The ten chapters in this volume provide surveys and exemplary case studies on a range of liturgical topics. Most are concerned not with the Mass or office but with rites or services for special occasions, although such occasional rites are often set within the context of the Mass and office. Each essay represents varying research interests and topics, and they are united by their historical approaches, a grounding in manuscript or source studies, and a critical engagement with earlier literature in the field.
The volume serves well as an introduction to contemporary historical studies of the medieval liturgy. As the editors, Helen Gittos and Sarah Hamilton, note in their introduction, most of the contributors are not concerned with the reform or practice of the contemporary liturgy, unlike many among earlier generations of liturgical scholars. Several authors in the volume are explicit in considering the need to interrogate earlier scholarship on the basis of its assumptions. Thus, a word like “liturgy” itself or the issues raised by the Reformation and developed by later confessional reforms (such as the Liturgical Movement) are questioned for the ways they have shaped the study of medieval rites. The authors in the current volume are instead interpreting, analyzing, and using liturgical sources from a primarily historical point of view, with the goal of understanding the medieval past, including its sacred rituals and religious cultures. Trends in contemporary scholarship which are represented in the volume include an interest in liturgical diversity, the contexts and historical role of the rites, and the imagined performance and social setting of the liturgy—however much it may be conveyed incompletely by liturgical sources. The articles themselves are models for how to conduct research in the field, and they provide new material and interdisciplinary resources for specialists.
In the book's first section, “Researching Rites,” the themes of the volume are presented in Helen Gittos's opening chapter, in which the author sets the limits and possibilities for the volume, reviews the history of rites, and examines the place of occasional rites in manuscripts and the medieval liturgy. Gittos reflects further on the informal and diverse possibilities in studying the medieval liturgy and the care needed in reconstructing the liturgy from medieval manuscripts. Given that much of the liturgy was learned through practice and oral routines, the manuscripts may have been prepared only in part for performance. Instead, they may have been made to present new material or “control, suppress, limit or fossilize particular practices” and innovations (21). The remaining articles in this part are by Frederick S. Paxton, who writes on his own research in the rites of dying and how it has developed to reflect new work and new approaches, and William T. Flynn, who provides a survey of the place of musical studies in earlier and current liturgical scholarship.
In the second part, “Questioning Authority and Tradition,” Henry Parkes examines the editorial practices that shaped the edition of the Roman-German Pontifical by Cyrille Vogel and Reinhard Elze, which was based on Michel Andrieu's studies of early manuscripts transmitting the Roman liturgy to the Frankish north. In completing Andrieu's edition of the Roman-German Pontifical, which marked the return of the Romano-Frankish liturgy to Rome, Vogel and Elze made editorial choices that simplified and presented as a single work what is, in fact, a complex group of disparate witnesses. As a result, in Parkes's reasoned view, this influential edition has misled scholars in their understanding of the nature of the pontifical and its transmission. Similarly, Matthew Cheung Salisbury argues that identifying English liturgical manuscripts by their uses, whether Sarum or York, has obscured the diverse features of individual liturgical books and the churches they served.
In the third part, “Diversity,” Sarah Hamilton considers the first descriptions of excommunication rites in ninth-century canon law manuscripts and the variety of such early rites in four eleventh-century pontificals. She shows the intersection of law and liturgy and how liturgists were developing the rite in individual directions. In the part's other chapters, Florence Chave-Mahir examines liturgical and hagiographical descriptions of exorcism, and Mette Birkedal Brunn and Louis I. Hamilton study the rite for dedicating churches in liturgical books and sermons in order to elucidate the medieval meaning of such rites.
In the final part, “Texts and Performance,” Carolyn Marino Malone contributes a study of the relationship between distinctive architectural features and the experience of the liturgy in Saint-Bénigne (Dijon) and at Wells cathedral. In the closing chapter, Carol Symes bookends Gittos's opening essay in reflecting on the coherence and commonality of the diverse topics treated in the volume and on the fraught relationship between textual evidence and performance. Symes considers how texts may have preserved local practice or restricted innovation and notes that there is no proof that texts reflected practice, unlike modern texts on which performance is based. Symes cautions readers that scholars need to be aware of the random survival of written texts and how incomplete an individual description of a rite may be. Moreover, the texts are silent on what performers/celebrants already knew, and they are not records of events. The reasons why the directions for a rite may have been written were many and varied, such as codifying a tradition but also allowing for adaptation. The chapter ends, as it began, with a call echoed in several chapters: if scholars are to understand the medieval experience of ritual and the sacred, we must expand the definition of what counts as liturgical and consider medieval practice in the broadest possible terms and from several angles. It is a goal well served by the studies in this volume.
