Rituals for the Dead: Religion and Community in the Medieval University of Paris by William J. Courtenay

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rituals for the Dead: Religion and Community in the Medieval University of Paris by William J. Courtenay Tori Schmitt William J. Courtenay, Rituals for the Dead: Religion and Community in the Medieval University of Paris (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), xi + 201 pp., 43 ills. In his latest book, Rituals for the Dead: Religion and Community in the Medieval University of Paris, William J. Courtenay offers enticing new perspectives on the religious functions of the early university. Scholarship on medieval higher learning has long centered on investigating the university as a singular, corporate entity, mapping out its precise legal origins, privileges, and curricula. Instead, Courtenay's volume—developed from Conway Lectures given at the Medieval Institute of University of Notre Dame in 2016—sheds light on a particular facet of university life: the obligation of its scholars to enact religious care for their dead, which, as Courtenay notes in the introduction, "if … observed, took up between 20 and 30 percent of their time" (5). Drawing from several decades of expertise, Rituals for the Dead offers seven succinct chapters, covering both visual and textual sources, which demonstrate the great significance of memorialization in daily life of magistri et scolares Parisienses. In the first and second chapters, "Death in Paris" and "Allocating Spiritual Rewards," Courtenay examines statutes concerning burials and funerary masses. In 1215, Robert of Courson, papal legate and former regent master of theology, recorded that any student or master of the university who died in Paris was entitled to burial with mandated attendance by his peers. For masters or significant donors, reoccurring masses could also be endowed, ensuring a "twofold benefit, remembrance among the living and reduction of pain and time in purgatory" for the deceased (17). As Courtenay points out, the concept of virtus missae, or the [End Page 234] notion that both the living and dead could benefit from prayers, alms, and masses given for the deceased, clearly reflected contemporaneous theological debates at the university and cathedral chapter concerning the nature of purgatory. In the third chapter, "Candles For Our Lady," attention shifts to the commemorative practices of individual nations. By the second quarter of the thirteenth century, all masters and students at the university held affiliation with one of four nations: French, Picard, Norman, and English. Affiliation within these nations loosely corresponded to geographic origins, though in many cases students also came from elsewhere in Europe. Sources such as the Proctors' Book of the English nation, which dates to the early 1330s, provide lists of expenditures for services, such as candles in the celebration of nostra Domina, the Virgin Mary. In the final section of the chapter, Courtenay builds on the observations of Nathalie Gorochov, arguing that the benefits of belonging to a nation bore similarity to membership in a lay confraternity, as both afforded the kinds of funerary benefits, "normally available only to the wealthy in medieval society" (49). In the fourth chapter, "Gaudy Night: Colleges and Prayers for the Dead," Courtenay highlights the inherently commemorative function of medieval colleges. While the terms "hall" and "college" are frequently used interchangeably to discuss student residences, Courtenay points out a key difference in that colleges "were endowed institutions and incorporated," principally for the benefit of the soul of their founder (55). Consequently, statutes, such as those from the Collège de Hubant, also known as the Collège de l'Ave Maria, outlined that students must carry out charitable acts and religious piety on a recurring basis in memory of the college's founder. In the final three chapters of the book, Rituals for the Dead moves to consider those often overlooked in discussion of the medieval university. Though women were barred from official enrollment, the chapter "A Hidden Presence" discusses the significant contributions made by women patrons, founders, wives of married students and faculty, grammar school teachers, shop owners, and tradeswomen to the scholarly community of the Left Bank. In "The Growth of Marian Devotion," Courtenay presents the profusion of Marian imagery on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century seals for faculty, nations, and individual scholars as visual evidence of the growing cultural importance of Marian piety. The concluding chapter, "Balancing Inequality," acknowledges the...