The regular canons and the liturgy of the Latin East

ABSTRACT

The present paper examines liturgical rites practised in the crusader states from the perspective of its agents, introducing the monastic and institutional framework in which the liturgy was commissioned and performed, that is, the history of canons regular in the Latin East. The first part identifies the normative basis of the Augustinian canons’ vita communis and looks into the relationship between the clerics’ monastic customs and their liturgical observances. The second part investigates how the canons’ spiritual ideals influenced particular components and features of their liturgy, focusing on the mimetic highlights of the church year and their importance for the way in which the canons strove to impersonate the Apostles and the primitive Christian community of Jerusalem.     

Holy Fire and sacral kingship in post-conquest Jerusalem

ABSTRACT

In 1101 the Holy Fire failed to appear in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Holy Saturday, as tradition and liturgy dictated. Less a failure and more a deliberately precipitated crisis born of a political struggle of wills between Patriarch Daimbert and King Baldwin, the resolution of this event enabled the kings of Jerusalem to establish dominance over the ecclesiastical sphere for most of the kingdom’s history. A reading of the narrative sources against liturgical sources casts light on the intersection between liturgy and government and on how the simulation of miracles could be used to advance political causes.     

Gregory the Great, the Rule of Benedict and Roman liturgy: the evolution of a legend

This paper relates the evolution of Gregory the Great’s reputation as creator of the Roman liturgy to the slow process by which the Rule of Benedict acquired authority within monasticism in the seventh and eighth centuries. It argues that Gregory composed the Dialogues to promote ascetic values within the Church, but that this work did not begin to circulate in Spain and then Gaul until the 630s, precisely when Gregory’s known interest in liturgical reform is first attested in Rome. The letters of Pope Vitalian (657-72) provide hitherto unnoticed testimony to the theft of Benedict’s relics by monks of Fleury c.660, marking a new stage in the evolution of monastic culture in Gaul. The paper also argues that the Ordo Romanus XIX is not a Frankish composition from the second half of the eighth century (as Andrieu claimed), but provides important evidence for the Rule being observed at St Peter’s, Rome, in the late seventh century. While Gregory was interested in liturgical reform, he never enforced any particular observance on the broader church, just as he never imposed any particular rule. By the time of Charlemagne, however, Gregory had been transformed into an ideal figure imposing uniformity of liturgical observance, as well as mandating the Rule of Benedict within monasticism. Yet the church of the Lateran, mother church of the city of Rome, continued to maintain its own liturgy and ancient form of chant, which it claimed had been composed by Pope Vitalian, even in the thirteenth century.     

Civic Sacrament and Social Imaginaries in Transition: The Case of the South African Churches and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Abstract

This article reflects on a seminal moment within South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC): the appearance of the African Initiated Churches (AICs) before the Commission in 1997. It demonstrates how this moment brought into relief divergent contestations of the public within South African Christianity in three ways: first, by situating the TRC within the liturgical performance of a reimagined South African nationality, making it a "civic sacrament" of reconciliation; second, by highlighting the formative role churches themselves played within this liturgy, deploying theological language to create a healed, secular body politic; third, by displaying the different social imaginary of the AICs—a social imaginary which interrupted the TRC's liturgical recreation of time and space, as well as challenging the historical relations between church and state in South Africa. The paper concludes with the question posed in this "interruption," a question that challenges the broader church with regard to fulfillment of the liturgy not in the secular nation-state, but in that City which is to come.     

Liturgy and devotion in the crusader states: introduction

ABSTRACT

This special issue contains eight essays on the liturgy celebrated in the Latin East in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The papers as a whole demonstrate how the study of the liturgy can open up the religious and cultural history of the crusades and the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, reveal crusade spirituality and practice, and trace how the Latins of Outremer expressed through their liturgy their historical consciousness and awareness of contemporary realities.     

