Abstract
The central focus of this book is the history of the Christian festival of Rogationtide, used by the author as the basis of a wider argument about Christianization. It traces the origins of the Rogation Days, showing that although it is possible to sketch their diffusion (and standardization) after 511, we are essentially dependent for their fifth-century origins on the accounts of two famous Gallo-Roman bishops, Sidonius Apollinaris and Avitus of Vienne. Ristuccia postulates four structural elements of Rogations: a three-day celebration; an annual celebration at a fixed time, usually in the weeks around Ascension and Pentecost; a procession of clergy and laity; and penitential practices such as fasting and prayer. He distinguishes this Frankish feast from the Roman Greater Litany, with which it is sometimes confused, pointing out that in the Middle Ages, rogationes, litaniae, and supplicationes were regarded as roughly equivalent. He devotes a chapter to dismissing claims that the Rogations simply Christianized a Roman festival, the Ambarvalia. Three chapters examine Rogation as ritual performance. One deals with the Rogation procession as embodiment of the local church. Before the development of the parish, Rogation processions represented the early medieval church on display: clergy and laity assembled to march through their plebs, visiting the sacred spaces of their community and returning to their baptismal church in a display of Christian unity and solidarity. In ‘Disrupting Rites and Profaning the Sacred’ Ristuccia then puts three cases under the microscope, investigating events at Paris in the 580s as described by Gregory of Tours; the case of the ‘heretic’ Aldebert, condemned in the 740s; and the attitude of the Milanese Pataria to Rogation in the 1060s. He groups them under the heading of ‘ritual failure’ but the way in which Rogations or Rogation-like ceremonies were contested surely indicates their ritual success. Much more convincing is the chapter ‘Praying Orthodoxy’ which explores the way in which, with the rise of infant baptism and decline of the institution of the catechumenate in the early Middle Ages, Rogation Days developed into an occasion for instructing the laity and teaching the Lord’s Prayer and Creed.
Published Version
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