Light on Darkness is a beautifully written and highly accessible book that carries its considerable learning lightly and elegantly. Far from writing another liturgical ‘textbook’, Gillhammer here offers her readers an ‘invitation to explore the extraordinary richness and depth of the liturgy’ (24), entering imaginatively into not only its language but its performance and experience, beginning with the medieval English church. Repeatedly, we are asked to employ our imagination to enter the medieval church at evocative liturgical moments – on the very first page, for example, into the moment of the lighting of the paschal candle on the night before Easter Sunday. We begin dramatically: ‘It is midnight. Deep darkness covers the church. The doors are closed and not a single candle is burning at the altar’ (7). A scholar of medieval literature and culture, Gillhammer roots her explorations of the human experience and emotions of the liturgy in the medieval church and its theology, bringing the liturgy to life through the liturgical year in exploring its mysteries in terms of love, hope, suffering, grief, joy as well as the dimensions of time and space. She carefully and simply introduces the theology of the church through an exposition of the Apostles’ Creed, the creed of the medieval layfolk. Yet this is never simply a two-dimensional exercise for it has a clear spiritual dimension. The danger of so much liturgical scholarship is that it becomes dry and lifeless in forgetfulness of that which, in Gillhammer’s words, makes ‘liturgy possible in the first place’ – ‘prayer to God’, for ‘without his help, the liturgy is empty and futile, no more than a set of hollow phrases’ (253).

In the medieval church, the liturgy was far more a fundamental part of a whole way of life than it is for many, if not most, people today. Yet its power and afterlife can remain significant, and Gillhammer explores this in a series of examples of its continued presence in music, literature art and film, accompanied by a number of fine illustrations from medieval illuminated texts, primers and later art. She begins with one of the greatest of the penitential psalms of the church, Psalm 51, which has traditionally been read as an expression of King David’s remorse after his illicit affair with Bathsheba. Rather than offering a note of predictable academic scepticism, Gillhammer keeps that tradition clearly before us. Helpfully, we are given the full text of the psalm in Latin and in the Coverdale version as found in the Book of Common Prayer and then invited to experience the emotions of the psalm through the church’s office of Tenebrae in Holy Week. But its life does not end there, for in her excellent commentaries, Gillhammer then takes us through the musical life of Psalm 51 in the settings of Allegri, James MacMillan and other composers old and new. Later, the Agnus Dei, the Song of Songs, the Improperia or reproaches of Good Friday and the Dies Irae are similarly explored in the power and context of their medieval liturgical settings and their survival and reinterpretation in many forms, as for example the music of Mozart and Verdi, the poetry of Dante and Tennyson and even modern cinema in Star Wars, Mad Max and superhero films.

As a scholar, Gillhammer is never less than serious and well informed. Her range of knowledge and skill as a medievalist and as an interpreter of music, art and poetry is astonishing, and it is employed in the service of exploring the profound cultural resonances of Christian liturgy from the luminous space of medieval cathedrals in Wells and Lincoln, medieval lyrics and to later echoes that are still apparent in film and popular music.

Liturgy has a complex relationship with both time and space, its power within lived experience often permeating folk myths as easily as the joys and sorrows of the church’s liturgical calendar. This should not be dismissed lightly. Thus, the liturgical feast of St. Michael on 29 September has lent itself and its biblical roots to a much wider and enduring afterlife, not least to medieval legend through Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend and chivalric Arthurian stories. And if our experience of time and space are made more complex within the liturgy, this may be a reminder that, despite its long association with the development of English drama through the Mystery cycles in York, Chester and elsewhere and echoes of this in Shakespeare’s Reformation England, the liturgy in word, gesture, music, light and the odour of incense is not simply a performance but an experience of divine presence in which all participate. It is not simply an act of historical memory within linear time.

In our age of liturgical uncertainty, and perhaps loss of liturgical nerve within the churches, Gillhammer’s fine book deserves a wide readership. As what she calls the ‘untold story of the liturgy’, it is a reminder to the liturgical scholar, the worshipper and the general reader that the liturgy was and remains something that matters in lives, Christian and post-Christian, that still experience love, that suffer and feel joy – and hope. We, indeed, may hope that this will not be the final word that she has to say on the subject.