Royal inauguration and liturgical culture in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, 1099–1187

ABSTRACT

While modern scholars have often assumed that the models of liturgical kingship which prevailed in Latin Christendom during the Early Middle Ages became less prominent in the Central Middle Ages, more recent work has suggested that royal dynasties including those of France and England maintained practices of liturgical kingship between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. This article contributes to this recent wave of historiography by examining the image of monarchy which was adopted in the kingdom of Jerusalem between 1099 and 1187. It takes as its focus the inauguration ceremonies and associated royal rituals performed by the monarch during this period, considering aspects of each ceremony, including the various constituent rituals, the place or places in which the rituals were held, the prelates who presided, the identity of other individuals who were recorded as having taken part, and the dates upon which the ceremonies were held. It is suggested that the royal dynasty of Jerusalem was attuned to the liturgical potential of inauguration ceremonies, and that it adopted rituals which were aimed at fostering consensus among the political community of the kingdom. The monarchy created an image of liturgical kingship which combined Western practices with elements that were unique to Jerusalem.     

Was Photios an Anti‐Latin?: Heresy and Liturgical Variation in the Encyclical to the Eastern Patriarchs

In discussing Epistle 2, most of the attention has been focused on the discussion of the filioque, to the exclusion of Photios’ other liturgical and ecclesiastical comments. While the filioque arguments are now widely seen as an interpolation into the text (though whether by the hand of Photios or another author can be debated), these additional comments are largely glossed over. However, the liturgical comments in Photios’ Ep. 2 are indeed a central point of contention for the Patriarch himself, rather than a scribe or secondary author. Photios’ antagonism towards Latin liturgy is part of a broader cultural conflict between the two halves of medieval Christendom. For Photios, as well as his predecessors and successors, Orthodoxy was increasingly defined as not only a theological issue, but an issue of praxis, and the presence of innovative liturgical practices was indicative of a perverted theology. These sorts of differences would have been especially notable for Greek missionaries to the Bulgars who lived and worked beside, and in opposition to, Latin missionaries in a competition for ecclesiastical hegemony. Ultimately, Photios’ writings against the liturgical practices of the Latins were of considerably greater importance to his contemporaries than the filioque was to his successors, and the implications of Photios’ theology, given his enduring importance to Orthodox Christianity, have the potential to create new flashpoints in contemporary discussions between Orthodox and Western Christians.     

Sermons,Preaching, and Liturgy: Practices,Research Methods,and the Case of Giordano da Pisa

This article analyses the relationship between sermons, preaching, and liturgy within the Order of the Friars Preachers in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Italy. It provides an account of a specific method for the study of the medieval ‘modern sermon’ by investigating the reportationes of the sermons given by Giordano da Pisa, a Dominican friar who preached in Florence and Pisa between 1302 and 1309. The investigation using this method shows that the sermons’ subjects and arguments, often considered by historians to be a direct consequence and reflection of Florence’s social and economic reality, had in fact also much to do with the evangelical story or epistolary passage assigned to the specific date of the liturgical calendar: there are thus two principal influences rather than just one. This approach to Giordano’s sermons provides a new perspective on his work as a preacher by being more attentive to the internal construction mechanisms of sermon discourse.     

JERUSALEM'S HINTERLAND IN THE EIGHTH–SEVENTH CENTURIES BCE: TOWNS,VILLAGES, FARMSTEADS,AND ROYAL ESTATES

Abstract

Although many excavations and extensive surveys were carried out in the vicinity of Jerusalem, very few systematic attempts were made to analyse the Iron Age city's hinterland in its entirety. The present article summarises some of the general results of a detailed study of the area around Jerusalem, identifies the territories of the city's ‘daughters’ (satellite towns), and then focuses on two such units, in which settlement distribution was markedly different from other units: Moza and Ramat Ra?el. The article concludes that most of the territory around Jerusalem belonged to organically developed towns, the territories of which were densely dotted with villages and (mainly) farmsteads. Moza and Ramat Ra?el, however, functioned in the late Iron Age II (7th century bce) as royal estates (perhaps even as a palatial estate in the latter case), responsible for both the production and storage of surplus.     

