4 - Vestments
from Part I
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2025
Summary
On an upper floor of the Tridentine Diocesan Museum in a series of darkened rooms the walls are lined with glass cases. Inside them are vestments. It is yet one more measure of our great distance from William Durand. Chasubles, copes, surplices, and dalmatics are displayed as fragile matter: behind glass in cases controlled for temperature, moisture, and light. Chasubles are arranged in chronological order along one wall; copes, surplices, and dalmatics, fewer in number, are in other cases. It is not merely that all are separated from the persons who, Durand’s word, used them – as they would have been when those persons were not celebrating a Mass. Nor is it that they are fixed in place and separated from one another. We come closer when we recognize that all have been removed from their place, the place of worship, but that, too, still is only part of their transformation. All are kept permanently physically and spatially isolated both from those persons and also from the place with which they had so complexly participated in the meaning of the Mass. They have become objects, their intricate embroidery now the focus of our gaze.
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- The Reformation of LiturgyMatter and Time Reconceived, pp. 114 - 150Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
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