appeared by his order in 1584 (decree of 29 June 2001).
One of the commission, the Oratorian Caesar Baronius, then published the book with two companions of his own: the Notationes, notes on each eulogy giving its sources, and the Tractatio de Martyrologio Romano, a treatise on the history of martyrologies. Baronius corrected the text further in later editions. His notes made the Roman Martyrology not only a liturgical book but a work of scholarship, and they were reprinted with it for centuries.
Revisions to 1960
The book was revised again under Urban VIII. The edition printed at the Vatican in 1630, after Baronius's death, includes the changes he had noted himself and adds, in the margin, references to the places in his Annales Ecclesiastici where each saint is discussed. That edition is on this site with its Notationes (see the 1630 edition and its notes).
Clement X authorized a further revision, and Benedict XIV, a scholar in his own right, had the whole text examined again; his edition of 1749 remained the basis of every later printing (see the 1749 edition). New saints and blessed were added as they were canonized or beatified, and the book was revised, emended and enlarged by later popes until 1960 (decree of 29 June 2001). An English translation of the 1914 Roman printing, published in Baltimore in 1916, is also on this site (the 1914 English translation).
The Second Vatican Council and the editio typica of 2001
The Council's Constitution on the Liturgy asked that "the accounts of martyrdom or the lives of the saints are to accord with the facts of history" (Sacrosanctum Concilium, n. 92c). For the martyrology this meant a thorough revision: every name and every eulogy was to be examined by historical method more carefully than before, and the book was to agree again with the other reformed books of the Roman Rite (Praenotanda, n. 22). At the same time, saints and blessed had to be added who enjoy approved public veneration, whether from immemorial local cult or by proclamation after 1960.
The work took many years. Pope John Paul II approved the result, and the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments promulgated it as the official Latin edition on 29 June 2001 (decree Victoriam paschalem Christi, Prot. N. 551/00/L).
The editio typica altera of 2004
Only three years later, a second typical edition followed, promulgated on 29 June 2004 (Prot. N. 1140/04/L). It added the many servants of God whom John Paul II had beatified or canonized in the meantime, so that they could be honoured at once on their dies natalis; it changed the entries of some saints whose mention had lapsed or raised historical doubts; and it refined the Latin and the spelling. This editio altera is the edition in force, and the one from which this site's identifiers take their dates (see Canonical eulogy IDs).
The vernacular editions
The decree of 2004 entrusts the translation of the martyrology into modern languages to the conferences of bishops, whose texts are reviewed by the Apostolic See. The Italian translation of the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) was confirmed on 11 July 2006 (Prot. N. 739/06/L) and became obligatory on 1 November 2006; it is the "typical" edition for the Italian language. No approved English edition of the 2004 text exists; this site shows an unofficial English translation. The editions on this site are described in The editions on this site.