Adventus in Jerusalem: the Palm Sunday celebration in Latin Jerusalem

Themes of continuity and innovation in the rituals of the church of Jerusalem in the early twelfth century, following the crusader conquest of the city, are examined with a focus on the Latin Palm Sunday procession. Based on the Ordinal of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was produced for the use of the patriarch and the religious community of the Holy Sepulchre, and which contains the yearly ritual cycles and major processional celebrations, the study reveals the original characteristics of the Jerusalem liturgy, as well as its components incorporated from pre-crusade practice. It speculates on the earliest organisers of the liturgy, their identity and the sources of their inspiration, as well as the orientations of the early monastic community in Frankish Jerusalem.     

A “Theological Junto”: the 1641 Lords’ subcommittee on religious innovation

Abstract

The 1641 Lords’ sub-committee on religious innovation has never been the focus of a dedicated study, despite its acknowledged significance. This article presents the sub-committee as an attempt to control parliamentary discussion of the Church. Its membership was carefully selected to ensure that it would have an anti-Arminian bias. Its discussions addressed a wide range of doctrinal and liturgical questions. The Conformist members of the sub-committee were attempting to re-assert the Reformed identity of the English Church, and roll back the doctrinal and liturgical developments of the 1630s. However, despite the political crisis, they were not prepared to give much ground to Puritan opinion. The sub-committee therefore illustrates the strength of commitment, even amongst leading Reformed theologians, to the idiosyncratic aspects of the English Church Settlement. It is therefore a significant witness to the development of English Conformist opinion.     

Solomon and His Empire: Fact or Fiction?

Abstract

The essay examines the plausibility of a “Double Monachy,” a large state, under a king Solomon in the 10th century with Jerusalem as its capital. First, all texts in the Old Testament are mentioned, and it is pointed out that no extrabiblical texts from the period mention such a state. In the next paragraph the archaeological finds from the period are examined whether they may allow the existence of such a state, and it is concluded that it is improbable. Also from historical knowledge of the period in the Levant as well as Solomon’s name it is concluded that there was not a large kingdom in Jerusalem under a king of that name.

In the rest of the essay I try, from the story in the Bible, to date the various elements of the story, and comparing them with other legendary kings (e.g. Sargon of Akkad) to find a suitable period when such a legend could be construed, I point to the second half of the 7th cent. BCE as the best possibility for the story’s date.     

On Crystals of Augury

Abstract

Salisbury cathedral is usually seen as a ‘one period’ building, a ‘complete’ 13th-century cathedral. As a result, the later medieval work at Salisbury has rarely been considered in its own right. This neglect has been compounded by the subsequent loss of many of its most important elements: the two eastern chantry chapels, St Osmund’s shrine and half the library. The aim of this paper is to redress this imbalance. Salisbury’s original appearance was transformed dramatically in the early 14th century by the construction of the high tower and spire, and in the later 15th century, following the canonisation of St Osmund, when the east end was substantially remodelled. As at other great churches, the interior was continuously adapted to enable the cathedral to meet the spiritual needs of late medieval society. These were principally the performance of the liturgy, the commemoration of the dead, the augmentation of devotional cults and the promotion of learning. These themes are explored in the discussion of the new library, major monuments, the shrine of St Osmund and the construction of four new chantry chapels. Thus the cathedral evolved significantly in the two and a half centuries after Bishop Ghent’s consecration in 1297.     

The origin of chantries: some further Anglo-Norman evidence

It is suggested that Sir Howard Colvin's theory about the origin of the chantry as a response to liturgical overloading of the regular monastery with commemorative liturgy is not the full story. The chantry was preceded by institutions more obviously its precursors than the monasteries: secular colleges and the chapels of manorial precincts. It is suggested here that the chantry arose out of a more complex cross-fertilisation of ideas and institutions than Colvin suggests, and also that the laity had as much a part in the process as the monks. The article also points to particular moves towards the individualised mass of commemoration within the Angevin royal family in the 1170s and 1180s as an impetus to the evolution of the chantry.