rhetoric Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. It is one of the three ancient arts of discourse ( trivium) along with grammar and logic/ dialectic. As an academic discipline within the humanities, rhetoric aims to study the techniques that speakers or w ...

, a pericope (; Greek , "a cutting-out") is a set of verses that forms one coherent unit or thought, suitable for public reading from a text, now usually of sacred scripture.

Description

The term can also be used as a way to identify certain themes in a chapter of sacred text. Its importance is mainly felt in, but not limited to, narrative portions of Sacred Scripture (as well as poetic sections).

Manuscript A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand or typewritten, as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. More recently, the term has ...

s—often

illuminated Illuminated may refer to: * Illuminated (song), "Illuminated" (song), by Hurts * Illuminated Film Company, a British animation house * ''Illuminated'', alternative title of Black Sheep (Nat & Alex Wolff album) * Illuminated manuscript See also

—called pericopes, are normally evangeliaries, that is, abbreviated

Gospel Book A Gospel Book, Evangelion, or Book of the Gospels ( Greek: , ) is a codex or bound volume containing one or more of the four Gospels of the Christian New Testament – normally all four – centering on the life of Jesus of Nazareth and the roo ...

s only containing the sections of the

Gospel Gospel originally meant the Christianity, Christian message ("the gospel"), but in the second century Anno domino, AD the term (, from which the English word originated as a calque) came to be used also for the books in which the message w ...

s required for the

Mass Mass is an Intrinsic and extrinsic properties, intrinsic property of a physical body, body. It was traditionally believed to be related to the physical quantity, quantity of matter in a body, until the discovery of the atom and particle physi ...

es of the

liturgical year The liturgical year, also called the church year, Christian year, ecclesiastical calendar, or kalendar, consists of the cycle of liturgical days and seasons that determines when feast days, including celebrations of saints, are to be obse ...

. Notable examples, both Ottonian, are the Pericopes of Henry II and the Salzburg Pericopes. Lectionaries are normally made up of pericopes containing the

Epistle An epistle (; ) is a writing directed or sent to a person or group of people, usually an elegant and formal didactic letter. The epistle genre of letter-writing was common in ancient Egypt as part of the scribal-school writing curriculum. The ...

and

readings for the

. A pericope consisting of passages from different parts of a single book, or from different books of the Bible, and linked together into a single reading is called a ''

concatenation In formal language theory and computer programming, string concatenation is the operation of joining character strings end-to-end. For example, the concatenation of "snow" and "ball" is "snowball". In certain formalizations of concatenati ...

'' or ''composite reading''.

References

* Meinolf Schumacher: "Perikope" in ''Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft''. Vol. 3, edited by Jan-Dirk Müller, 43–45, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 200
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External links

Pericope in the ''Concordia Cyclopedia''
Rhetoric Types of illuminated manuscript Christian genres Hebrew Bible {{Hebrew-Bible-stub