Medieval religious practice featured numerous blessing ceremonies that sought to protect people and property from malign elements in the natural and supernatural worlds. Present-day Christians within the Catholic tradition still continue this practice, although it is probably used rather less frequently now than it was in the Middle Ages. Derek Rivard's study of medieval blessings seeks to discover how these rituals contributed to the formation of the medieval religious mentalité.
Modern scholars often describe medieval blessings as quasi-magical ceremonies that ordinary people treasured in the hope that they would inspire God to come to their aid in difficult circumstances—and, Rivard adds, to placate and petition a deity that they feared might be “somewhat capricious” (60). Popular demand for blessings of various kinds, according to the conventional view among historians, essentially constrained members of the clerical elite to fashion rituals that would furnish the laity with the reassurance, solace, and comfort they desired. Rivard, like some other recent scholars, questions the usefulness and adequacy of what he calls “this simplistic bipolarity.” He argues instead that the dynamics of the relationship between “official” and “unofficial” views on blessings and similar ceremonies in the medieval church were considerably more complex than the two-dimensional model might suggest (8–10, 21–23).
Rivard based his study of medieval blessings on liturgical texts that appear in many of the numerous collections of ceremonial formulas for services conducted by bishops and other clerics that are commonly described as pontificals. The pontificals he has chosen to examine begin with the mid-tenth-century Romano-German pontifical of Mainz and end with the late thirteenth-century pontifical of William Durandus.
The blessings that Rivard analyzes sought to secure God's favor for an impressively broad spectrum of persons, places, and things. He deals in detail with blessings for fields, gardens, seeds, wells, and harvests, as well as houses, bridal chambers, marriage beds, furnaces, hearths, ovens, dishes, kitchen utensils, the sea and the ships that sail on it along with the nets and other maritime equipment that they carry, cemeteries, churches, vestments and sacred vessels, sick or disabled persons, pregnant women, pilgrims—including crusaders and other travelers—knights together with their armor and weapons, and participants in ordeals or trials by battle, as well as the instruments used in those affairs.
The author provides translations of many of these blessings and for most of them helpfully includes the Latin text in the notes (which mercifully appear in their proper place at the foot of the page). His translations are relatively literal and mostly accurate, although they often lack much in the way of literary grace. An ample twenty-page bibliography closes his book. This is unfortunately marred at times by bizarre peculiarities in his citations. Thus, for example, he quite properly lists Paris as the place of publication for Migne's Patrologia Latina but then gives the publisher as “Parisiis.” Similarly, he identifies the publisher of Moeller's Corpus benedictionum as “Turnhout” and claims that the publisher of Gregory Dix's Treatise on the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus is Henry Chadwick. Such blunders presumably reflect haste in note taking combined with haphazard proofreading.
Rivard concludes that blessings provide us with a window into medieval ideas about cosmology. They reflect popular conceptions of God in a variety of roles: as a protector of farmers, soldiers, sailors, and travelers. He is in addition characterized as a purifier, a defender, a healer, and a judge. The authors of blessing rituals seem to have viewed God above all as a zealous protector of his people and their interests, although they nonetheless needed to implore him from time to time to save them from imminent perils. Blessings no doubt served to reassure the faithful of God's presence among them. They also assumed his willingness to intervene in the problems that beset individual persons, and this may well have helped to assuage their religious uncertainties. They implicitly predicated a quasi-contractual relationship between God and his faithful servants in which their obligations to him were balanced by his obligations to them.
The texts that Rivard examines show fluctuations over time in the ways that their authors viewed the function of the blessings they composed. Blessings of knights and weapons composed between the tenth and twelfth centuries, for instance, addressed the duty of monarchs and other potentates to protect their weak and powerless subjects, such as widows, orphans, and other disadvantaged persons, from external enemies—perhaps Vikings or Huns. By the middle and latter part of the thirteenth century, however, Rivard finds a change in the focus of these rites. Later blessings laid less emphasis on the function of knights as defenders against worldly enemies. Instead, they stressed the obligation of soldiers to cultivate spiritual virtues: they admonished knights to be steadfast and faithful Christians, as well as soldiers, guardians of the peace, and protectors of the defenseless, if they wished to merit salvation.
Rivard's study of medieval blessing rituals sheds helpful light on the ways that medieval churchmen and their flocks viewed their relationship to God, to nature, and to their society.
