ABSTRACT
Before the reforms of the Council of Trent, Portugal had a great variety of liturgical books documenting vibrant regional and local practices. While other very local practices may be identifiable, the three main medieval customaries in use before the Council of Trent were those of Braga, Evora and Coimbra. The ancient Use of Braga is preserved in the printed Breviary, Ritual and Missal. Following the Bull of Pius V, Bartolomeu dos Mártires and Rodrigo de Cunha tried to introduce the Roman Breviary to Braga, but such was the resistance of the Church Council that the two rites existed there side by side. In 1634 Rodrigo de Cunha published a reformed Braga Breviary, but it had many problems. The liturgy has remained stable thereafter. The closest one might come to a Portuguese cursus would be the Braga Breviary of 1511; but even this is stretching the story, as other Iberian regional groupings are unmistakable, and the differences between them are distinctive.
