Interpreting Medieval Liturgy, c. 500 - c. 1500 AD: Text and Performance
Lead Research Organisation:
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
Department Name: History
Abstract
The medieval world is widely recognised as one in which ritualized actions played an important role in religious, social and political life. Liturgical rites constitute an important yet understudied part of the medieval record, largely because the study of them has become highly specialised and compartmentalised as different academic disciplines have developed their own approaches to this form of evidence. Liturgical rites pose particular problems for modern scholars because often the only surviving evidence for them is written texts which are very imperfect guides to what was actually performed.
This network will focus on the evidence for occasional services (rather than those for the Mass and the Office), that is personal rites such as for baptism, penance, and burial, as well as annual processions including Palm Sunday and the Rogation Days; these were rituals which lay at the heart of church life for all medieval Christians, lay and clerical. These services structured the course of individuals' lives, but also bound them to the wider community, and helped articulate community identities.
The network will bring together international scholars from a variety of different disciplines -- history, musicology, theology, English literature, theatre studies, art and architectural history -- in order to resolve the tensions and to break down the barriers which currently exist to the interdisciplinary study of these medieval liturgical rites. Scholars drawn from the USA, Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Israel and the UK will create a framework for an exchange of research methods. The network will focus on the problems of studying the texts of the rites themselves, the contexts in which they were produced, and the relationship between texts and the environment in which they were performed. It will combine formal papers with a re-enactment of a late medieval rite for the reconciliation of penitents in a late medieval church, St Teilo's, recently re-erected and re-furbished at St Fagans, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.
In order to guarantee the continuity of the network and to maximise the dissemination of its research findings, we will produce an edited book and an interactive website. The contributions to the edited book will discuss different methodological problems and are intended to help scholars new to liturgical material. The interactive website will include a published summary of each meeting, a publicly-viewable discussion forum, and a film of the liturgical re-enactment. There will also be links to other websites, including St Fagans', in order to ensure the dissemination of the filmed re-enactment to school teachers and children, for whom medieval religion is part of the national curriculum in history, and to the general public interested in what went on inside medieval churches.
This network will focus on the evidence for occasional services (rather than those for the Mass and the Office), that is personal rites such as for baptism, penance, and burial, as well as annual processions including Palm Sunday and the Rogation Days; these were rituals which lay at the heart of church life for all medieval Christians, lay and clerical. These services structured the course of individuals' lives, but also bound them to the wider community, and helped articulate community identities.
The network will bring together international scholars from a variety of different disciplines -- history, musicology, theology, English literature, theatre studies, art and architectural history -- in order to resolve the tensions and to break down the barriers which currently exist to the interdisciplinary study of these medieval liturgical rites. Scholars drawn from the USA, Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Israel and the UK will create a framework for an exchange of research methods. The network will focus on the problems of studying the texts of the rites themselves, the contexts in which they were produced, and the relationship between texts and the environment in which they were performed. It will combine formal papers with a re-enactment of a late medieval rite for the reconciliation of penitents in a late medieval church, St Teilo's, recently re-erected and re-furbished at St Fagans, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.
In order to guarantee the continuity of the network and to maximise the dissemination of its research findings, we will produce an edited book and an interactive website. The contributions to the edited book will discuss different methodological problems and are intended to help scholars new to liturgical material. The interactive website will include a published summary of each meeting, a publicly-viewable discussion forum, and a film of the liturgical re-enactment. There will also be links to other websites, including St Fagans', in order to ensure the dissemination of the filmed re-enactment to school teachers and children, for whom medieval religion is part of the national curriculum in history, and to the general public interested in what went on inside medieval churches.
Organisations
| Title | The Reconciliation of Penitents'. One reiteration of the rite was performed before an audience of academics attending the workshop in the church itself. |
| Type Of Art | Performance (Music, Dance, Drama, etc) |
| Description | The network has been of considerable importance in advancing current understanding of the medieval liturgy. By establishing links between some twenty-nine scholars, most of whom had not met before because they were drawn from seven different countries, and nine different disciplines, it broke down the barriers which exist between scholars with very different backgrounds. Each workshop was notable for the degree of agreement reached between participants from different backgrounds about the nature of the problems facing scholars of the medieval liturgy. There was universal agreement about the importance of highlighting the distorting effect raised by modern editions for scholarship, which wrongly lead to the impression that there are single authoritative texts, rather than traditions. Similarly there was clear agreement that it was not safe to assume, as was suggested by early twentieth-century liturgical scholars, that ritual and textual simplicity is indicative of an early date, and that rites became more ritually complex and acquired more textual accretions with time. Rather the network agreed on the importance of carefully investigating the history of individual rites in their manuscript, textual and performative context. It was also agreed that the textual record often has more to tell us about the context in which it was composed, and its author's desires for authority, than about performance of the rite itself. The network was also successful in breaking down chronological barriers between those who work on the early medieval, central medieval and later medieval periods, leading scholars to recognise the considerable similarities in the challenges they face: for example, the problems raised by the existence of editions of 'normative' texts such as the Romano-German Pontifical and the Use of Sarum has obscured the degree of textual variation which continued to exist to scholars of the eleventh-century Germany and fifteenth-century English liturgy, respectively. It thus allowed scholars taking part to re-evaluate the normative narratives that have shaped the field, including the perceive differences between the early and late Middle Ages, the transformational impact of the Reformation, and the late twentieth-century Liturgical Movement's emphasis upon the early Christian and modern periods at the expense of the medieval liturgy. Furthermore, discussions in the network identified the lack of guidance available in the current literature for scholars who wish to work on liturgical rites; whilst some training is available to musicologists, this is not the case for other disciplines, such as history, literature, and theology. The essay collection arising from the network's discussions is designed to rectify this lacuna by offering a practice guide to those wanting to work on medieval liturgical rites. |
| Exploitation Route | This research has potential to inform understanding of those interested in how medieval churches were used in the past; these include museums (the project worked with St Fagan's National Museum), school children, and those communities interested in the local history of local churches. |
| Sectors | Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| URL | http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/mlnetwork/ |